Should we change the contest voting system?

[IchoTolot]

This is kind of my point, though: if your favourite level got voted out, why should you now be voting for a level you didn't think should win? Votes now mean less in this round, surely?

I still vote for a level that I think should win compared to another even if they were not among my favorites.

In the end with your conclusion it at least still would come down to the question if the vote or the placement matters less.

All in all, the question of "One mixed round to determine the top 3" would be best to put up on a poll later. I am willing to try out skipping it if there is enough support for the simple system.

[Dullstar]

One other possibility that comes to mind is, during the non-mixed phase, hold all three rules' votes simultaneously. This wouldn't cut down on the number of votes, but would get them done much quicker (and can also potentially be combined with other ideas).

I think this would help streamline things a bit. The combination of the sheer number of voting rounds is a major factor in why the voting takes so long, but it's further exacerbated by the fact that we only run one round at a time even when the rounds don't have dependencies on each other.

[IchoTolot]

One other possibility that comes to mind is, during the non-mixed phase, hold all three rules' votes simultaneously. This wouldn't cut down on the number of votes, but would get them done much quicker (and can also potentially be combined with other ideas).

I think this would help streamline things a bit. The combination of the sheer number of voting rounds is a major factor in why the voting takes so long, but it's further exacerbated by the fact that we only run one round at a time even when the rounds don't have dependencies on each other.

I am open for this, but how can we implement that?

Maybe hosting 1 vote in the voting topic and use the discussion and update topics for the 2 extra polls? Or is there a way to host multiple polls at the same time in one topic?

[namida]

Mentioned on Discord but, IMO, the best way would be to have two topics that exist solely for the extra polls, and re-use them in every contest (while not allowing replies, except perhaps to bump when needed by a moderator - although this could also be handled with stickies).

Maybe an SMF addon that allows multiple polls per topic exists, but it's not something I'm going to look at while I'm in the process of working on an SMF 2.1 upgrade - more than happy to come back to this once the 2.1 upgrade is done.