>Jim
>
>Take a look at
>
>http://fox.wikis.com/wc.dll?Wiki~WillMicrosoftMarketVFP
>
>(hint: review the names in the "no" category compared to the >1000 names, i.e. 99.9% of respondents, in the "yes" category. Recognise the names? What might it mean?)
>

I can only speak for myself, but I was only responding to a humorous and satirical post by Nancy, who I consider to be both a friend and fellow anarchist wrt electronic communities. In the event that we want to encourage participation in the WishList process, setting rules such as these will make the MS staff job easier, and applies a tight constraint on "what is a wish?" which makes working in a hierarchical message base model easier, but it reduces the number of people who can participate in the process because they don't know the rules before they post their ideas, or have something worthwhile to say that falls outside the restraints imposed by "the rules" on behalf of some other set of participants.

My feelings on this would be identical were the rules suggested by Ken Levy, John Koziol, or you; this is not an issue of personalities (if my friend Nancy hadn't commented, I might never have even bothered to read the thread in the first place) but of personal philosophy on the boundedness of the wish list process.

IMO (which doesn't seem to count for much) a threaded model of discussion is counterproductive to the WishList process. If what we are striving for is a uniform document arrived at via collaboration amongst the community, a resource like the Wiki, or an enhanced UT Document model, would fit the bill better; a group of people could do the task of concisely stating the concensus arrived at by the group discussing a change/set of changes, fix the spelling/typo issues, strip out the chaff and post the document for the approval of the participants (who could still modify the concensus document) before releasing it to MS.

IOW, discuss freely, conclude the [primary] topical debate at some point, summarize, neaten and post the result of the collaboration as a well-stated document derived from the necessary chaos of the wish process, and if necessary, repeat until we've got the core of the wish well-stated, debated and summarized.

If you wish to derive meaning other than satirical humor, my "vote" on the management of the WishList would move it to a Wiki-esque environment, with a crew of literate and non-partisan volunteers formalizing the debates. And I still feel that lesser beings deserve to be involved in the process without a set of rules to qualify them for participation.

And yes, I feel that the first attempt at the "Open Letter to MS" was a horrid thing, that did the community a vast disservice and pointed out the lack of commitment to the result of the appeal by some of the participants, who delayed or total refused to buy into the VFP7 product. But that is not really topical other than wrt your link to the Wiki discussion where both of the "evil conspirators" who took this discussion as an oportune moment for a humerous parody of creating rules for the on-line community were the entire "No" category on the Open Letter issue. Perhaps we're totally twisted, insane beings from outer space. Or perhaps we're the sane individuals. Your choice...

...and thanks for all the fish!