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.)
Second Round of Polling
There was a tie for ninth place in the first round, so I flipped my swiss coin to decide which smiley would make it to the second round. List of second round candidates
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. Submissions List of submissions. 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.
I see that the highest number of voters in a poll in the first round is 414 in poll 1. That’s suprisingly low to me - I would have thought the number would be 1,000 or more. Does that mean there were only that many people who cared which smiley got added, or that there are only that many regulars who are also registered? Can any other tentative conclusions be drawn from this low number?
I think it means that some people are totally unaware of these polls. If you never go to ATMB or IMHO then you wouldn’t even know this voting is going on.
The rate of voting “No New Smilies” is shockingly low (3% so far). The members of this board seem to be clammoring for an emotional release… Now I’m wondering what the results will be if we do as planned - repeat the poll until the “No New Smilies” wins.
:Smack: deserves to win - it’s quite well drawn. The hand even has all 5 fingers! Who was the artist?
On the other hand (snicker), I can think of several ways to interpret it:[ul][li]:Smack: How could I be so stupid?[]:Smack: People can be so stupid![]:Smack: Good Grief, someone put Opal’s name in the list again!:Smack: I hurt my left eye today…[/ul][/li]
Dubious is also way cool.
Oh, Dog, I am really torn here. On the one hand, the Dubious smiley seems to wordlessly encapsulate the entire philosophy of the Straight Dope. On the other hand, -
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