Vote In Mix May Mayhem NSFW Webcomics Tournament First Round– Or Cheat For The CBLDF!
UPDATE: Round 1 voting is over. Vote in Round 2 now!
Hooray, hooray, the first of May– the Mix May Mayhem NSFW Webcomics Tournament starts today!
You nominated and voted for your favorite Not Safe For Work webcomics, and we’re taking the top 32 and putting them in a single elimination tournament where we whittle down the contestants down to one. Take a look at the brackets– and remember, they all link to NSFW comics, so be careful when clicking through…
We’re making a minor change to the voting ballot: we’re using one large ballot instead of dozens of ballots for each individual contest. This should put less strain on our servers, so we won’t have the outages we kept having in March.
[poll id=”218″]
We’re also adding one more wrinkle to this version…
Towards the end of our last tournament, it got a bit heated. Commenters started attacking the strips, the authors, and each other, 4chan denizens came in and overloaded our servers, and it turned into a big mess. Then our finalists, Tom Siddell of Gunnerkrigg Court and Tarol Hunt from Goblins, decided to donate all their winnings to the Child’s Play charity. Semi-finalists Andrew Hussie from Homestuck and Rich Burlew from Order Of The Stick followed suit, and we kicked in the unclaimed winnings from nobody picking the Final Four.
And we realized that this might be a much better way to solve all the problems and do some good at the same time.
So we’re giving you the option to put your money where your mouth is and buy additional votes for your favorite strips. Simply click on the Donate button below, and during checkout, click on “Which comic are you donating for?” and detail who you’re voting for. It’s 10¢ a vote for this round with a minimum of ten votes purchased at a time, and all proceeds from paid votes will go to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, the organization that protects NSFW comics of all kinds from censorship. At the close of the round, we’ll add the paid votes to the totals and announce the winners who move on to the second round.
I see this paying votes turning into a perversion of the contest past a voting tourney for exposure into an advertising platform. Some of these comics have massive budgets and will just buy votes. I suggest limiting bought votes or increasing the price.
It’s a great charity initiative but I heartily agree with Antares’s solutions.
This.
We considered that, which is why we aren\’t revealing what the money totals are until after the voting totals are done, so you don\’t know how much you have to pay to actually buy the pot, to throw in a poker metaphor.
And yes, the price per vote will increase for each round, which should limit voting… or raise a lot of money for the CBLDF. Or both.
This is a cool opportunity to get exposure, and it’s working so far, and immense thanks for the opportunity, but I have to admit the logic behind buying votes is a little baffling. It’ll raise money for a good cause, but is that the point of the tournament? It allows people to buy their bracket, which doesn’t seem in the spirit of fun and exposure.
Withholding the number of purchased votes even seems a little worse, a comic could win the straight vote and its creator(s) get excited only to find out they lost when the cheat votes are added. I know I’d feel pretty burned if that happened to me, not to mention feeling pretty hollow if that’s how I won.
Also, CBLDF is a great charity, but I don’t know of any case (I may be wrong) in which they’ve aided a webcomic, nor am I sure they would.
At any rate, thanks again for the opportunity to drag in some new eyes and the fun of a little friendly competition. Cheers.
The CBLDF haven\’t been in a case where they directly aided a webcomic (to my knowledge, Charles Brownstein could correct me) but they\’ve been co-plaintiffs in numerous cases that helped secure freedom for the Internet, such as ALA v. Virginia back in the 90s.
Buying votes is sort of a relief valve. We discovered the last time that people would take ridiculous steps to vote, with some people claiming that they were using bots which brought the site down, which could certainly skew the numbers. We figured if that was going to happen, we should at least channel it productively and let people who weren\’t computer whizzes have a potentially equal say.
Bots seem the bane of any kind of online voting. It’s hard not to feel a little jaded every time I’m reminded of their existence.
I guess the main thing is the exposure, not the victory, and I have seen a noticeable increase in my traffic because of the tournament, so that’s a win. Not crazy about buying votes, but you know, do as you must. Overall I’m glad the contest is going on.
Lol, some people voted for the separating lines…
I’m stoked that Locus made it into the contest! One small thing:
Can I get my entry changed from “Locus Comic” to just “Locus”?
Thanks!
We didn\’t want to get you confused with the SF magazine.
Gotcha.
I thought in order to qualify you had to have at least updated fairly recently….Chester hasn’t updated in over a year…..
actually chester has updated but the dates are all screwed up on her site
I’m disapponted. I thought this was going to be a tournament of porn sites. As it is, it’s a competition of a few porn sites and a bunch of normal comics with a nipple coincidentally visible every 50th page. I guess I should have realized that NSFW is a label that covers a very broad range of explicitness, but it doesn’t really make sense to compare one kind of comic with the other – the type of audience who wants to read Oglaf isn’t going to be remotely the same demographic as the audience that wants to read Pictures of You. (And despite the fact that I’m very much in the first camp, I’d be surprised to find out if most of the less explicit comics wouldn’t be kinda disgusted to be compared with porn just because they have 3 pages in their entire archive that include partial nudity.)
A number of the strips self-identify as NSFW, for whatever reason. Your workplace may differ from mine. And a lot of the harder-core strips are behind paywalls, such as the ones at Slipshine, should you be interested.
How come the best webcomic in the world is not here?
I mean explosm of course? Is it not nsfw enough?
It wasn’t proposed in the nominations, that’s all…
I’m confused as to why Between Failures is on here. I don’t see how it’s NSFW…especially since (if I remember right) it was just in the competition for the normal March Madness tournament, which indicates that it’s not NSFW by this sites standards either.