G'day 'Stretch ;)
"Is the AOM always a Poser artist?"
Nope, each month's AOM comes from a different area. There is some overlap of course. The problem I see is that the AOM contest for the Poser month gets (I think) a lot more voting than, say, the Rhino month. So the winner of the Poser AOM contest is more likely to win AOY by default.
"Many sites that I have seen ... "
Agree with you on that. It would have to be combined with some sort of activity counter like visits per month, time online etc.
I'm not sure I agree with the selection of metrics though.
- Email addresses are as you say, less than a dime a dozen. Just to give an example, anyone who subscribes to the UK ISP Demon Internet as I do gets a domain name and unlimited email addresses. Basically anything ending in @{hostname}.demon.co.uk gets to the owner of {hostname}.
- Forum posts Like the galleries, some folks don't frequent the forums and only come here for the artwork or to buy stuff.
- Online time/number of visits I still think this is a go-er and if done carefully could be very useful. There's already script-blocking to stop harvesting, and though I don't know the ins and outs of it I would think it possible to catch multiple refreshes of the same page.
Methods
- Cumulative Voting: Still think this would favour any Poser artists too much.
- E-bot Voting: Could be very useful. Maybe adding one more step; verification. The ebot sends out notification to active members, who click the link to vote. The ebot contains a link with a unique embedded code (like Form.SessKey or whatever.) The server code detect the embedded ID then marks that vote as cast and refuses further GETs that contain that ID.
- Mods/Admins Only Voting: like you say, this alienates the members.
- No Contests/Voting: definitely a last resort.
- Off-Site Voting: All that does is put the burden of verification on to a third party who then has to go through some kind of vetting process themselves.
- Public Voting: Like we both say, probably influences voting.
I don't think you missed anything ;)
So taking your list and changing it, my preference for metrics and method would be:
- Length of membership
- Online time in the previous 30 days
- Number of visits in the previous 30 days
- Some sort of e-bot voting
This is a code-only solution and would therefore be impartial and pretty much transparent so long as the method was published.
