Initial response.. No
How can players communicate using a cancel vote ? If you cannot tell me for good reason that's OK

In hidden draw votes players sometimes vote draw and cancel at the same time to indicate that they're voting draw (but would prefer this game not to be on their record). This is more of a problem in gunboats than press games, though it happens in both.

Also: BRING BACK PPSC.

Nah

Not a fan due to live games.

Maybe only in HDV Gunboat games? In HDV FP or PP putting up a cancel vote to signal draw is basically the same as saying you'll draw in global, which is allowable. GB is the only mode where cancel-signalling is an issue, but it is a real issue in those games - I've seen a cancel vote up to signal a draw quite a few times - and this is a neat solution to it.

What's the point of hidden draw votes anyway?

No

No. When it is time to kill a game (e.g., France and Germany both CD in 1901) sometimes you can get a consensus to draw and sometimes you can get the cancel. In gunboat you have to vote for both in order to have a prayer of ending a pointless game.

Frankly, I've never seen a cancel vote go up late in a game to signal a draw vote even once. I'm not sure how big a problem this actually is.

Just make cancel votes hidden when the draw vote is also hidden.

+1 Orathic. "Just make cancel votes hidden when the draw vote is also hidden."

Both cancel and draw are needed for early game NMRs.

Thanks for the explanation
I'm not a fan of hidden draw votes.., i normally avoid joining those types of games..in the few games I've played that had hidden draw votes, it has been the single greatest cause of acrimonious disputes.
I'd say get rid of hidden draw votes full stop...but that's just my view, and I suppose there are players who like games with hidden draw votes ( & acrimonious disputes ) so I'm OK with it being an option when setting up a game, and players can choose to, or not to join.

I note a reference to PPSC.. Why this form of scoring cannot be allowed as an option defies logic.. But it's opponents at times act in a totalitarian manner and insist that their view must be inflicted on all other players.
Now in early 2016 the supporters of keeping PPSC as an option, not the default as it once was, but simply as an option were told that in response to our protests at the total removal of PPSC, that the new DSS and SoS scoring systems would be trialled and after some period of time there would be a review, and that the review would offer the opportunity to revisit the issue of bringing back PPSC as an option.
And we were asked to back off and give DSS and SoS scoring systems a chance..and we have eased up..so I'm wondering when we'll hear about the scoring system review..a few months time was what we were told..I don't mind giving it twelve months.. But I do hope it occurs, and what we were told was genuine, not just a tactic to kick that problematic issue down the track and hope it can be forgotten

Perhaps the suggestion that both draw and cancel votes be hidden might answer, but would pause votes then be used to signal messages
Make all three votes hidden ?

I can't imagine pause votes being used in that way. I'd imagine most players would take it as a genuine need to pause.

You think someone voting pause in a live gunboat HDV game really means they want to pause it and pick it back up later?

We don't tend to see pause votes being abused, but then if the cancel votes were unavailable, maybe we would.

Either way, this idea seems fairly unpopular. I don't think we should do it.

I'd go with non-adoption.

You may remember that the rules about not voting for Cancel when you don't honestly want to cancel as a means of communication in No-Messaging games **predates** that of the Hidden Draw Votes feature. The reason for this is that for some time periods of the site in some amount of players there was a cultural meme of voting "cancel" to mean "Let's eliminate the smaller players and then draw, i.e. I'm willing to draw soon, just not yet". (as others have pointed below, that could just go to Pause as well)

0) So it really isn't a unique feature to Hidden Draw Votes.
0.5) This is only against the rules and unethical in gunboat games, not sure why you're bringing up press as well.

1) I'm against adding additional features just to try to stop people from cheating in ways that are already against the rules. Having a log of votes would be more helpful to solving the problem without having these problems of non-solution and, to pull a phrase from Linus, breaking user space. Or canceled games not being deleted from the database entirely, which has also been proposed in the past. If the major sticking point is that we can't police it well enough, then we need better tools, not taking away essential features.

2) Especially because this **doesn't actually stop the rule breaking**. We have plenty of rules on the site that can be broken if someone wants to, and if they do we'll investigate and determine if it happened and if so mete out some kind of adjudication. This doesn't solve the problem, and it's a problem in a problem-space we've purposely decided not to tackle. You can still just vote cancel to communicate you want to draw soon without having to vote draw. Or pause. And with this scheme there's even less risk to mal-intended cancel votes since others can't have their cancel up without taking down their draw.

3) If someone isn't voting draw/cancel in a ruined live game for 90 minutes because they think they can exploit it to win
a) That's not against the rules here, and most likely won't be any time soon unless someone wanna propose, pass, and develop an algorithmic implementation and implement it.
b) ....this change wouldn't do anything towards that problem. Because they're not voting at all.

4) This isn't a huge problem. I run into it, as a player or as a mod, very infrequently. And like I said, we investigate it when we do, just like any other form of rule breaking.

So, in addition to this proposal not solving the problem, it opens up a plethora of hugely damaging problems, many outlined by others above.

5) There's plenty of legitimate reasons to vote both draw and cancel, as you are not trying to signal you actually want one or the other. There's no reason to break this.

6) This problem refers to gunboat games, where you can't communicate, so players can't just talk out whether a game should be cancelled or drawn and need to be able to express both solutions as palpable. Telling them to just keep toggling and help the others noticed is a non-solution.

7) Hiding the cancel feature behind modmail is a non-starter for live games. Shouldn't even require further comment; and there's no particular reason to put that on the comedy cubes if there's unanimous alive agreement like is already required.

I've been playing here, almost exclusively in Gunboat, for like 6 or 7 years now. I've never seen Cancel votes being used for anything but their intended purpose. I think this is one of those things that happens like once a year and everyone gets all worked up over it.