Hey all! Welcome to my meta comment about the year-end awards. I am going to try to pre-emptively answer some questions you may have:
Are the awards just for manga?
No! There are three different awards: anime, manga, and light novels. Check out each one here:
What counts as manga? Is X series eligible?
Any series that published in 2024 is fair game. This includes series that started long ago but have continued into this past year (One Piece, etc.) or even ended this past year (Nagatoro, Oshi no Ko, etc.).
Series that are eligible would be anything that is within the rules for this community. That means that manhwa are also eligible for example.
Who chose these categories and why is my favorite category missing?
Well, like I wrote up top, this all came together pretty quick. So, I did my best to come up with a good sprinkling of categories that covers a broad range, but not so many categories that it is annoying to actually submit votes for all those things.
Please let me know if you don't like some stuff or want changes. It's kind of too late for this year, but rest assured that I will incorporate feedback for the future.
What is this survey site? It looks super sketchy...
I am hosting it! It is a dockerized instance of LimeSurvey (thanks martialblog for creating a docker image). I initially ran into problems hosting this on my VPS that I use for things (like rikka), because this service takes a ton of memory. So, this is now running on my homeserver, literally in my office, right next to my desk.
Here is a fun little peek into how figuring out setting up the site went:
As for privacy/security, I have all the surveys configured to not record IP numbers or other identifying information. I know you can only take my word for it, but I hope that I have earned at least a little trust at this point running this community.
One thing to note for the voting round is that the survey will place a cookie into the browser to try to prevent voting multiple times (feel free to do multiple rounds of nomination). Frankly, this is the flimsiest of defenses because private browsing easily circumvents it, but that is the extent to which this site should mess with your browser.
Nominations...but what about the voting?
Voting comes next! The nomination window will be open for one week (week 50). Then, week 51, the nomination submissions will be sorted through by NineSwords and I for our respective communities. Then, the voting period will be over the course of week 52, the final week of the year. Winners, should everything go as planned, will be announced on the 31st of December.
For nerds that care a lot about voting methodologies...
I am right there with you. For the voting round of these awards, in each category, you will be able to rank-order the nominees in the order you want. Then, at the close of the voting, a ranked-choice election will take place. I haven't written the code yet, but I plan on using PyRankVote to run the election using the Instant Runoff Vote (IRV) method since it is just single winner elections.
The other option in consideration right now is STAR voting. Basically, you would be able to assign each nominee a score from 0-5 where 5 means it is most deserving of winning (non-exclusive, meaning you can give multiple nominees a score of 5). Then, I would use the starvote python package to process the data and determine the winner.
Awards!?! What are we, Buzzfeed? Reddit? I hate this!
First, chill...but I get it. I thought this would be a fun community thing, but if the community hates it, then we won't do it again. Simple as that. Do please let me know. I hope that I have proven by this point a willingness to incorporate community feedback, even when it is critical.
