If there's been a change, I should think it's an attempt to make the "Hot 20" nonsense a bit more meaningful. When the "Hot 20" first started, you could instantly vote for an image whilst viewing it via the "Hot 20". This meant that simply being in the "Hot 20" meant an image was far more likely to get a vote than images in the regular gallery. This resulted in a feedback loop making it quite difficult for images outside the "Hot 20" to get in. You can thank yours truly, PJF, for the suggestion of getting rid of that (and Russell, the chap who used to program Renderosity, for doing the technical implementation). This new idea sounds like another attempt to further distance the act of viewing the "Hot 20" from the act of voting in it. Ideally, everyone should be looking at all the images in the gallery and making a choice of what's best from there. If that happened, the "Hot 20" might mean something. But it remains the fact that a lot of people just look at the "Hot 20" expecting to see the current best works, and then dig down to vote for what they think is good from that selection. It's still a self-perpetuating nonsense. I can't believe I just got involved in a "Hot 20" discussion. There go a few minutes of my life I'll never get back.