August OTM Voting (2020)

Hello! Congratulations to our winners this month, Adeline Light, Arion Neptune, and Anteros Princely! Please be sure you have given them some love (it’d be wise to do it before reading the rest of this!).

This Month: Spades, SOTM Survey, and Summing Up

I’d like to thank users for bearing with us through the slight delay in posting the August vote. The admins have made some observations with SOTM and have decided it would be best to gather user opinion on the SOTM vote in order to potentially improve it.

Hence, this month you will need both partake in voting and complete the SOTM survey in order to win COTM or SOTM. Please be honest and take time to genuinely reflect on the questions. Do not worry about upsetting or offending the admins - we wrote the survey, after all, and need honest feedback (negative and/or positive) to make potentially change for the better. Users who have been on the site for less than three months do not need to complete the survey.

Because we hope for users to genuinely reflect (and doing this survey is necessary), we will be chasing users up about completing it. We will be doing this far earlier than the vote closes, as we want to make sure users have not rushed the survey, jeopardising the results. While you can do the survey at any time before OTMs close, it might be wise to get it done before you get votes in, as soon as possible (without rushing!).

In addition to this, admins (Spades, Zena) will not be completing the survey. Admins have a fundamentally different experience and understanding of the OTMs which we feel needs to be considered separately (but equally) to the user based feedback. As such, the admins will forfeit any wins they gain this month.

We would also like it to be known that we are testing a new COTM vote counting system. This will not impact who wins, as we will be picking winners based on the current system for the time being, but we will be observing how this new counting system would impact who wins and if this would be beneficial for the site. If we find the system effective we will let you know what it is and, of course, if we plan to implement it.

As noted earlier: we have clarified the rules this month so please be sure to read through them all!

OTM Rules

Voting will close 28th of July, 11:59pm GMT

COTM Rules

1. Users should not vote for OCs that belong to them.
2. An OC who has already won cannot win again.
3. A character with the same destiny as a previous winner cannot win.
   1. Characters with "generic" destinies, such as Charmings with no set role, do not count as having the same destiny as any previous winners who are of that "generic" destiny.
4. A character cannot win if the driver won COTM the previous month.
5. You can only win the OTMs of a given month if you have partaken in the voting for that month.

SOTM Rules

1. You can vote for a ship you have OC(s) in.
2. OC/Canon is allowed.
3. The ship does not have to be a romantic relationship nor does it have to contain just two OCs. Poly ships or friendships are accepted.
4. All the OCs in your ship must be present on the wikia to win the award. You may vote for ships where this is not the case, but they cannot win until all the OCs have been uploaded.
5. Not everyone involved with the ship needs to vote for it to win.
6. A ship cannot win if a driver involved won SOTM the previous month.
7. The exception is for big squads, which we would define as being squads with 7+ users. A driver involved in such a squad, if it had won in the previous month, may still win the following month.

Here's a link to the list of COTM and SOTM winners, please give them a read.

How to Vote

Now that you've read the rules, you may want to know how you vote for an OC or a ship!

UPDATED as of 4th of July 2020. Please give this a read before you vote.

Voting Basics

1. Voting is done through comments on this very blog post.
2. You can list the OCs and ships you wish to vote for in a comment, and if you want to add more votes, you can leave another comment or edit your old one.
3. OCs and ships can be voted for in the same comment.
4. You can vote for multiple OCs or ships.
   1. If so, each vote must be separated by a line break or bullet point.
5. Be sure that you are explicit in who or what you want to vote for! "Votes" that simply say "any of X's OCs" will not be counted. Please state a character and a ship by name!
   1. If we can't tell with absolute certainty who you are voting for, your vote will not be counted.
6. Users should comment on the Wikia to vote.
   1. In extenuating circumstances, votes can be delivered via Discord if it is impossible for the user to deliver them in a Wikia comment.

COTM

1. Character names should be written in full. "Full" is defined as exactly how the OC's name appears on their article page title. The OC should be linked.
2. Votes should be formatted in a readable manner.
3. Comments as to why you are voting for the OC can be placed after the OC's name, not before. We heavily encourage these comments!

Examples:

YAY:
 [[Common Charming]] - “Generic User” has put so much love into them. Their infobox bio 
is very witty.
 *[[Common Charming]] - i have many comments and opinions on them!

NAY: 
 *i would die for this soft, [[Common Charming|common boi]]
 any of generic users ocs i love them
 *I love [[Common Charming]] so much!!!

SOTM

1. All members involved in the ship should be directly named. This can be done by linking their pages within the ship itself, or having names "trail after". All name rules that apply to COTM apply to SOTM.
   1. This is because some ship names overlap (ie, they are associated with different sets of OCs).
   2. The exception to this is groups or ships which qualify as squads and, hence, have pages. Ships with pages can simply be linked, to avoid listing lots of OCs.
2. As with COTM, votes should be formatted in a readable manner.
3. Once again, we encourage comments on why you like the ship in question. These comments should come after the ship name and the names of those involved with it.

Examples:

YAY:
 *CoSpSh - [[Common Charming]] x [[Spicy Charming]] x [[Shipwrecked Charming]] - i love 
them!
 [[Common Charming]], [[Spicy Charming]], and [[Shipwrecked Charming]] have such a fun 
dynamic!
 [[Common Charming|Co]][[Spicy Charming|Sp]][[Shipwrecked Charming|Sh]] (aka 
Common Charming, Spicy Charming, Shipwrecked Charming) is an excellent ship!

NAY: 
 *The best ship in the history of ships is [[Spicy Charming]] and [[Common Charming]]. 
I hope they make up with [[Shipwrecked Charming]] soon! 
 [[Common Charming|,ndkjf]] [[Spicy Charming|ndkjfndj]] [[Shipwrecked Charming|fndjknf]]
 *That one ship with those charmings is cool beans

Things to Remember

1. Remember that COTM and SOTM appear on the front page of the site. You should vote for OCs and ships who, for whatever reason, you would want new users to see.
2. Don't feel pressured to vote for what everyone else has voted for if everyone is voting similarly.
3. The winner may be unexpected as we count all votes from all previous months when deciding who wins.
4. It would be wise to vote for OCs with active users.
5. Admins will not tell you when a vote is invalid. We expect users to keep up with the rules and to make sure they are voting in a way that ensures their votes will be counted.

How the admins pick a winner

With few exceptions, the admin team will pick the OC and the ship with the highest number of votes. The admin team has always picked the person with the highest number of votes possible.

However, while the admin team tries their best to, and has seldom not, picked a winner that didn’t align with what people had voted for, there have been occasions where we have jumped to the OC or ship in second, third, or even fourth place. For clarity, here are some of the things we could consider or have considered in the past:

1. Ever After High is a franchise aimed at kids. Therefore, site traffic is likely to have a young audience. There could be some OCs or ships that we would not be comfortable having on the front page. OCs and ships that explore mature, inappropriate, or unhealthy themes, particularly where said themes have not been warned or framed correctly, would be highly likely to not win.
2. While not everyone involved with a ship needs to vote for it for the ship to win and SOTM does not demand a user to have voted that month to win, if a ship made up with a small number of users suffers from those users being inactive or active users involved not voting for it, we may be inclined to give the win to a different ship.
3. While generic roles can win multiple times, ie, Charmings with no set or known destiny, in the event of the top five all being Charmings, we would try to space these out.
4. If a user has expressed discomfort with an OC or ship of theirs winning, they would not be able to win no matter how many votes they accumulated.

And in the event of a tie the admins would consider the following:

1. Which OC/ship has been on the list the longest.
2. How many votes the OC/ship generally gets per month.
3. Reasons people have given for voting, ie, leaving comments after the vote.
4. How many different people have voted for the OC/ship