2003 Weblog Awards – Procedures

Polls for the 2003 Weblog Awards close Sunday December 14. Winners will be announced December 15.

Why the delay? I am checking logs for excessive voting patterns regularly, but I’d rather make the adjustments all at once. I appreciate the efforts of all the contestants to guide their readers to proper participation, but regardless of how hard we all try there will always be some who try to spoil the fun. Fear not, it’s trivially easy for me to spot the excessive voting. How to address these votes (which will be discarded) midway through the polling is a thornier issue. There are three ways I can handle this:

Make the adjustment, and hope I remember that I made the adjustment when I look through the logs again once the polls close. I’m worried, frankly, that I will forget that I already adjusted the vote totals downward and mistakenly do it again. There are 21 different polls to keep up with.

Make the adjustment(s) then clear the logs. This way there is no chance that I would have the problem described above, but I loose the existing vote logs for that poll. I really don’t want to keep checkmarking the logs in this way. I would like to keep the logs intact until the polls close.

Note the adjustments, leave the logs in place, then adjust the totals when the polls close. This allows me to keep the logs and make all the adjustments at one time.Option 3 is the one I’m going with. I’m sorry if this is not an optimal solution, but I will try to note the polls where corrections are to be applied.

See the update below…

Others will surely be added. I will notify these sites by mail and include a copy of the relevant portion of the log if requested. Please refrain from spiteful name calling between sites over this issue because:

Unless the blogger did it themselves (highly unlikely) they really have no control over it.

You could be the next on the list.As to the declaration of winners, where the vote total is exceedingly close I reserve the right to declare co-winners.

Update: I changed my mind. I am going to apply the corrections to date. I found a way to preserve the logs offline.

The following vote totals have decreased by the amount indicated based on vote abuse.

Best Conservative Blog
Hewitt (151)
Misha (150)

Best Marauding Marsupials Ecosystem Level Blog
the cheese stands alone (35)

Best Flappy Birds Ecosystem Level Blog
Quibles And Bits (22)
Agroves (52)
Exultate Justi (53)

Best Group Blog
Powerline (150)
Rantburg (650)