So…

This usually would be the post announcing and congratulating the person who came out on top of this weeks poll, therefore winning CDC145. However, I unfortunately cannot do that this week as I have reason to believe that the person who has finished in first place has not done so fairly. Up until Friday, there were two people trading positions for first place, hovering around the early 30's mark with the other two competitors around 15 votes or more behind. However, on Friday the person in third place jumped into first gaining something around 20 votes in a few hours, whilst everyone else gained a vote or 2. By last night, this lead had stretched to 10 votes higher than the previous leader, meaning this person had gained over 35 votes in two days, compared to everyone else's 5 or 6. I'm sorry but that wreaks of bull. And it's not the first time that this sort of thing has happened around this person either. Some highly respected members of the community have come to me with concerns over polls that this person has taken part in before and even when this person doesn't win there's always some sort of stupid stuff going down with the voting that defies all belief. It's been 5 polls now and it's got to the point now where I'm not dealing with it anymore. I'm now no longer doing polls to decide who wins the character design contests, I'll decide myself. We've tried democracy, people took advantage of it, so now we're going back to a dictatorship. And with that I'm going to give this win to the person who came in second, as our first place has been disqualified. So well done to CantDraw in that regard, as he did end up finishing in what now becomes the winning position.

Anyway, on to my second point. The CDCs in general seem to be losing interest and lets be honest, it's much more fun when you have lots of people entering with high quality pictures than having one or two good pictures and three alright ones. You go back to last year, we had more amazing pictures than could fit on the poll most weeks, but for the last 4-5 weeks I've been struggling to actually find the four minimum for a poll. Suppose that's one advantage of ditching the polls now. But anyway, I honestly don't know what to do. We've already lost the Caption Contest due to lack of participation and if things don't pick up the Character Design Contests will be going that way too, which is a shame because it is the longest running blog post we have. I will try to keep it going until the end of this year, but after that I'm going to lay it to rest unless things pick up. I've tried asking for suggestions to keep the ideas fresh but it just isn't seeming to work, so instead I'm just going to leave the ball in your court now guys. You want me to keep this thing going, help out. Do your part. I know there is such a thing as real-life and it gets in the way an awful lot (I would know that, I take massive amounts of time between doing pictures because stuff just gets in the way, plus being lazy but that's by the by), but still these contests last a week and I don't have a rule against entering stuff that you made before the contest, just a rule against entering stuff you've already entered into a contest, so it's not like you have to make stuff specifically for the contest. I'll make the contests a broad as I can from now until the end of the year if it helps, but really that's as much as I can do to get you guys participating, it's something you have to do yourselves.

Anyway, I think I've said everything that was on my mind. No, I am not going to say who it was who was cheating in the poll and, sorry Cliff, for that reason I'm not putting the standings in the comments for you this week.

And with that

JR out.