[Z]

After how fast Round 1 went this year, it's just time for a change. I've decided that next time around, Round 1 will be open for a week, and then Round 2 will be open for a week. Round 1, the users with the most nominations will make up the top 50. For example, say 43 users receive 4 or more nominations, and then 18 users have 3 nominations at the end of Round 1, there are obviously 7 spots left to fill and 18 users all eligible. Then I would go to the first come first served rule and the first 7 users to have gained 3 sets of nominations would take the spots, though obviously there's still scope for more than 50 to qualify if someone gave more than one user their third nomination and they had the deciding nomination.

This way is much fairer. There's still the importance of getting your nominations in quickly, but it means that people aren't screwed out of participating by virtue of not being voted for quickly enough. Similarly, Round 2 will only be open for a week to speed things up. If you give people 2 weeks to vote, some people will take 2 weeks to vote, and it doesn't need to be open for that long.

I've also been given a heads up regarding other users trying to fix nominations in Round 1. If I had been made aware of this earlier, I would have been able to do something about it, but unfortunately that wasn't the case. Hopefully this new system will go some way in preventing situations like that from happening again. In future, if I can prove that people have been vote fixing or I'm sent evidence of people vote fixing, I'll just void those users' nominations/votes in future. I'll speak about this more in the countdown thread but I'm a bit disappointed more than anything.