1. Votes for inactive users will not be taken into consideration anymore. The event is related to the activity made by users during current year and not for the past.

2. No merit sending is allowed from nominees to users which nominated them.

We were also curious about how users feel about implementing a rule which would give chances to more people to win. What we were thinking about is the following: to arrange things thus the winner of a category cannot be the same person from previous contests. Or he can be, as this does not mean a ban -- but he can be with more efforts. To be more precise, all previous winners could start with a coefficient of 0.8. Attention! -- this happens only regarding the previously won category!

I appreciate I am heavily biased here given I have previously won the same category twice, but I wouldn't take this approach. You could easily end up in the situation where someone is deemed to have won, but someone else would have won the "popular vote", by getting more votes which were each worth less. I can already picture the arguments which could arise, particularly if there will be prizes involved. It is also disincentivizes people from voting for the previous winner, since their vote will be less valuable than if they voted for someone else. I would either go down the route of excluding previous winners or doing nothing at all.

This feels too restrictive to me. I would have opted for a lower number, say 20 earned merits, but that's just me.