Quote from: Lucius on Today at 04:40:41 PM

Just to clarify that I do not blame @icopress, but individuals who, due to their personal interests, made this competition very questionable.

I fully understood your point of view, Lucius, as I read your previous posts and I share most of your thoughts. I am sure that icopress also understands you and never thought you would blame him. Practically, the situation that happened was like this: Zeus gave fire to Prometheus, to give it to people thus people would use it to get themselves warm and cook their food, but people used the fire to burn each other's homes. icopress did his best to organize a very complex competition, spent a lot of time to think about categories, eligible voters, contest rules etc., he tried to entertain the forum, in a way, but some took all his efforts as an opportunity for personal benefits.

Quote from: Lucius on Today at 04:40:41 PM

I fully support this idea, and I would also suggest disabling the merits in this thread in order to prevent competitors from motivating voters in this way.

I am glad my idea has fans and, as I see, you and icopress are two of them. However, if the contest is kept on Ivory Tower board and if it will have a rule to disqualify any user which would award votes, then there would not be necessarily needed to disable merits in the respective thread. If any merit occurs, the respective user is disqualified and, I think, this will be more harsh for him / her.

Quote from: Welsh on Today at 05:14:14 PM

I forgot to vote. I actually intended on voting in some of the categories this year, just things got in the way.

I am sorry that you forgot to vote, Welsh...

Quote from: Welsh on Today at 05:14:14 PM

Although, I definitely think there's been a few problems with the current format highlighted, and I believe for most of them they can be somewhat mitigated for future additions. I do think there was more interest in this years competition than the previous year, even without all of the controversy surrounding certain voters.

Certainly, the problems can be mitigated. We can all learn from first two editions of the contest and make the next one greater

And another suggestion I'd like to make, for the next iterations of the contest, is to have two phases during the contest: a first phase where all eligible users can vote any users they want and a "play-off", where top 5 users of each category are qualified. In the second phase the voters can nominate only users which qualified in the play-off. I think in this way the contest would raise even more interest and it will be more spectacular.