Forum:Adjustment to Voting Center Requirements

Good day, members of the CBW Voting Collective.

At present, the Featured Article spotlight is in a reasonable position, with the Staff Team (Usually myself, Invader, and Gonel) typically handling the updates within two weeks of the voting closing. After previous attempts to replace the Featured Trivia, outlaw self-nominations, and limit the Featured Quote to wiki content, I would like to pitch a few new updates of my own, having watched the system develop and adjust over recent months.

Primarily, I suggest that all nominations for Featured Article, Featured Story, Featured User and of course Featured Image must have an image in the infobox. In the most recent voting period three pages were nominated for Featured Article, none of which initially had an image. In the past this has presented issues for the Staff when creating a spotlight but having to use the Noimage.jpg placeholder, which admittedly does not look professional on the main page. At present, Duran and Dark Elemental Energy are the only two pages to have made it to the Main Page without an image. While I am proud of the spotlights themselves, I personally take issue with how the spotlights look without images and I dread to think what would happen if two imageless pages won two different categories next month.

Additionally, stemming from the recent vote to limit the Featured Quote to wiki content, I would like to extend this same principle to outlaw Featured Stories, Featured Images, and Featured Creations uploaded from external image-hosting websites, such as Brickshelf, Tumblr, Imgur, and Pinterest. As previously stated, the Main Page exists to showcase the best that CBW has to offer each month, which it cannot do if somebody posts a link to their latest post on MOCpages without bothering to create a page for their creation. Doing this feels like a cop-out to me personally and I would ideally like to see this practice come to an end. As such, I believe that all nominated content should have a basis on the wiki; be it a quote from a paragraph in a story or a creation from a MOC Blog.

Moreover, all Featured Images must be used files actually appearing on a page. This is just common sense to me for obvious reasons.

Thank you for your time and I look forward to seeing these proposed changes discussed below.

Infobox Images
Motion that all nominations must have an image that can be used in a featured spotlight or risk disqualification.

No External Hosting
Motion to deny nominations linked from external file-sharing sites and to prioritize wiki content.

Used Images Only
Motion to outlaw unused images from being nominated.