IDEAS FOR RYZOM

Regardless of how many choose to abstain, the act of abstaining is not voting. The voting percent should be representative of those that actually expressed an opinion.

I think it was suggested in another post to count the number of persons (not visits) to the thread, but that seems rather intrusive and still irrelevant... If you dont express an opinion, your vote doesn't count. So at this point a high number of visits only indicates how long the thread has been posted for.

Finally, "Other" absolutely is the same as "none of the above," because anything other than what the author stated is obviously none of the above... It is not positive or negative necessarily, simply not an option offered by the poll author. If you want to vote negative, choose no!

Many posts do not offer simple Y/N  choices.  Many are badly written. 

This is not a democracy.  Polls are there to help the devs (and other active writers/coders/etc.) have an idea what people want.  Votes in a poll carry no official weight and should carry no weight at all unless they represent a significant fraction of the player population, hence the desirability of Abstain, Other and None of the Above and having them be part of the percentages. 

None of the Above is a vote that says "The choices are all distasteful to me and I can't think of a good one."  Other is a choice that implies that there is a potential choice that the votor thinks is a good one.  (It is also usually followed by a post in the thread.)

If the choices are not acceptable, then vote "Other" and reply in thread that the options are not acceptable.

None of the polls actually carry very much weight by the number of participants, I'll look in older posts again, but how often do more than a couple dozen people participate?

I abstained