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Why are you called The Motte?
A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently,
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but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens
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the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired
propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."
On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.
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Notes -
Multiple rounds of selection.
In the initial round, a bunch of users who the mods considered trustworthy and generally representative of the forum were selected, mainly going off AAQC count and other things, and then asked to nominate the next set of voters, who would go on to nominate the final set, who were then to nominate the people who they wanted to see as mods. I have genuinely lost track of whether there were 2 or 3 preliminary rounds before the final vote.
At that point, the candidates were asked if they were willing to take on the responsibility, and quite a few demurred. The remainder were finally vetted by the existing admins, and the results came out a few days ago.
As you can imagine, this took a while. I think a few intermediate steps could be taken out of the picture, because the people nominated in the second step were almost all the same people who showed up for the final vote, but at least it brought in new faces who hadn't been chosen by the mods at the start.
@ZorbaTHut based it off the election of the Doge in Venice. It seemed to work well enough last time, and if it ain't broke and also happens to be mildly exciting, don't fix it!
Votes were submitted in private to him, but there was no barrier to people declaring or discussing their choices, in a channel made for them. A surprising lack of acrimony, and I don't recall anyone being uncouth enough to nominate themselves, though I'm not sure if that was expressly ruled out.
You couldn’t nominate yourself or a currently banned poster and were limited to 4 nominees were the instructions I got in the third(final) round.
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