User blog comment:Sprinklemist/New Admin Post (All users may give their opinions, but, please, stay on topic, and limit how many times you comment)/@comment-1874924-20100610003637

Since I haven't yet weighed in on the FQ proposal, here are my thoughts:

1) Would FQs be limited to actual dialogue, or might brief narrative passages be featured? This would be more of an issue if FQs are to be drawn only from Featured Stories, because there are at least two FS winners (Life After Lies and Legacy) that don't have all that much dialogue, and what dialogue they do have isn't necessarily the most memorable or feature-worthy part of the stories. This could become even more of an issue as more noncompetition stories win FS status, because it seems that noncomps tend to be less dialogue-intensive than competition stories, in addition to being shorter.

2) Although the FS/FI/FC voting requires people to nominate their own works, I think FQ would work better if readers are allowed to make nominations, because we're more likely to get true audience favorites that way. Of course, I see no reason why the author couldn't also nominate quotes from their own stories, and I would give authors veto power over quotes from their own stories.

3) I would rather have the Support/Oppose voting format, rather than polls, because my understanding is that polls don't permit supporting multiple candidates. For similar reasons, a poll system also doesn't support midstream additions as well as a Support/Oppose system. Note that neither of these issues would be as serious if the nominees came from a predetermined story.

Actually, I think FQ should have Support-only voting because, even with the existing Feature categories, Oppose votes really don't serve any practical purpose; they're really just a way to vent, and I don't really see why someone would want to vent against a quote.

4) There should be the option for multiple winners in a month, especially if the crop of nominees is large, although we would probably want to stick with a monthly voting cycle. When winners are determined, we could subdivide the "display" month, giving time to either a set number of the nominees with the most votes, or to every nominee that received a certain level of support.