It's a nice system, though how can we manage to set this up so that 2000 people will actually submit their list of four characters? Some major advertising has to be done for that to work.
How to get people to participate is the biggest concern, to which I have no idea.
Latest update from Korean Contest
Sawatchika Eri 680 over Souseiseki 419
So called Tsunderes will sweep final 4 in Korean tournament. This makes me believe that the 2nd system I proposed may be better than 1st, for it will allow more variety of character to survive to the semi final round.
Am I the only person who thinks that this is a gorgeous idea? Actually I don't quite see the problem with 'disappointing results'. Characters I like generally aren't very popular (Hagu, Aka, Kyouya, Pino, Alice etc.) and I don't care much about whether others see what I see in these characters. On the other hand, I /love/ statistics and popularity contests... It shouldn't be taken too seriously anyways. So I'd love to help organizing this - but I guess I can't help with hosting (mainly because I have no idea how much bandwidth this would cost).
Well, what we can do is make some kind of wordpress account and install some kind of poll plugin (I'm not that knowledgeable about wordpress, so I'm not sure whether this should work or not).
And regarding getting enough voters, it's clear that we need to advertize. If we manage to get the support of some well-visited sites, perhaps things can go the right way.
I like the idea, and AnimeNano is probably popular enough that putting a link at the top of the page to a tournament nomination form would probably get enough people to submit their picks (although maybe not 2000 people like the tournaments in Korea and Japan, I bet at least a few hundred would participate). It's probably best to wait for the Saimoe tournament to end first though, it looks like a lot of people on AnimeSuki's forums are following it and voting in it despite the language barrier for those like me who are Japanese-impaired.
Would there be restrictions on characters that can be nominated, so for example only characters appearing in anime from fall 2005-summer 2006? I think Saimoe must have a restriction along those lines, either that or no one votes for old-school characters like Lum from Urusei Yatsura...
We could have couple of different group: All time vs Jan. 2005 to present, human vs non-human, male vs. female. We could do one big tournament or several smaller one around the main event, which is likely to be recent female characters. This depends on what the general consensus of English group is.
Can I be in the poll? I didn't do too well in the anime nano podcast poll though...
Latest update from Korean Moe Tournament
Suiseiseki 707 over Tohsaka Rin 656
The Final 4 matchup
Sawatchika Eri vs Suzumiya Haruhi
Shana vs Suiseiseki
To tell the truth, none of the 4 appeals to me. I am seriously considering not to vote on this final 4 rounds, unless one of you convince me the superiority of one of the character.
Shana and Suiseiseki actually met before in round of 32 and tied at 420 votes a piece. Because a winner from another matchup won with vote less than 420, Housen Elis from Canvas 2 had only 299 votes in her victory against Asakura Nemu who had 263, they both advanced instead of that winnerto the Sweet 16.
Actually having run popularity contests for anime characters before (granted, we're talking about a voter pool size at around 500 max), it is a lot of work. Saimoe has an incredibly large amount of administration and organization, plus the sufficient IT back up for it.
However, the "fun" part of these things is in the "support" posts. You need a place for that, or else it'll just be like GameFAQ's character contests. If this is to be done I'd suggest someone host a blog dedicated to this, and people can go nuts in the comments, or something.
You may need to have some kind of redundency check, to prevent pumping votes, but in my experience it only matters if your voter pool is small.
There are also a lot of things that you need to decide beforehand, and things that is good to know. Like:
1. your voter pool--how many people are you expecting?
2. limitations of your IT stuff--if you are going to take open nominations, you'll need someone who can crunch a lot of names and stuff. Do you need some kind of authenticity check? Bind votes by IP?
2.5 People are more likely to vote and participate when it's easy to vote and nominate. People outside of the community would do so too. This is something you need to decide if you want to make it easy or make it "seem fair" at the cost of less votes.
3. What kind of a character contest do you want? Free for all? Limited by genre? Limited by year? Limited by age? Saimoe included non-human characters just because it's fair to do it, and plenty of people are willing to waste their nomination spot on Raising Heart and the like. The kind of contestants will determine the nature of the contest. This is really important.
4. Who is going to suck it up and be the administrator? It takes time and vision and the ability to be fair, or seem to be so. There will be time early on where you need to make some discretionary calls, and you need to minimize them and be public about it.
5. Advertising is always nice but I think if people who are blogging about it pay it mind and talk about it, it'll be a fun exercise for the community anyways.
I don't see how such a contest can be doneon a simple blog. You'll need a selfmade, specialised CMS for that. If no one is programming one, forget about it.
@ Kurisu: What is CMS?
@ omo: Here are the best answers I can come up with. Sadly, I don't think it is adequate
1. I have seen Jason's AoMM blog do March madness style popularity contest and the final had attracted 1217 votes. Judging from this, I think getting 500 real independent voter is very possible.
2. I do believe we should take open nomination. It will give us several interesting or weird candidates along with usual suspects, and by counting the number of nomination each character got, we could assigns seeds according to number of nominations for the 1st preliminary round. It will take some man power. I think, several person can volunteer to take emails from time period A to B and count the nominations from the emails. At this stage, we could make sure we got one set of nominations per email address. Later on, when we can use the website for direct voting count, we could enforce one vote per IP address as well. A good system may be that we hand out one login and password per email address, and while registrating, the system can make sure it is handing out only one login per IP address as well. After you log in, you just click on the dot of your choice(s) and click finish. After voting, and only after voting, we could let the voter see how much votes each character has accumulated so far.
2.5 I think ease of voting should matter more than making sure one person cast their vote only once per contest(s).
3. This is really up to the people. I wouldn't mind, free for all, everyone and everything included popularity contest to crown only one winner. Some might want to have the preliminary rounds structured so we would have champions from various groups competing for the final crown; the grouping can be male, female, anime before 2004, anime after 2005, harem anime, mecha anime, animal, non-biological entities, whatever. It is my suspicion that the category that will attract the most people would be female character from animes after 2005. We could run this as the main event, and when we are getting near to the finals, thus having less contests per week, we could also run other categories to fill in the blanks. A interesting category may be favorite non-human animal like side characters from animes of any time. We could have a good race between Mukuru, Pico ( Air ), Snoopy ( Peanuts ), Gojira, and George ( Curious George ). We could also have international category and Far East ( China, Japan, and Korea ) category ( for majority of anime subcontracting companies are located in Korea ). The possibilities are endless, but we need to hear from more people about it, first. If I had capability and power to do this alone, I think I would go with Female character from anime on or after 2005, female characters from anime on or before 2004, any non-female anime characters from any time and place, and favorite blogger/commenter.
4. If I know what CMS means, already have experience running a blog, and doesn't have to worry about graduating, I would gladly volunteer to be administrator. Since I already got 3 strikes against me, I am not fit for being administrator, but I would like to be part of staff that will run this contest, since I should bear some responsibility of suggesting it in the first place. I would need a great deal of tutoring from other staffs in the beginning, though.
5. If we get this contest started and announce it to various anime related forums, Blog Suki, Animeblogger antenna, and various of well known websites, I think they will come. If we make favorite blogger contest in tournament format, along with some resurrection rounds, we will really attract attention and blood will flow.
