I mean, really, the only hiccup was all of those ineligible nominations needing to be taken out, but you're already working on that, looks like.
Once I got around to figuring it out and stopped overlooking glaringly obvious buttons in plain view, I found the voting system quite intuitive and very user-friendly, so no complaints on that score. However, I do think next year's process could be made a lot smoother by setting a clear, unambiguous cut-off date for what stories can be nominated as well as a clear definition for what qualifies as a new story (or a who counts as a new author for that matter) and including those definitions prominently in the first post. There was quite a bit of debate about what does and does not qualify for one thing or the other throughout, which created a lot of extra work and headache for the staff and a bit of delay and frustration for voters. Mutually agreeing on a policy beforehand and putting it out in public for easy reference should hopefully nip that problem right in the bud.
Yeah, that was definitely the biggest issue. I plan to lay out the rules for this stuff very explicitly in addition to trying to enforce it automatically as far as possible, and furthermore I'd like to make it easier for the staff to monitor all the nominations that come in - this time around we were basically just keeping an eye on the same "All nominations" page you all saw, but it was difficult to keep track of what was new and ensure everything got checked for eligibility in an organized way. Seeing as everyone might be interested in seeing what nominations have been added since they last came there, I'm thinking some sort of general "What's new" feature - probably just a marker next to nominations added or updated since you last visited the page. It would also be useful to have a page for viewing one particular user's nominations and nomination comments and link the usernames of nominators to that, as well as having a new marker next to users who have added or updated their nominations in the list.
I might also explicitly add some sort of marker for whether a nomination has been checked for eligibility and force us to actually click a button to set that flag, but it may not be necessary with everything else.
From what I saw of the voting system it seems to be pretty good. The only issue I ever noticed was that the text size in the popup thingies explaining the fic quotes and other related things was too small, or made it look like the letters were all pushed and crunched together, which made reading information from more than one at a time a PITA - but one key combo later that was fixed, so... Yeah, it's nice to see an automated semiindependent system to assist voting in as much as it can.
I can definitely enlarge the text - I wanted to keep it small enough so that you wouldn't need to keep scrolling up and down to read nomination comments, but it could stand to be at least a point or two bigger.
Also, I thought the new app for the awards was great. I particularly liked how the comments on the nominations were handled. My only feature requests would be to port some of the functionality from the nominations phase over to the voting phase--I would have appreciated a counter that showed how many catergories I'd entered votes for out of how many I needed to vote in to have a valid ballot, as well as the ability to save my votes and return to them later. I could vote immediately in a lot of categories, but there were definitely a few where I had to go out and read some stuff, so I would have appreciated not having to restart my ballot after doing so.
I can definitely do something that shows you how many categories you've entered a vote in, sure.
Saving and returning later actually works exactly the same way in the nomination and voting phase: it will stop you unless you submit a valid ballot, but once you do you can return and modify it at any time. Presumably you noticed it as an issue in the voting phase because an incomplete ballot in the voting phase is more likely to also be invalid, whereas you just need four different fics/authors to have a valid nomination ballot.
I could add a feature for saving incomplete ballots in addition to submitting them for real, but I have a certain worry that that would lead to people forgetting to actually submit their nominations/votes, even when they have perfectly valid ballots. Alternatively, I could make it so that you can save incomplete ballots the same way as complete ones but they're only counted if they're complete, but that also sounds like it could potentially lead to people not realizing (or forgetting) that their ballot is invalid and failing to fix it. Maybe it'd be better to just have a localstorage thing that autosaves whatever you've done with the form in your browser and fills it in for you automatically if you return to the page later, but actually clicking the submit button will always validate that it's complete and reject it if it isn't, the way it does now? Opinions?