Exhibition matches will be featured with additional males and even some guest female characters. If you don’t see a particular male you’re fond of in the bracket, maybe he’ll show up in exhibition! In the end, we do realize there are still far more characters available, but we unfortunately do not have the space to feature everybody. If this tournament is successful, we’ll aim to do better next time. For now, good luck to our competitors!

Our latest donors are ntaee and Z.G. Thank you very much for your contributions!

Thanks to everyone for making this postseason successful with a very large voter turnout and new records set with this past semifinal round. The staff would also like to thank Kyouko and thx_to_staff for their donations this week. Our server is paid for the 2012 season, and we have begun early collection for 2013.

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.

http://www.internationalsaimoe.com/community/promotional.php

I forgot to credit KholdStare in the last post for taking the lead in preparing the community artwork page and hosting the contests for exhibition poster and signature-banner submissions.

Thanks also to hinakatbklyn who is our latest donor. ISML would not be possible without the generous efforts of all the community and staff. Thanks for voting and thanks for spreading the word to new people.

Hatsune Miku also wins the Aquamarine Bracelet for her performance in this Period’s exhibition matches. A different piece of jewelry will be awarded each Period to recognize the best competitors in the exhibition setting. As always, this is separate from the main tournament, but we hope you enjoy the matches and posters as they come; we are always excited about showcasing new characters and learning about how the world rates their moe potential.

Our Exhibition Gallery continues to update each match day, and now translations are available as well as a poster gallery for the Period winners.

Voting for the Topaz Seitokai has begun on our forum. The Seitokai program has been very entertaining in the past few weeks and well received by our community. We look forward to the new leadership for Topaz Period.

Finally, a belated but huge thank you to Elouda, our latest donor. His humbling gift puts us very nearly at our financial goal for 2012, and the Regular Season has only barely started. The staff and community appreciate it very much.

Congratulations again to our 50 Contestants. They will be undergoing difficult trials ahead as they compete for each of the seven Necklaces and then possibly the coveted Tiara. Their destiny depends on you, the voters.

During the break, we’ll be working on building the schedule for the round-robin tournament. Also Contestant biographies will be updated, and we’ll have some new voting avatars as well. Aquamarine Period will be colorful and exciting; the new Necklace Round will be debuting, too! Please look forward to it, and thank you again for voting.

In donation news, ISML Staff would like to thank stephenbanks for his gift to the League. We appreciate your generosity.

Thanks for voting in Phase III; we hope that the pick-3 format has been interesting, as it is new to ISML this year. Last year it was a pick-2 format.

Three more rounds remain in our Preseason, which make up the seeding tournament. These are a series of exhibition rounds featuring our 50 Contestants. Wins and losses do not count towards Regular Season statistics, but we do use this data to help seed our Contestants in the Regular Season schedule. Good seeding information allows us to balance the matchups of each Period (phase) of the Regular Season, so all our Contestants have a fair shot at Necklaces. Plus we can put some more exciting matchups on key days, and make the tournament a lot more fun for everyone.

Round 1 splits the 50 Contestants into five groups of ten. You will vote for up to two girls per group.
Round 2 changes it up to ten groups of five. Again, you will pick up to two girls.
Round 3 is seven groups of seven — pick two (the 50th seed coming out of the previous rounds does not participate).

More details are in our 2011 Charter.

Finally, the ISML team gives a thank you to amai-chan, who is our latest donor. Thank you for supporting our tournament and keeping our servers online for the year ahead.

It’s been quite a busy week as we transition from Phase I to II with no break in between. Up next is a single-elimination tournament with brackets of 8. Also on the Contestants page at the bottom is the bracket list for our remaining 128 Candidates. They each face new competitors than in Phase I. May the best girl win! Sixteen more Regular Season Contesants will be known by the end of next week. We will have bracket images prepared soon, too, to help you visualize the tournament bracket more easily.

Thanks to all the voters, our community, and supporters. We received one donation last week; thanks to leekinghin for the gift. No matter how large or small, each contribution helps pay our server costs for future years of ISML. As of right now, 2011 is paid for, and we are about $80 into the $350 cost for 2012.

The first day of voting for Phase II starts soon; please look forward to it!

http://www.internationalsaimoe.com/charter2011.php

We have made changes to this upcoming ISML year. A quick overview of the big ones:
1. No more automatic entries to the regular season (only to preliminaries).
2. A character cannot win more than one Necklace per tournament year.
3. We added a special 8th round to each Period to help decide the Necklace winner.
4. Postseason will be single-elimination, not double.

To accommodate #4, Staff amended the ISML Constitution to change “double elimination” to “elimination-style” in the text. This gives us more flexibility in organizing each year’s tournament. Plus after three years of data collection, we have concluded that a double-elimination tournament is not really effective in saimoe.

On 1 January, the 2010 site will be archived (but still accessible to you), and the 2011 website will begin. Nominations begin on 6 February. We hope these rule changes will bring a much more balanced and exciting year to the League in 2011; we look forward to seeing new faces and crowning new champions.

Thank you for your patience and continued support! Also, all of your donations have successfully paid our server costs for the next year; we appreciate it very much! ISML will continue to be brought to you advertisement-free and with hardly any downtime.

In other happier news, I would like to recognize lrv3646 for his donation to ISML — his second one in a year’s time. Thank you!