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.