This is good advice, it is a great article and there is a great discussion here. Again though, the votes here do not actually count for anything, but the passionate and polarized response to this is surely an indication that the community here cares about this issue and is highly divided.  I think the development team should be aware that the community is watching the outcome of this and wants to be sure that it is implemented well. After all, this is not a typical software project and unlike other open-source projects, most of the users here have actual money invested in it and may walk from the project if they don't like where it is headed. I think the popular opinions are an important factor and need to be addressed delicately, this is a much more political environment than probably any other open-source project.  Also, many of us here ARE miners in pools but do not have individual votes, if we did, perhaps the miner voting results would look more like the results of this poll. Just something to think about.

This post is in no way meant to trivialize the topic, quite the contrary, I think it is important to gauge the sentiment of the community, especially since the devs cannot seem to agree on the topic and the whole issue is becoming quite contentious and maybe even a little ugly. I do not want to encourage "popularity contests" and frankly, I don't think that the results of a silly forum poll won't hold any influence over the decisions of those who are truly involved with the implementation of protocol changes.  I do however feel that the vast majority of the community has not been encouraged to participate in the discussion and I think everyone should be at least somewhat active in these matters. Really, I hope to encourage some discussion among the 99% of us here that are not participating in core development, and if there are devs who are passionate and unhappy with the results they see here, perhaps they need to more strongly express their positions to the community in a way that everyone can understand so that we can make the best decision possible and keep everyone informed.  I think we all appreciate the hard work that everyone in the development team puts forth and I hope that no one feels undermined by anything that gets posted here.

I have been casually following the BIP 16/17 issue and I thought that maybe we could use a poll to help assess where the rest of us non-developers and non-voters stand.

I saw this wall go up today while the price was crashing, it was smaller then but it went up in an instant.

I blame them anyway!

This is pretty priceless, Bitcoin shows what, like a 1500% increase in value from the beginning of 2011 to the end, and we get classified as a failed business model in 2011. Nice!

http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/19/failure-is-an-option-7-businesses-that-tanked-in-2011-slides/

I had some BTC in there for a bit as well, but I pulled it out because I was getting nervous about them going POOF!

HAHA! Now if only we could find the Facebook of Bitcoin to bring in 800 million users...

Crappy! I see too that there's nothing for sale at reasonable prices, so you can't even buy BTC to get your value out. What an incredible disappointment they have been.

The Solidcoin fiasco did not help them out any. Anyone around here still carrying a balance over there?

What happened to Ruxum? Are they seeing any volume these days? Once upon a time I had high hopes for them and now it seems likely that they will just disappear one of these days. I wonder how much money and BTC are kept there right now?