Well, this has motivated me to cast my first vote and it was not an intuitive experience.
- Feedback on the voting experience - (thought I would just post it here)
A few weeks ago I thought I had voted by simply clicking up on a bunch of delegates, but I wasn't sure as I thought a transaction was needed to cast the vote. Since then I hedged in bitUSD several days ago, so I thought my vote had gone through then as I had made a transaction (even though I still got the message that my not all my stake was voting, I thought, well most of it must be).
But then today I updated a bunch of my votes in the 'delegate' section and downvoted (which I discover is removing the ability to vote in favour rather than a downvote) of the 5 suspect accounts here. I then thought that I need to make a transaction to cast my vote, so I went and bought 0.1bitUSD, thinking that would do the trick. But I did that and my account continued to say I was not voting with all my stake. So, I kept looking and found in my account the 'update vote' button,
I didn't want to 'vote all' as that sounded like I could vote even for the delegates I had downvoted, and I didn't want a random subset as that sounded like it could include them too, so I clicked 'vote as delegates recommended', and found a bunch of delegates I didn't upvote in the delegates section were voted for. Confused, I looked on the wiki, and saw that "vote as delegates recommend" results in voting for a delegates 'slate' I had approved. Who's slate? I still do not know who's 'slate' I approved and I was still getting the 'your not voting with all of your stake' message. Where do you see and approve a delegates 'slate'?
So, I pressed on, determined to get my vote in, so I looked on the wiki and saw I needed to vote for 101 delegates to get that message to go away and that if I clicked 'vote all' it would do as I said. So I went back to the delegates and made sure to click on at least 101 delegates, even going into the standby-delegates section to make sure I voted for enough (as some in the top 101 I didn't want to vote for, I hadn't kept count of all the ones in the top 101 I didn't want to vote for so I just had to keep voting in the sub-101 to make sure I had upvoted enough) and then I updated my vote. So I presume if I only clicked 100 delegates I would still get that 'not all of your stake is voting' message?
Mission accomplished (at last).
But that was not an intuitive voting experience. Why is the 'update vote' button not in the delegates section where the voting is done? It would help if there was some little instructions that appear as you mouse over the 'vote all, vote none etc' so the wiki doesn't need to be read at the same time. And what is the purpose of choosing a 'random selection'? It seems to complicate the process pointlessly. A user should be able to immediately understand that "vote all" means to vote for all the delegates you have approved and it should be one the same page.