i, for one, am glad that they pulled the public votes. weve all seen firsthand what a determined person can do to swing the public vote. one of the AOMs of 2002 did it, by spamming his newsgroup and having those people create rosity accounts for the sole purpose of voting him AOM. then he did it for his friend. then he laughed about it, and said self-promotion was a valid tactic. now im not happy that the members cannot vote for things such as this, in a utopian renderosity, all the contests, hot20s AOM/AOY and awards would work wonderfully, where everyone in the community would take the time to pick whom they thought was the best candidate and EVERY SINGLE MEMBER would place their vote. but thats not going to happen. not in my lifetime, and not in yours. with the old system, the most determined person would win, since they would spam for the most people to vote for them and work the hardest on their little publicity campaign. i, for one, am glad that there is no more opportunity for that - for people to manipulate the AOM and AOY like that, and you should be glad too - god knows what could have happened if things HADNT of changed. so no, its not the utopian renderosity. but its far better than the alternative, so i support it fully until someone proposes a better idea. i already did - script it so that when everyone logs in during something like AOM or AOY voting, they get a dialog at the top of their screen, like an IM, that has the AOM or AOY poll, and kindof 'force' them to vote that way. then all of the 100k or so rosity members would vote, and it would be impossible to sway such a large number of voters. its not that hard to do, and i think it would be the fairest solution. cheers, -gabriel