CAC - Process Rules

[quote=Jebus McAzn]The following is taken exclusively from Smogon's CAP Process Rules. [u]Submission Threads[/u] Prior to the polling step of each stage of CAC, a submission and discussion thread is put up for that stage. In these submission threads, which are typically open for an extended period of time, users may submit their entries for that stage of the CAP and discuss other users' entries. Users may make suggestions for the submitters to consider and they may state which submission they favor the most and why. General think-tanking is encouraged in these threads, as all discussion is to further the quality of the CAC being created. All posts in the submission threads must be fully substantiated with reasoning, otherwise they are liable to be deleted and given a warning by a CAC forum moderator. It is up to the discretion of the CAC's Topic Leader (TL) to interpret the content of a submission and discussion thread. In the case of submissions, it is the TL who decides which submissions move on to the polling stage. The TL will use the rules and his or her own knowledge of the metagame, the CAC, and his or her expectations of the CAC to make this decision. Polling There are two polling styles that get used in CAC. * Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV) * Bold Voting IRV is used in polls where there are more than three options in the poll. Bold voting is used when there are three or fewer options remaining. In most cases, IRV will be used first to cut down on the numerous entries in the first poll and then bold voting will be used to select the final winner. Both of these polling options were decided on by the community over others for their resilience to poll manipulation and speed with which they work. All polls are to be open for at least 24 hours so that users from all time zones have the chance to vote. Do not post the current tally for votes in a thread; it will be determined at the end and part of what makes these polls resistant to manipulation is not knowing. Instant-Runoff Voting IRV is a voting style that constantly eliminates the last place contestant until one of the entries in the poll has a majority of the votes. IRV typically is designed to yield a single winner, as shown in the flow chart, but can be easily tailored to yield multiple winners. For CAC, the first winner is chosen based on the IRV method, and then that winner's votes are removed from the system. Once that winner's votes are removed, the system applies IRV again to determine a second winner. This repeats until three of the entries to the poll have been selected. The only exception to this is for the typing polls, as those always have four entries and always proceed immediately to the bold voting stage. The votes for IRV are cast as posts in the poll thread; there is no actual click poll applied to the thread. In order to vote, users will rank from most preferred to least preferred as many poll entries as they choose to rank. This means that if there are five entries in the poll and the user only wants to vote on three of them, he may do that. An example vote is shown below: [quote=Jebus McAzn][b]Most Preferred Second Most Preferred Least Preferred[/b] Any comments that the voter has would go below the votes in non-bold text. Bold text is used to determine what the user's votes are, so none of the supplementary text should be in bold.[/quote] Bold Voting Bold voting is where each voter chooses a single entry in the poll of however many are left for their single vote. This system is straightforward in that the entry with over 50% of the votes moves on to the next stage. If no entries have over 50% of the total votes, the entry with the least number of votes at the end of the poll is eliminated and another bold vote poll is posted. Eventually, when there are only two entries left, one will always have over 50% of the total votes. This may not be true for ties, however unlikely they are, but CAC has means of handling ties as explained below. An example vote is provided below: [quote=Jebus McAzn][b]My Preferred Entry[/b] If the voter wishes, he may post comments on his vote below the actual vote. As with IRV, only the vote itself should be bold and none of the supplementary text should be bold.[/quote] In the unlikely event of a tie, it will be broken by the second-place IRV votes, the sum of the votes received in previous posts, and/or the Topic Leader's discretion.[/quote]