Adding a new smiley
We will be adding a new smiley at the SDMB. The smiley will be chosen by popular vote, using the approval method of voting (you can vote for more than one candidate, the candidate with the most votes will win - see at this page a description of approval voting by mathematician Sam Merrill.)
The polling process
We have 50 candidates. vBulletin limits the number of choices in a poll to 10. So the first round of voting will have 5 polls with 10 candidates each. You can vote for more than one candidate in each of the 5 polls in the first round. (Note that if you vote for every candidate, the effect for determining the winner would be the same as if you had not voted at all.) This first round will last 7 days.
At end of 7 days, there will be a second-round poll with
a) the winner in each of the five polls of the first round (five smilies)
b) plus the top four vote-getters besides those five, treating all the polls as one
c) and the “no new smilies” choice
The second-round 10-choice poll that will also expire in 7 days and be conducted using approval voting.
If the winner of the second round is a category with two or more smilies (e.g. dubious has two submissions), there will be one final poll to choose the best smiley for that category, with an expiration date of five days.
If there are ties in any of the rounds of voting, the winner will be decided by Arnold Winkelried flipping a swiss coin (to have a double guarantee of swiss neutrality) to determine the winner.
Candidates
List of candidates. The table of submissions is divided by columns - the first column will be poll one for the first round, the second column will be poll two for the first round, etc…
Threads of interest
Asking for smiley submissions in ATMB
Practice poll in ATMB - We strongly recommend that you experiment with vBulletin’s polling feature here before you start voting on smilies.
IMHO thread debating the most useful smiley - This is the place to discuss which smiley is the “best” and/or worthy of your vote.
IMHO thread discussing the voting method
Let the best smiley win!
