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PLEASE READ THIS ENTIRE POST BEFORE YOUR RESPOND

The administrators of DU have been preparing for Election Day (and its aftermath) for months now. We have considered a number of issues, and we have been doing everything feasible to prepare. We thought you might appreciate knowing ahead of time what to expect. Here are a number of issues we have considered, and what you need to know about each of them.

High Traffic, High Bandwidth, and Poor Website Performance

We fully expect that Election Day will be the busiest day we have ever had on this website. We have done, and continue to do, everything in our power to prepare for the worst. But we cannot promise that it will be enough. In fact, our best guess is that during peak times the site may be unusable. Expect the worst.

Fortunately, we were able to take advantage of the three presidential debate nights to identify problems and fix them. Elad has made many tune-ups to our hardware and software to deal with these problems, but there is a high probability that we will experience more problems on Election night. Hopefully the problems will be limited to Election Night only, but we can't make any promises.

Currently we run DU off of four web servers. In anticipation of Election Night, we are temporarily adding a fifth.

Removal of Unnecessary Website Functionality and Possible Blocking of Visitors from the Site

In order to decrease the strain on our servers during periods of high-traffic, we have a system in place to gradually remove certain functionality. Expect a loss of features such as avatars and signature lines, searching, ignoring members, hiding threads, etc. We will also be stripping out most images, so the site will look quite different.

If, despite our best efforts, the website is still experiencing serious performance problems, then we will be forced to consider the possibility of blocking people from the site. This will only be done as a last resort. If necessary, we will block out people who are not registered for the message board. (If you have a username and password for the message board, then you are registered.) Under our absolute worst-case-scenario, we may have to block out everyone who does not have a donor star next to their name. We strongly urge all members to check BEFORE ELECTION DAY to make sure that: 1) you are registered for our message board, 2) you have a donor star if you are a donor, and 3) you know your DU password. If you need to change your password, you can do so by clicking on "Options" and then selecting "Change your password." We are going to be busy on Election Night, and we probably will not have time to respond to lost password requests.

Temporary Forum Reorganization
On or before election day we will be adding a few new forums with specific purposes. Currently, we expect to have three new forums, all of which will be located at the top of the forum list: "Presidential Results and Discussion," "Other Election Results and Discussion," and "Report Voting Problems."

We are temporarily moving the State & Country Forums up near the top of the page.

The four busiest forums (LBN, GD, GD:2004, and The Lounge) will be listed immediately below the temporary election forums.

Where to Post Election Results
We know that we cannot force people to post specific thread topics in specific forums, so we are not even going to try. There will be so many people posting so many different topics in so many different forums that you should expect election night on DU to be chaotic.

Still, we are going to provide specific forums and threads for election results -- for those DU members that wish to use them.

Presidential Election results should be posted in the "Presidential Results & Discussion" forum. In that forum, there will also be an "official presidential results" thread, much like the "official" threads we had during the debates and primaries.

Results for U.S. Senate, Congress, Governors' Races, and other major campaigns should be posted in the appropriate state forums, or in the "Other Election Results and Discussion" forum. We plan to open up "official results" threads in the various state forums for each of the Senate and Governors' Races.

Special "I Voted" Avatar
After you vote, you should assign yourself an "I Voted" avatar. Click on "Options" then click "Edit your Profile." Look for the words "Avatar Image" and type ivoted.gif into the space provided. Click "Update." We hope that all of our American members are showing "I Voted" avatars by the end of election day.

Disruptors
We will be taking a number of precautions to keep out disruptors on Election Night, but invariably some will slip through. If you see a disruptor, please hit the "Alert" link on their post so the moderators can deal with them quickly. Do not assume that someone else has hit alert. In most cases, nobody has.

Some folks have been bragging on other websites that they are going to "unmask" on election night after racking up thousands of posts on DU pretending to be liberal. I am hoping that this happens. I get a great deal of pleasure from the idea that some moronic freeper has wasted months of his life pretending to be a liberal on DU. I get even greater pleasure from the thought that after all that work there is a good chance that their big "unmasking announcement" will get deleted after about 30 seconds, and their account banned forever.

What We Expect From You
This is a great group of people, and we're looking forward to spending election day with all of you. All we ask is that you keep a few things in mind...

- Make an effort to avoid duplicates. We don't need 200 threads on the same topic. It's okay to respond to threads instead of starting your own whenever a new thought comes into your mind.

- Treat other people with respect. We're all in this together. On election night, we're going to be celebrating together or crying together. Let's not make it worse by trying to start flame wars on hot-button topics.

- Take it easy on the moderators. They've got a tough job, and it's even tougher at busy times.

- Expect problems. There will be problems on DU on election night. If you expect the worst, you might be pleasantly surprised rather than disappointed.

We Reserve the Right to Change Any of this at Any Time
This document reflects our thinking as of this moment. But we do not know what is going to happen over the next week, or what sort of curveballs fate will throw at us. As always, we will do whatever we think is appropriate or necessary to run the message board, and may even completely change our approach if the circumstances require it. But at the moment, we're confident that this is the plan.

Special Note for Kerry-Hating Fellow Liberals Who Can't Wait to Say "I Told You So" if Kerry Loses the Election
Don't do it. You've been warned.
If Kerry loses, there will be plenty of time later for everyone to discuss what happened. But please don't start with the "I told you so" stuff immediately after the polls close, because you'll probably get banned. Most members of this message board are going to be devastated if we lose. We will be coming to DU for comfort and support; the last thing we want to hear is a patronizing speech from some holier-than-thou jerk. But I don't think that is going to be a problem because...