Temporary autoeditor election procedure

Hello people,

In former days, new autoeditor elections were announced on the autoeditor mailing list that all autoeditors were automatically subscribed to. However, all our mailing lists, including the autoeditor one, died in September 2015 when the server they were hosted on took its last breath. This effectively halted the election of new autoeditors. It was always the plan that our new forums should be able to handle this, but our recent issues have meant development on the features necessary to completely replace the autoeditor mailing list has been slow. Thus Nicolás (reosarevok) and I had a talk about how to handle elections going forward, and we came up with this procedure:

1. The proposer nominates the editor normally (starting an election), and then adds a post in the Autoeditors category of the forum linking to the election and asking for seconders. Like with the mailing list, this should also contain the proposer’s reasoning for proposing the candidate.
2. Nicolás (reosarevok) will then mail out to all autoeditors with a link to the election topic (and possibly a link to this blog post).
3. The proposer, Nicolás or me (or another autoeditor, if they’re faster) will update the thread once a 2nd seconder is found and the voting has started, and again when the voting has ended and the results are in.

We have added most autoeditors who are already signed up on the new forums to the @MB_Autoeditors group, but not all autoeditors have signed in to Discourse yet, and some have spaces or other “weird” characters in their username that make Discourse not able to parse them. If you find that you’re not in the @MB_Autoeditors group and you think you should be, please write a message to me (Freso) or Nicolás (reosarevok) via MusicBrainz and ask us to add you to the group. (Sending your message via MusicBrainz will let us know that it is indeed you/your account, so please don’t poke us on IRC or elsewhere about it.)

This is all obviously intended to be temporary, just until we’re able to get the process fully automated again. If you have any Ruby experience/know-how and would like to help out, please check out OTHER-248 (and possibly OTHER-254). There’s also MBS-8836 on the MusicBrainz server side for the Perl-istas.

Let us know if you have any concerns or questions about this (reminder: temporary) approach, either in the comments or on the forums. I personally hope it’ll work well enough to carry us through for a while longer until everything is ready.