A scoreboard has been added to the bottom of the main page to keep track of our Candidates’ progress throughout Phase I. Group winners after 4 rounds will advance to the Regular Season while everybody else is reshuffled into new groups for Phase II. Ties will be broken per the criteria in our Charter.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this second day of voting. Day 3 will begin very soon.
Day 1 has concluded, and it went very smoothly and successfully! A record-breaking turnout for this first match of the preseason. Thanks for your participation and support.
Results are out for Day 1, which covered Groups 1 through 8. Day 2 is next for the remaining eight groups. And then we’ll be done with Round 1. Round 2 will start on Thursday with Groups 1 to 8 with different opponents for everyone. If your saimoe candidate did not win today, she still has three more chances to gain points in Phase I.
Thanks to our community members who contribute match previews and teaser paragraphs each day. Thanks again for the images, avatars, and banners; we couldn’t have done it without you. Come visit us on the forums if you want to join in the discussion and meet other voters!
Phase I of the Preliminary Period will now begin on Sunday, 27 February.
We extended the number of voting days from 6 to 8 in order to organize the arenas a little better. Our pool of Candidates this year is larger than in 2010 as well, so adding more days makes for better pacing of the 4 Rounds in Phase I. So Sunday will feature Groups 1 through 8. Tuesday will be Groups 9 through 16. And then on Thursday will be Round 2, beginning again with Groups 1 through 8.
The Charter will be appended, and our event calendar on the Rules FAQ has been updated.
We have not completed all of our character portraits (avatars), so they will be missing for the time being. They should be ready by this weekend and definitely by Sunday when the voting round begins.
The groupings for Phase I are also released. Candidates in each group will participate in a round-robin tournament of 1vs1vs1 matches. Points are earned for first and second place in each match. Group winners advance to the Regular Season while the remaining girls enter Phase II.
http://www.internationalsaimoe.com/contestants/preliminary.php
Voting rounds are now less than a week away!
Thank you for your patience! We finished ahead of schedule. The results of the ISML 2011 Nomination Period are now available.
http://www.internationalsaimoe.com/statistics/nomination.php
Congratulations to the 96 characters who enter the Preliminary Period to become Candidates for the Regular Season! Also listed are some invalid nominations because those girls have either already advanced or were declared ineligible per tournament rules. And we also provided a list of girls who came close to the cutoff. We appreciate their participation and hope to see many of them next year for ISML 2012. Some may get selected for exhibition matches this year as well.
Groupings for Phase I will be released soon. Look forward to it!
Less than 24 hours left to go for submitting a nomination. We’ve received a great response so far — more than double last year’s nomination total. Thanks to everyone for participating and spreading the word!
We’ll be spending the next week counting and finalizing the totals; results will be posted on the front page with an announcement here in the blog as soon as they are done.
The wait is over! Nominations for ISML 2011 are now open.
http://www.internationalsaimoe.com/voting
You may nominate only one time, and you have a whole week to get your submission in. So if you can’t think of 12 characters today, you can submit later on. 
Please try to be as clear as possible in your ballot, so we don’t have any confusion or ambiguity when we count them.
Also please mind the table of characters marked “do not nominate.” These 48 girls have already qualified for the Preliminary Period, so you do not need to nominate them. If you did put one of them on your ballot, that’s okay; it won’t void your ballot, but you will not get to submit a replacement nomination.
The nomination form will close on 13 February at 0000 GMT.
Thanks, everyone, for your cooperation! Enjoy this year’s ISML!
All voting rounds this year will take place on a Sunday-Tuesday-Thursday schedule like they did during ISML 2010.
I apologize for the multiple changes; at the start of the year we thought Mon-Wed-Fri would best fit our working schedule, but it has recently come to our attention that it will not be so. Fortunately we have not started any voting rounds, and with plenty of time to spare before March, I hope that this announcement does not inconvenience anyone when planning for the upcoming season.
Nominations are unaffected by this shift; they will still begin on 6 February at 00:00 GMT.
You can view the updated calendar on the Rules/FAQ page. Basically every voting date has shifted left and will occur one day sooner than on the older schedule. All times remain the same (15:00 GMT start).
Thank you for your patience.
A preview of the nomination form is now available on the voting page. The form will open on 6 February and stay open for one week.
Same rules apply as last year. Please take note the table of characters who are auto-qualified to the Preliminary Period. You need not nominate these characters.
The language translation buttons work, but some text areas are not yet completely translated; character names and series will not translate just yet. I will patch that in soon.
