#but there's only so much one can do with a one-question ten-option poll lol

[coquelicoq]

new pronunciation poll! this one is about everyone's favorite word, data. things to keep in mind:

this poll aims to capture your pronunciation of the word "data" when used to mean "information" or "facts". that is, don't answer based on how you pronounce the name of the Star Trek character!

don't overthink the phonetic spellings i've used. i'm really just looking for how you pronounce the first vowel sound - is it the vowel in 'day' or the vowel in 'cat'?

i am also interested to know whether, when "data" is the subject of a verb, you conjugate that verb in the singular or in the plural. examples:

the data is stored (singular) vs. the data are stored (plural)

the data was collected (singular) vs. the data were collected (plural)

the data says (singular) vs. the data say (plural)

the data looks like (singular) vs. the data look like (plural)

[12thperigeeball]

Hi! I'm so sorry to bring this up but I have some questions/concerns about this year's voting process. I know that this is the first time we have tried this out in two brackets and the first time tumblr has had polls but I have 3 things to bring up.

1. We (currently) have 3 very clear leaders and no one even close to their votes in each category, why not let that stand if it remains like that until voting closes?

2. I'm worried not enough people will remember/see the second poll since they voted already and many aren't used to having two poles. I personally almost didn't even see that there were going to be two rounds until a while after I voted and won't be around much the rest of the weekend since the ball is over. I never would have know. (Also many don't know characters by name only so will there be accompanying pictures?)

3. If we are lengthening the voting can we maybe lengthen the Yule Ball itself to the whole weekend? That way it gives people more time to join in, especially weekend workers. Nominations can still end Sat at midnight, but maybe we could even have voting occur on the theoretical Sunday as an actualy event in the ball that people can react to.

Hi anon! No worries, we're happy to help clarify things.

So first and foremost, I do want to clarify that the voting process this year is a cumulation of different decisions that all three of us have discussed and agreed upon, based off of last year's voting concerns of the community and our experience with the ball theme voting process this year.

One major issue that I know concerned people last year was cheating - and our Google forms runs on an honor system. Doing a no sign in required voting form with no results showing has been the way the ball has worked for ten+ years now, but we can tell when the times have changed and the community asks for more accountability.

Secondly, one concern we heard from the ball them voting from earlier was the amount of options and the votes being more spread out. If you have 200+ votes but the 'winning' option only has 50, then that's an issue, isn't it? And when you toss in the option to see results without having to vote for a nominee, well, that skews things as well. A trade off for accountability, but one we can work with. We did feel like the second round of voting went much smoother than expected and still got an incredible amount of engagement from our user base! We were pretty worried it wouldn't, but it proved otherwise.

So, to answer your questions directly: 1) It has been two hours since voting began (from the time of receiving this ask + writing it. It is now 12 hours since receiving the ask as of posting). In previous years we've seen nominees come out strong out the gate and then fall behind as the process went ahead (in the past 10~ hours we can see that starting to happen now). Making a call about letting votes stand at this time would be putting the horse before the carriage, without factoring in our desire to reduce cheating as mentioned before. Our attempts to reduce vote fixing is our main priority. Also, as of 12PM 12/17/2023, our current queen and couturier winners are 'see votes', lol. Not logging names/emails and showing results have to have a trade off somewhere, and the trade off will require a round 2 of votes.

2) This was also a concern of ours, but our previous ball theme voting rounds and the amount of participants on tumblr itself has assuaged our fears of it being missed. I know having two polls isn't the norm, but we feel confident that we will still get a great turnout as we did before. We try our best to spread the poll around by reblogging it multiple times so people can see it during different times of the day. As for the not knowing characters by name - that was one of my biggest concerns with tumblr polls too! I believe we should be able to attach pictures to poll posts above or below the poll to help as a visual guide, howeverrrr it will stretch the post out significantly. It's something we're still considering the best possible way to show this without clogging dashes from constant reblogging.

3) This is a pretty good idea and one I have already been considering recently! The two day format has been a holdover from the Taima days and while none of us have ever stopped people from continuing to post or rp past the ball dates and never require people to role play out the nominations, the dances, or any other aspect, it still does limit how much time people have. The logistics of it may mean some more thought of course, because we try very hard to be considerate of the holiday by having the ball happen the weekend before Christmas, so we may have to adjust the ball happening earlier in the month to give users a larger cushion to enjoy themselves. You know, convention logic for four days instead of two! We'll keep you guys updated on this for next year, so feel free to let us know how you guys feel about this idea.