If there was ever any announcement that you had to pay complete attention to on the forum, this is it. Seriously, if you have any investment at all in how this forum is run, read all of this information because it is for your benefit as forum users that you understand that these voting rights are limited to forum users who meet specific criteria.
If all this makes no sense to you, read on. For context, Wookieepedia has a ton of rules, right? Site policies that editors vote on to create or change.
These votes are subject to what's called our consensus policy.
Anyone can propose a rule change, but only certain users are eligible to vote on certain motions.
For any policy vote put on the Consensus track forum, any user can vote if they've made at least 50 edits in the last 6 months before a specific vote starts. This has pretty much always been true, but forum users are now included in some cases as detailed below.
Until now the case was that forum users weren't able to vote if they didn't edit, because these policies almost exclusively dealt with editing the wiki. That was reasonable in its time, but we mods have been working for a while on making the Discussions forum rules official site policy. The first vote on it was forever ago—and it passed! That's why we say “rules” instead of “guidelines,” because the two are different.
Along the way, we also started a vote to change Wookieepedia's Discord server rules so that forum users with at least 200 posts could access the full server just as any editor with 50 edits can. It also passed!
These votes saw unanimous support from editors, but obviously since they had to do with the forum, forum users should've been given a say. A vote affirming that just passed too.
Now, for any vote changing a Wookieepedia policy to directly affect the Discord server or this very Discussions forum, any forum user with at least 200 posts in the last 6 months can vote on that specific change. If you have fewer posts in this time frame before a vote or the vote has nothing to do with Discussions or Discord, you can't vote in it.
Here are instructions for checking your post count on the forum. If ever you vote on a Discussions-relevant or Discord-relevant policy change, your vote won't count if you don’t meet the number. This doesn't work on the Fandom mobile app, so you need a web browser to make this easy.
Go to your user page. You should click a button that says “View Profile” to get there.
On your user page below your profile, there should be four tabs: “About,” “Talk,” “Contributions,” and “Activity.” Click “Activity” to see a log of your posts.
Your post log shows 50 posts at a time. You can click “View More Posts” three times (slowly) to show your last 200 posts.
If the last post in the list was made six months or less before the vote started, you can vote in it!
This is faster than just scrolling your post history and counting one by one until you first either hit 200 posts (you can vote) or hit a post older than six months (you can't).
Here are instructions for casting a vote on a relevant policy change. Again, this works only on a web browser as you can't edit on the Fandom app.
Search for “Forum:Consensus track” on the wiki or just use the link I already included in this post.
Find the relevant ongoing vote if it has to do with Discussions or Discord.
Find the “edit” button on the vote page. Make sure you're using the source code editor (if it’s not your default, find it with the three dots on the right), not the visual editor that looks just like a normal page.
Type the source code below under the “Support” or “Oppose” section to vote in favor or against the policy proposal. Once you submit the edit, the pound sign will appear as a number in the list of votes, and the four tildes will appear as your username and a timestamp to verify your vote.
#~~~~That’s how editors vote on site policies. If you just use the forum and don't edit the wiki, you can still check the Consensus track for motions that you can vote on, and follow this thread too, because we'll link any future votes that include the forum here.
In fact, there are two ongoing votes that forum users can participate in right now. Today is August 19, so anyone with more than 200 posts made on February 19 or later can vote. Use August/February 20 if your time zone is way ahead of mine, and you can check the first signature on each thread if the timestamps come down to a difference of hours or minutes.
The first vote eligible forum users can participate in is this one to codify the Discussions Guidelines as official site guidelines. There are actually two separate motions, so you're able to cast a vote for each.
The second vote is a vote to modify the Discord server's role layout so users here can still verify themselves even if they don't meet the required posts or edits to see the full server yet.
Please vote on these proposed changes if you're eligible and find them important. I know this is a lot, so if you have any further questions about how to vote or whether you're eligible to do so in the first place, ask them here.
