If it is necessary / desirable to require that the user define vote_floor in the config file, the program should fail gracefully if it isn't. Currently, it fails unintentionally. My preference is that vote_floor not be a required config option. You can provide defaults easily in many way. One way is via the Mojo Config plugin directive. You can set defaults. Another way is when you define the attribute with has vote_floor you can specify a default value, as has vote_floor => -2;