Oh, stuff I should probably respond to here -.-'
Timing: It was, of course, decidedly later than we would have liked due to te development of v3, and as a result we had to compact the time windows. Originally there were going to be a couple of weeks between announcement and the start of voting, and a full month window for the voting to take place. Future votes should be closer to that timing and more in the February range, especially since the actual planning will be easier with a setup already in place and experience under the belt to base any modifications on. Plus we'll be able to set up the genre/leads lists publicly ---
For this first time, we had to keep it all under wraps until it was fully ready to go, on the off-chance that it might need to be nixed. (In fact, we were working on doing this back in 2007 but had to let it go) Announcing something to people and getting them excited about something only to nix it is Not Good. So we made due with a mix of input from mod chat, and "please don't tell others about this" pms flying all over the place. But now that there's a system in place, it should be easy enough to apply to future years that nixing shouldn't be a reasonable possibility.
Separate threads - If all the voting were in one combined thread, it would get rather difficult to count, and any side-discussions would be a mess for anyone to attempt to follow. Is opening a separate thread for each vote really all that troublesome? Most browsers have tabs these days, and they shouldn't take that long to load... plus they were all conveniently linked from the rules page... I'm not sure I understand the issue here -.-'
And as mentioned, a voting script would be extraordinarily expensive. So long as you're not voting for Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto - Natsu no Sora everywhere, the act of typing the names shouldn't really take all that long once you know what you're voting for, right? Maybe it's just me that doesn't feel like it's a big deal, because of all the other typing-heavy stuff I did... 3 short lines of text times 20-28 feels like nothing by comparison :P
Nominations - One of the aims of the setup was to attempt to minimize needless drama, as the primary goal here was to be an entertaining exercise for the users. Nominations are something that will naturally cause drama - people bugged that their pet series didn't get nominated for this or that, or something was nominated that they felt was a steaming pile of trash, etc. If we were going to try it, if nothing else it absolutely could not be a closed-doors smoke-filled-room sort of thing, as that all but guarantees heated drama. This ruled out attempting it this time due to the necessity of secrecy.
Even then, a simple/basic public nomination wouldn't be all that different than just voting openly anyway, especially since we're not doing polls but rather lists where people can vote for their first, second and third favorites. Which means you can vote for an unpopular favorite first while still supporting something more likely to actually win, so it reduces the need to cut the pool down to the x "top" candidates. Also, such open nominations would be prime grounds for full-blown popularity skew if not done right - there'd need to be some mechanism in place to give less-viewed series a decent shot of making the cut. So that's two issues to combat, for which it would take a reasonably fancy system to work around. The nominations would probably require more effort than the actual voting -.-'
Vernanonix - Will have to take note of that and try and fix the wording for the next time. I figure "the A-P community" means anyone that uses the site, (as opposed to random lurkers) but didn't think too hard about whether or not it might be interpreted another way. Sorry about that.
Even though I wanted to ^^
