Grand Moff Boris wrote:
Well actually I can tell you what it is. I think there are people - and I have received several PMs/e-mails about it, especially since that thread went up - that believe everything should be said out in the open.
I agree, and I will never support such a move. Its about confidentiality and respect for the privacy of the nominees. I don't think it's right to expose our private discussions to the public, where anyone with a username and with any motive can read them and use them against us. Further, there are things said that could be hurtful to the community if they were public. You might not understand that from the outside, and I am not going to go into details here either. But it's true nonetheless. It's just such a bad idea. Sparky is welcome to his opinion on it, I just wholeheartedly disagree with it. I don't like that he keeps taking it to WotC, but I've asked him to stop and he hasn't. I don't think he wants to intentionally subvert the HoF reputation, but that is the net effect of his now multiple threads.
Further, the idea that the community vote alone should determine the members simply turns the HoF into a popularity contest, and makes the process more or less worthless. Sorry, most people aren't going to take the responsibility to read through all of the applications carefully, and participate in the discussions, and so on that we expect our HoF members to do. Not to mention the opportunity for "cheating" that would be present.
Further, if you want even more reason, look at what happened last year when the HoF did not take a couple of the top community vote getters. Even though it wasn't a knock on those people at all, and in the end we just had better candidates than what the community said were their top 3, people still got upset about it. Its a reality we discussed in the HoF chat before hand knowing it would happen, and we still went forward with the list of people who got the votes. Why? Because we believed we did the best job possible and no one to this date has submitted to me that any one of the people in the class of 2009 was not deserving.