The final rankings are available on the main page. All of our Contestants performed admirably. Four-year veteran Shana unfortunately falls short in the end, but she deserves a lot of recognition for her accomplishments in a still very successful Saimoe career. Kanade and Ruri take third and fourth place — incredibly strong results for their first year in ISML. We look forward to seeing everyone back in ISML 2012. There will be big changes to our regular season format, and we will have the 2012 Charter ready next month describing all the details.

This year’s final match set more records than the two semifinal rounds; we apologize for the slowdowns in the site around the beginning and ending of voting. Even with our new server, the rush of traffic was enormous. We don’t expect this to occur regularly during the season, though, but if it does, we will surely upgrade our resources to accommodate the traffic. Thanks again to all who have donated to ISML; we appreciate it greatly.

We have received many comments about the validity of the results, and ISML Staff assures you that the vote count is accurate. The sad truth is that some form of cheating exists in every round from Preliminaries all the way to the Championship. It is just the heaviest towards the final rounds. We have a very robust vote-checking methodology and clean out thousands of illegal votes every round, so in the end, the winners of each round will have won their matches fairly — each vote representing one and only one person. We are grateful for community members who help to report incidents to us, and addressing them is always our top priority.

With these results, ISML 2011 is now concluded. Nominations for ISML 2012 to start in January. But the wait doesn’t have to be that long. We have a special event starting in a few weeks — an exhibition tournament with male characters. This will feature 96 characters and last for 9 voting days. The goal of this tournament is to find the best male character — not necessarily in terms of moe, gar, or bishounen. You are free to make your own judgements about which among our candidates can be simply considered “best of the best” or your “favorite.”

If you haven’t yet, please register for our forum. Our community continues to grow each year, and we are always happy to welcome more people to join in discussion, share votes, and just have fun about both our tournaments and anime/manga in general.

Thanks to everyone for voting and supporting ISML! We’ll see you again soon!

We’re working hard to make sure things are in top shape for the start of the Postseason. Thanks for being a part of ISML.

We are done with the Regular Season! It has been very exciting these past seven Periods; we hope you enjoyed them, too. Preparations for the Postseason are next. We’ll take a few weeks to prepare some new avatars and set up exhibition matches to accompany our Top 16 Contestants. This break period is also an opportunity for me to fix these server issues once and for all. The rush of visits right as results came out tonight knocked us out for a few minutes, but no worries.

The first match is scheduled for Sunday, 30 October. I’ll update again when we have a match preview ready.

Our exhibition winner this Period is Kaname Madoka, who wins the Diamond Anklet. Congratulations! A final exhibition match 7-way with all of the winners this season is planned; more details to come later on.

Thank you for voting and supporting ISML! The donations page will reopen once the postseason starts, as the time to renew our hosting services is coming this month.

We have big plans for ISML 2012 as well. If you visit our Forums, you’ve had sneak peeks at our proposed ideas. A formal charter is expected by mid-December. The staff is working hard to keep ISML fresh but also fair each passing year; we appreciate all of your feedback as well!

The Necklace Round is up next. We are adding two extra exhibition arenas in an attempt to try and finish the exhibition tournament idea we had earlier in the season. Please vote in all arenas!

We’ve been able to isolate the server issues to a certain few instances. Unfortunately they cannot be repaired completely until after the Regular Season is done and we can afford more time to do work that may take down the server for periods of time. For the rest of Diamond Period, an intermittent outage is still possible if we don’t catch it in time. Otherwise it will be just a few minutes before services are restored. So please vote as you normally would; once the form says your ballot is accepted, you are assured that it was written to the database. Thanks to those who have helped out and reported issues when they spot them. The feedback is very helpful.

But please vote as you normally would so we can observe the server behavior under normal conditions and adjust settings accordingly. Thanks for your support, and thanks for voting!

Unfortunately server updates this weekend did not go well and so far has resulted in the server freezing up every few hours. And then after that happens it needs to be restarted, and the cycle repeats again until I finish fixing the error. This will result in some interruptions during the voting period, so I apologize in advance. If you get a database error while submitting your vote, please wait a while before submitting again.

I’ll give you updates as I have them.

Our latest gifts came from MiiNiiPaa, superunature, and adorend_1990. Our current total is now USD $361.48, completing our goal of $350.00 for the year. This means our server and domain registration will last through the end of the ISML 2012 year, which is great news since we are currently not even halfway through 2011. Thank you again.

On the donation page, a new Affiliate Shopping section is open. Some community members have wanted this feature to complement their usual online purchases. By shopping with an affiliate ID, they help ISML earn a small commission — effectively a donation at no additional cost. Currently we only have Play-Asia listed, but if anyone has a suggestion for additional affiliate links, please let us know.

Staff also says welcome to Rizwan, who joined as a translator for Chinese. In the few weeks he has been with us so far, we have had updates to our current list of Chinese character names and series titles. Some featured match descriptions are translated, and we have an ongoing project to update Contestant biographies this year in Chinese. Thanks for your help, Riz!

We all hope Amethyst Period has been exciting for everyone so far. As always, our forum is open to anyone for discussion, questions, or ideas. Thank you for helping to make and keep ISML great.