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Favorite Edit of the Month Polls - Voting Discussion

TV's Frink

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In the October FEOTM thread, there was a brief discussion regarding the voting process.  I did not mean to give the impression that we shouldn't discuss how or why we vote, so I'm starting this thread instead.  Feel free to use this thread to discuss the voting process and why you vote (or don't vote) the way you do.
 

reave

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Hi, my name is reave and I have a not-voting enough problem.
 

ThrowgnCpr

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reave said:
Hi, my name is reave and I have a not-voting enough problem.

Hi reave. You're not alone. I've suffered with this problem for years. There is support here.
 

juice4z0

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We should start a 12 step program for our voting issues
 

reave

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I resolve to be a better voting guy.
 

leeroy

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Reminder for everybody.

You are not expected to watch every fanedit in order to vote for FEOTM. Let's say you've seen only 1 edit and you thought "eh, it was all right". If it were me, I would look over the other edits, read their descriptions, read the reviews and cast a vote.

For me, I still haven't seen Rocky V 80s Edition but I loved The Assassination of Jesse James Dime Novel Cut so much so that got my vote.



this is why i never vote, how can i say that one thing is better than something else when i haven't seen it nor am i going to buy the film just to watch an edited version of it. i'm sorry but i just don't get the whole edit of the month awards

i guess i should say something considering it was my comment that has lead to this thread, sorry in advance for the long post

i don't vote as i believe to cast a vote i should see every edit, which would mean buying dvds to films i may not have any interest in, having to chose between numerous edits i may have have seen, and finally having to watch a bloody star wars fan edit every month ;-)

the internet fanedit database is fantastic though i do miss the 250 fanedit list you had, i know the database has a most popular fanedit section but for me i'd personally like to see the best monthly edit contest replaced in favor of doing a monthly chart list, for instance instead simply clicking next to the edit you want to vote for you have a link to the page so people can then score the edit and hopefully encourage people to review the edit. now i don't know how hard this would be nor how much work this may involve so if anyone could comment i'd like to know :)

i believe the monthly voting system isn't a true reflection of the edits, as it stands this month a few edits haven't got any votes which you could read as editors not wanting to vote for their own edits. a lot of edits have only 1 vote which you could read as an editor voting for there own work. steFANedit edit has only got one vote yet on the internet fanedit database it's received 6 reviews all of which have been positive. last survivors edit has 2 votes but again has 6 very positive reviews towards the edit. we are now 2 weeks into this months contest and for me there doesn't appear to be a great deal of interest in the contest.

so based on this months edits you could have a rule in which an edit needs 5 reviews/scores in order to be eligible to be considered for a best of list, so last survivors rocky 5 edit could become a high new entry (making it somewhat of a unofficial winner of the monthly edit contest) then in the coming months it may go up it may go down, it may even drop out of the chart. it would also eliminate having to chose between edits as steFANedit edit could become another high new entry which reflects the great reviews/score it's gained. so the process focuses more on the score the edit receives and the number of reviews it gets and replaces the system you have at the moment.

what i like about this site is how it always encourages people to edit though having spent along time editing an edit, making a dvd cover maybe even a trailer and then finally uploading an edit i have to say i find it somewhat disappointing to hear an editor saying they've voted for an edit without ever seeing the edit

neg
I'm sure a lot of people vote for fanedits they haven't seen. I've voted for an edit I didn't see. Is it ideal? Hell no.

i guess what i'm wanting to say is that a system in which more people are to be encouraged to score an edit or even review an edit is better all round than a monthly voting contest. it's incredibly frustrating for me after all the work I've put into an edit not to receive any reviews never mind a vote, i'd take a bad review other a vote any day of the week.

anyway i'm beginning to ramble so i best shut up now
 

baileym43

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that's a well thought out post.
i agree in that i don't vote regularly because i don't watch every film on the list.
though a few months i convinced myself that just having interest in the film itself was enough for me to vote for it.
so if i watched only 1 film in the list of 6, it's ok to vote for it because it earned my attention first and i thought it was done well enough to vote for it as well.
if the awards process is supposed to mirror the academy, should it not be decided by public votes and instead by the "informed" academy's decision? (which is already in place to approve or reject edits in general.)
just my pre-1982 cents there.
 

Neglify

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100% opinion, not any sort of official policy or anything.

Well, deep down FEOTM is nothing more than a popularity contest. Thankfully the community we have is pretty damn awesome so it's rarely a lopsided race (unless your edit has the words "War" "of" "the" and "Stars" in them).

So as far as "How Do I Vote For FEOTM?"...

Do whatever.

You feel like you gotta watch every edit? Cool, watch every edit and vote for your favorite. You're cool with just watching a couple edits that interest you? Awesome, vote for your favorite. You want to be mathematical and vote for the edit with the highest rating? Feel free. You want to flip a coin, do it.

I started the discussion about voting for FEOTM because there were so few votes and I feared that with so many edits released in October people thought "Wow, that's way too many edits to watch this month. Screw it, I'm sure LastSurvivor will win."

Of course I want people to watch fanedits. I want people to vote for their favorite. Yeah, not everybody has to vote, it'd be crazy to expect a vote from every active member.

The whole purpose of FEOTM is two-fold:

1) Have a fun activity the community participates in that has some weight to it.
2) Help people discover fanedits they wouldn't normally watch.

leeroy said:
i find it somewhat disappointing to hear an editor saying they've voted for an edit without ever seeing the edit

Now here's a little story I got to tell...

I was just lurking around the site in early 2011, checking stuff out like once a month or so. Then sometime in September I got more active. I noticed there was a vote for the best fanedit in August. I hadn't seen any of the edits so I just voted for "Sopranos Season One (Parts 1 and 2)" because I looked at the list, said "Oh nice, somebody fanedited Sopranos. That guy is cool."

That month ended with a tiebreaker poll and I felt I should watch the two edits vying for the prize. (For the record, it was Underworld: Tempation and Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze - Detarnished.) I watched the Underworld edit and wasn't swept off my feet by it. I had never seen that Doc Savage movie so I watched the original before the fanedit. The original movie was pretty bad so I didn't get around to watching the edit. But I did read over his edit's page and I read through his threads and I watched his comparison videos. It was obvious that slark put a lot of work and effort into his edit and it wasn't any sort of quick fix type edit (not to say TMBTM didn't put a lot of work into Underworld).

So, even though I didn't see Doc Savage Detarnished it was clear in my mind who I should vote for.

A year later I finally watched the Doc Savage edit and I'm so glad I voted for it. In fact, I wish I had voted for it in the original poll. If I had voted for Doc Savage instead of Sopranos, Doc Savage would have won.

Even though it's cliched, when it comes to FEOTM voting, I truly believe that every vote counts.

leeroy said:
i believe the monthly voting system isn't a true reflection of the edits, as it stands this month a few edits haven't got any votes which you could read as editors not wanting to vote for their own edits. a lot of edits have only 1 vote which you could read as an editor voting for there own work.

Just for the record, so far no editor has voted for his own edit this month. And whatever, if an editor votes for himself, that's his own thing. There's no rule or regulation about voting for yourself, it's a personal code some abide by, some don't even think about it.

leeroy said:
steFANedit edit has only got one vote yet on the internet fanedit database it's received 6 reviews all of which have been positive. last survivors edit has 2 votes but again has 6 very positive reviews towards the edit. we are now 2 weeks into this months contest and for me there doesn't appear to be a great deal of interest in the contest.

This is exactly the issue I have been racking my brain trying to solve. I think I've come to the conclusion that it can't be solved. I wish more people were active in the FEOTM poll, but hey, if a fanedit wins FEOTM with 3 votes total, so be it.

leeroy said:
so based on this months edits you could have a rule in which an edit needs 5 reviews/scores in order to be eligible to be considered for a best of list, so last survivors rocky 5 edit could become a high new entry (making it somewhat of a unofficial winner of the monthly edit contest) then in the coming months it may go up it may go down, it may even drop out of the chart. it would also eliminate having to chose between edits as steFANedit edit could become another high new entry which reflects the great reviews/score it's gained. so the process focuses more on the score the edit receives and the number of reviews it gets and replaces the system you have at the moment.

That would be a terrible solution in my opinion. The FEOTM contest used to be based on similar rules and I personally never want to see it go back. Using reviews and ratings as the sole factor in FEOTM makes FEOTM absolutely worthless to me. If we did switch back to that I would quit this site in a second.

Every reviewer is different in how they rate stuff. Some guys give 10/10s freely. Some never give higher than a 9, so their 9s are "really 10s". Some people feel that a 7/10 is equal to a 10/10 and will write a rave review and give it 6s and 7s. So for FEOTM to depend on reviews would mean ratings need to be standardized user to user and that's impossible.

Look at it this way.

Let's say there are 2 edits with 10 ratings this month and all other edits have less than 5 ratings. Edit #1 has an average of 9.1 and Edit #2 has an average of 9.0. Winner is Edit #1.

But let's say the 10th review for Edit #2 was a guy who feels that an 8/10 is his highest rating and writes a review saying things like "This edit is perfect... I loved every second... etc." but he gave it a rating of 8/10. If he had given it a 10/10 it would have been the winner.

I know it's a bit of a far fetched situation, but in my eyes this is something realistic.

leeroy said:
it's incredibly frustrating for me after all the work I've put into an edit not to receive any reviews never mind a vote, i'd take a bad review other a vote any day of the week.

I feel you dude.

In the end, the most important thing to me is that people watch and enjoy fanedits. Be it 1 fanedit a week, 1 fanedit a month, 1 fanedit a year, whatever. As long as people watch what we're putting so much work into.

baileym43 said:
if the awards process is supposed to mirror the academy, should it not be decided by public votes and instead by the "informed" academy's decision? (which is already in place to approve or reject edits in general.)

I'm pretty sure this was a method of determining FEOTM for a little bit. I personally don't like this idea because it comes down to a committee of 9, instead of a community.
 

L8wrtr

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The current form of the FEOTM is driven by two basic aspects.

First, the primary purpose is to encourage participation, discussion and interest in recent edits. Some months produce wildly involved viewing, discussion and voting, some months are but small blips, but the overall interest and excitement generated due to the public poll is a drastic improvement over the old days.

Second, the voting format relies on what I consider a twisted (perhaps wishful) varient of the Law of Averages combined with statistical probability. While the process of voting in FEOTM is not highly scientific and voters can range from not seeing any, to seeing a few, or to all, given a large enough sample (voting population) I think that more often than not the vote turns out to be a reasonably fair assessment of the edits as received by the community, and the more people who participate, regardless of how many or how few they have watched, the more representative and accurate the vote will be.

It's not necessary to see every edit in this type of poll as long as your vote actually has thought behind it. If you see only one edit and it sucks, then don't vote. That in itself is a statement and affects the poll in a fair way. If you see one edit (perhaps because it's the only one that you own, or the only one that interested you, or the only one you had time for and was the most interesting of the ones you had time to watch) and it was really enjoyable and it seems likely that no edit would beat it in your estimation, then vote for it. If you watched it and was good but meh, don't vote. Ultimately it's fair to vote because chances are that other people will be in the same boat. Some people will watch most or all edits and vote having a full understanding of the edits, some will watch only a few and can only make a judgement based on those two or three, and others will watch a different two or three and so-on. In the end the edit that collects the most votes is by an aggregation of the various combinations that people watch and vote, likely to be a fair representation of an edit which is highly entertaining, well executed, and ultimately resonated with most site-members who cared to participate in the process.

If you look over the winners of the FEOTM since it was re-opened to the public, I feel that every winner has been worthy of the title. Are there months where perhaps another edit was more worthy? Almost certainly, but the one that won was still worthy to be considered - still a great edit, and over time the vote will be the most accurate possible given the unpredictable dynamic that is our community, where interest and participation ebbs and flows, where personal time to watch movies can vary greatly month-to-month, and the number of people that care to vote can change month to month. There is no truly perfect, fair way to have the contest, but given all the various ways that FE has run this contest, this is the one format which has produced the most consistent and fair result month-in and month-out.

Just my 2 cents.
 

Neglify

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I feel the need to explain a little bit in response to these posts. Was just going to let them go and not give a shit but I can't.

"There doesn't seem to be much professionalism on these boards anymore..."

Yeah that's because we're goofy internet movie lovers who come here to joke around, talk about movies, make and watch fanedits. This is all a hobby for everybody. Sure sometimes we can get out of hand with the jokes but never during this FEOTM contest were there any serious shit talking, until Corz's post at least.

"This is obviously a popularity contest and not about what is the best edit..."

See ThrowgnCpr's post he said it best there.

"Jack & Jill has a 3.1 yet its close to winning.. REALLY? Sorry Neglify, no offense, but that's just not right.
As I stated, its just a popularity contest.

"No offense to anyone, I just think that's pretty selfish..."


I took offense to this. I worked hard on Jack and Jill, it wasn't just something I slapped together in a weekend. And if you read the reviews for the edit they're all joke reviews and ratings. All the "promotion" to win FEOTM has been purposely over-the-top. It was an APRIL FOOLS DAY FANEDIT, something so dumb that you have to ask yourself "Wait, is this for real?" I made it and went through all the trouble to make people laugh. Maybe the people who voted for it in the contest voted for it because they FOUND IT FUNNY. Read the thread for the edit, I put a lot of work into this prank.

Yes it's a joke fanedit. Yes it's dumb. Of course other edits are "better" than that one. Will I be sad or angry if it loses? HELL NO. I'm shocked it's received as many votes as it has. And I thank all the followers for drinking my Kool Aid.

leeroy said:
i'm not a fan of the monthly contest i've stated my reasons in the past but i have to agree with corz what is happening this month is disappointing. i've been coming to this site for a number of years i don't i engage myself with certain aspects of this site as it's just not my thing but as corz says this is just a popularity contest or even worse it's being rigged.

leeroy the next time you accuse Admins of rigging the FEOTM contest you'll receive an infraction. Send a PM to reave if you have a problem with this.

It's these type of comments that make me want to quit. Thankfully people like BionicBob are able to keep everything in perspective and remind me why I care about this site.

leeroy said:
why is it a private vote anyway? why not just post who we want to vote for and then add them up at the end

It's private because maybe people don't want to publicly say what edit they vote for. Maybe they just want to vote for their favorite or the best and not have to worry about people knowing who they voted for.

And also to discourage people voting for certain edits based on who else has voted. And to prevent childish arguments like "omigawd Gatos why didn't you vote for meeee? :cry:"

I don't see any legitimate reasons to change the privacy of who votes. If you can come up with one, great we'll consider it.
 

TMBTM

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I just added some thoughts in the FEOTM thread before I see your post here Neg.
I think I said several things in common with you.
 

leeroy

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leeroy the next time you accuse Admins of rigging the FEOTM contest you'll receive an infraction. Send a PM to reave if you have a problem with this.

i do believe i never mentioned anyone's name especially an admin, fact is if a edit that has a 3.1 score yet receives 7 votes to me that's a little suspicious

obviously your a little emotional right now but once you've calmed down read my post again you will see that i haven't once mentioned anyone directly, so please don't threaten me
 

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Neg - don't take things to heart - we appreciate your hard work (even if it is sometimes a daft Aprils Fools joke :lol:)

Leeroy - I think you've made some valid and helpful points - particularly about what people EXPECT from a FEOTM award, and what it actually is. There's definitely a mismatch there which is good to point out.
However, I think you sabotaged yourself by accusing the admins of rigging the contest. These guys pulled the site out of the dust, do it on their free time, and generally run things very well. As Neg's comment shows, being accused of underhanded behaviour feels like serious ingratitude, and can hurt a lot more than you may have meant!
 

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leeroy said:
i do believe i never mentioned anyone's name especially an admin, fact is if a edit that has a 3.1 score yet receives 7 votes to me that's a little suspicious

obviously your a little emotional right now but once you've calmed down read my post again you will see that i haven't once mentioned anyone directly, so please don't threaten me

:oops:
 

leeroy

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for me this was dealt with on sunday the fact that it's been dug-up again - well - lets just say, i've got more important things to worry about in life.

i could comment more but i said what i wanted to say
 

Rogue-theX

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Lt. Starbuck said:
320_cap770.jpg

I am a friendly, okay? We're all friendlies. So, let's just... be friendly.

:)
 

TV's Frink

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leeroy, I asked you to provide clarification on the rigging comment and I do not remember you doing so. Now is the time.
 

Rogue-theX

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I don't like this thread right now, I want it to be happy but its snot. I tried feeding it happy thoughts but its still snotty.
 

TV's Frink

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[MENTION=9491]leeroy[/MENTION], I want to clarify a little.

You said that it was possible the vote was rigged. I'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, perhaps "rigged" means something different to you than it does to me. When I hear you suggest a FEOTM vote was rigged, I think you have to have someone in mind who is to blame. However, you've gone to great lengths to avoid answering my question, which boils down to this - who do you blame, and what's the motive? I see a few possibilites:

1) One of the staff

You've said that you didn't say it was the staff, which of course is not the same as if you said you don't think it's the staff. I find your choice of words, especially in your replies to [MENTION=9578]Neglify[/MENTION], to be confusing.

2) One of the nominees

Here's where I'm prepared to take offense, given that I'm currently in the lead. Do you think I've done the rigging? Or given your comments about Neg's edit, including your misguided complaint that the low rating it has received should mean people shouldn't vote for it, does that mean you think Neg has done it?

3) Someone else?

I don't know who else would have motive, but perhaps you can enlighten me?

...

Here's the thing...I had my own concerns about this month's voting (having nothing to do with Neg's edit). However, the staff is very diligent in checking into strange voting patterns and making sure everything is legit. Knowing this, instead of making a public (and honestly infuriatingly vague) accusation, I brought my concerns to the admin team privately, who verified that everything was cool.

So your accusation is still out there, with nothing to support it or to explain it. Please do the decent thing and explain what the hell you meant.
 
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