i think a lot of the participation issues has to do with yahoo. back in the day. yahoo was the place to be, but now there's lj and facebook and all of that so no body hangs out at yahoo anymore. when dokuga started it was yahoo group same as the iyfg; the level of participation was not that bad, actually, i remember it was either the first or second time we did it and there were 87 nominations across the board. the real problem always comes back to voting though and that was abysmal. again, people aren't going to yahoo to see what's new there and so probably don't know how to get to the iyfg or how to work the polls. once we switched to the website participation was as good as always and voting skyrocketted. last quarter we saw almost 100 nominations and the average category received between 150 to 200 votes. not bad for what ought to be a small group of fans.

i'm going to be brutally honest here: very little will change at the iyfg. just look at the resistance to lj. they'd have heart attacks if they knew the dokuga uses blind nominations, opens nominations and voting even to non-members and tracks everything by ips so there's not funny business. (restricting by ip, which is what we do - we monitor how many times an ip can vote - it's must safer than yahoo's user/login system.) a change that fundamental will not happen so we're going to see the same issues reply again and again. nothing that's been said since December is new, by the way, and, jeez, i felt like i was fighting the same old battles again :/

by comparison dokuga is a joy