Top vBlog 2016 new requirements for bloggers

So this year I’m going to try something a bit different to try and limit the number of blogs that are in the voting. Every year the number of blogs in the voting continues to rise with over 400 last year. Each year I do remove dead blogs from the voting, these are blogs that have not produced any new posts in the last year. The number of dead blogs is fairly small though, maybe less than 20. With the number of blogs so high it gets very difficult for voters to sort through the huge number and pick their favorite blogs. It also makes all the work that goes into the building the whole voting process and processing the results much more difficult.

So based on some feedback from last year and especially thanks to Andreas Lesslhumer’s hard work of actually tallying up blog posts for each and every blogger last year I’m going to set a minimum post count as a requirement for being on the Top vBlog ballot. Right now I’m thinking of setting it as a minimum of 6 posts in the prior year to be eligible for Top vBlog. This would eliminate at least a 100 blogs from the voting. I know people get busy and it’s often hard to maintain a blog but I think one post every 2 months is a fairly low bar to set for this. The end result is it will be more fair to the bloggers that put in more work, easier for the voters to choose their favorite blogs and easier for me to complete the who process.

Let me know what you think about this, too high? too low? just right?