First off thanks to
@MrTeaTime and
@MrDJ for sorting the last VOTM awards out. It really is appreciated as I know it takes a fair bit of organising.
Also apologies
@MrDJ (even though you have told me not to apologise before, sorry mate!) I missed your mention at the start of the thread, if I had seen it, or seen it and not had the attention span of an inebriated goldfish, I would have done what I will suggest below about promoting the vote.
You are all right, tapatalk is a pain in the arse. It won't work with polls, notifications sometimes go wonky, likes and thanks come and go, in all fairness it is a shit system and we would love to kill it off. But I know a lot of people use it so that's not going to happen any time soon. Fingers crossed a good replacement will come along for it eventually.
But in the meantime... what
@Purplefowler said, people who want to vote can simply list the name of the vendor they want to vote for in the thread. When we ran this last we had a message in the voting thread that said something like "if you can't add your vote then post here and we will add it for you". Then I used to tot up what was on the poll and run through the thread adding in any other mentions of votes. Bit of a PITA but was the only way to do it. Here was what we used to post:
https://www.planetofthevapes.co.uk/...s/voting-vendor-of-the-month-september.84053/
So the format would usually be.
Open the thread for nominations on something like the first of the month. This is open for a week so that people could nominate vendors.
Vendors who were nominated but weren't vendors on here were messaged to ask if they would like to become vendors before the voting started.
Second week of the month voting opens and vendors who had been nominated contacted so that they could let their customers know about the vote and help them to win by joining the forum and voting for them if they didn't have an account already.
There is more that we can do to help promote it. I did start putting it in the newsletters but to be honest I have even been struggling to get these out the last few months. We also put notices on the forum so when people log in they see a notification alerting them to the nominations / votes and this really did help to push the numbers up.
I don't think the fact that more people using mobiles has too much to do with it. Just had a look at stats and I am surprised to see that we have more app users than ever before... We had been seeing declining usage since the beginning of the year but it has picked up massively (more than doubled) in the last six weeks or so. Mental...
About half of the traffic to the site (not app) is mobile traffic as well. And to be honest it does dwarf the number of people who use the app. So a lot of people do use POTV on their mobile so will be able to vote without having to leave a message for us to do it. I do think the answers to getting more votes on the VOTM awards are two-fold, firstly promotion (notifications, newsletters) and secondly routine. Once they have been running for a few months and people get used to seeing them then they are more likely to chip in.
I am not going to moan about having too much to do, too much work is usually a challenge, but I am failing badly at the minute and I know it. All stages in life are temporal though, times of shite shuffle into times of tranquility. Note to self - become aware of the tranquil times and enjoy them more next time they come around. So I am not going to fret about what could / should / might / didn't get done and just deal with what is in front of us now.
I do think we need to do the September vote. It will not take away from the charity raffle at all IMO. The rules always were, and unless there is serious opposition it should remain, that a vendor can only win once each year.
What do you all think? If we can agree in the next day or so then let's open nominations ASAP, have five days / a week of nominations and then a good two-three weeks of voting.