I think I'm generally a fairly affable member, but I seem to have ruffled a couple of feathers this month...so here is my own personal £0.00 worth...
I very much appreciate the 22 votes that were posted...I think that's 1 more than last month, which Vicki worked really hard to achieve...and 6 more than the 16 I got last January...whether that's seen as "working" or not is perhaps a matter of opinion. There were 52 finished songs to pick from...so a lot of non-voting song posters, as usual.
As for voting in public...the comments we post in reply to "finished songs" are in public and they tend to show how much we like/don't like something...so I don't personally see any reason to be particularly coy about it. Other opinions are available.
To address another criticism, I did try to make it clear that nobody was necessarily expected to listen to all of the songs...just to vote for the one they liked the most of the ones they heard.
I'll be honest, I was a little disappointed that my "one month only" way of doing things came in for some flak...I volunteered to host January SOTM if nobody else came forward...and then tried to take an opportunity to figure out why the voting turnout is so poor...perhaps PM'ing was too complicated, maybe the "wrong" songs were shortlisted, etc...
I did mention my plan for the competition in an earlier thread (subject to any objections) and I also ran the idea past site admin first.
I simply wanted to find a way to make more people feel more involved in the forum.