EDIT (12/29) – This issue has been revisited and updated in this post:
http://www.internationalsaimoe.com/news/index.php/2009/12/30/revisiting-relegations-an-apology-and-new-statement/
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If you’ve been noticing changes on the site throughout the day, I apologize for not reporting about it until now. There was a lot to do, and I’m glad I found the time to address everything, one page at a time. Now it’s time to review what I did.
Our Constitution has been ratified and can be found here. Also, the draft of the 2010 Annual Charter is now available for your preview; a few more tweaks will be needed before we can make it official. I also need to add more series and studios to the list; community members on the forums have been helping me out, and I appreciate it. 
The biggest update to the Constitution before it became final was the eligibility requirements in Article III. The last version was not clear on characters who had both male and female forms. For characters like Natsuru from Kampfer or Ranma from Ranma 1/2, their female forms will be accepted, and their male halves will simply not exist in ISML. This distinction be important when determining series impact and significance, which is another eligibility requirement.
A clause regarding humanoid appearance and anthropomorphic qualities was added.
After much debate among the entire Staff, we have concluded that eligible characters for the Preliminary Rounds, Regular Season, and Postseason (i.e. Candidates and Contestants) must come from anime produced by a registered studio and distributed on a large commercial scale. What this results in is the removal of characters in the Tōhō Musō Kakyō OVA from Candidate-eligibility consideration in 2010. They are not out of the scene completely, though, because they are still Competitor-eligible, which means they could appear in our Exhibition Matches held throughout the year.
Because of this removal, we also have to void the results of the ISML Relegation Tournament held at the end of the 2009 season. The tournament was an entry point into the 2010 Preliminaries for Contestants who performed below-average in 2009, but Hakurei Reimu’s participation in it causes an inconsistency with our recent ruling. Simply removing her scores (while keeping the others) would not solve the problem either, since we can’t guarantee the final rankings would be the same. And without the time or resources to redo Relegation, we believe and have decided it’s best to drop Relegation altogether. Our Constitution and Charter have been updated to reflect this action and ensure that such an inconsistency will not happen again.
To summarize: Kawasumi Mai, Kurata Sayuri, Tsukimiya Ayu, and Misaka Mikoto must be nominated next week in order for them to have a chance at advancing to the Preliminary Rounds (and then the Regular Season). They no longer have automatic entry.
As for the remaining updates, you can see that new pages have been added to the menu bar at the top of the screen. The Rules page now has an FAQ that will steadily grow throughout the year. We understand that the Constitution and Charter are perhaps 11 pages of combined reading you might not necessarily have time for, so the FAQ will be crafted to explain the most important things in the most concise way when you’re in a hurry. However, please give our full-length documents a chance when you can, as they have been written to ensure that we do things thoroughly, properly, and precisely.
Our Staff page has been updated to make everyone’s assignments known .. and also to give us a chance to remember our good friend mokuhazushi, who did so much for our tournament but then had to leave to fight a battle with cancer, which he unfortunately lost earlier this year in August. We miss him a lot, and we have since been working hard in his memory to keep ISML running.
The voting arena is set up with our nominations page ready to go when New Year’s Day arrives. Thanks to everyone who helped beta-test the form earlier in the month. The form will open up at 0000 GMT, January 1 and last for 7 days. Tell everyone you know to get his or her nominations in!
Finally we were able to add Google Translate to our site. The drop-down menu on the right of the menu bar has a long list of available languages for you to explore our site with. The one obtrusive thing it does is create mouseover highlights on all the text. This would be fine for a light-background site, but instead we’re a dark-background site. I’ll continue investigating the script and try to work around that, but for now you can still enjoy ISML in exotic tongues such as Swahili and Icelandic.
Merry Christmas everyone, and we’re about one week away from the start of ISML 2010. The anticipation is rising. Thank you everyone for your patience and understanding.
