You know, it might be nice to drop the "Contest" part of it and just make it a showcase of excellent posts. It's impossible to be truly fair in this, anyways -- a lot of the better posts are the culmination of weeks, if not months, if not YEARS of plot and character development, and they won't make sense to people who haven't been following along, people who don't care about the characters. There are exceptions -- introducing a new character will normally stand on its own. Something dramatic enough that people can empathize without knowing who, especially if there's a bit of an introduction at the start.... but by and large, every post is literally better when read by people from the same ship, and comparitively worse for people from other ships. It's not a matter of people being unfair -- it's a matter of the methods being unfair. And if we wanted the contest to TRULY be fair, we'd need to have judges who read every single ship -- and I doubt anyone is THAT into this. Especially since the qualities that make for a good sim are not the same that make for a good stand-alone post -- but that's another rant entirely. On the other hand, you could probably fix the contest somewhat just by having someone update the polls regularly. An unfair contest that favours ships who participate in it may well be better than no contest at all.