With the nominations having closed for the Fanworks Awards, those tabulating the votes have apparently taken it upon themselves to materially change the rules for them.

The voting pools are being limited to ten nominations per category, and "oversized" pools are being reduced by two of the overseers, who are now acting as judges.

I'm posting below what I posted at the PPMB. (With James's long-standing interest in these awards, I'll also note explicitly here what has been true for other statements of opinion at this Blog: James and I speak for ourselves, and we don't mean to imply that we speak for the other person.)

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RLobinske wrote at the PPMB, in the revised posts for rules for Written Works and Visual Works, after the nominations closed on 10 January:

Because of the great response (thank you), we have found that some categories have a large number of nominations. To help keep the number of works for everyone to review to a manageable level, each category will be trimmed to about 10 final nominations.

For each category, the works with the highest number of nominations will be included. For situations where including all the works with the same number of nominations would result in an oversized pool, a prevote will be done by nmorgendorffer and Mr. Orange (because I have numerous written and visual works, I will not be involved) to select the nominations to be included in the final 10.

Neither of these rules, after the fact, strikes me as being fair, especially with their not being announced in advance of the close of nominations.

To know that no more than ten nominations would remain for a category would very likely have made voters more selective, and thus affected how many categories one chose for nominating a particular work.

And as to culling nomination pools that are "oversized" (itself undefined) yourselves, by making a "prevote," this makes you, the voting overseers -- well, two of you, anyway -- into judges, where you decide what works are worthy of final voting.

That's a material change in the nominating methods. If it were known in advance that two of the overseers would be judging nominations as to whether they should be included, not merely tabulating nominations, that would also have affected nominating.

You had a year of saying that you were going to accept all nominations. Now, it's only those that fit your numerical limits, and, in some cases, those that are acceptable to two overseers who were just self-promoted to judges.

You don't change the rules this much at this point, Richard, not if you're to have them be objective. That's not having them be "set in semi-clay," with last-minute "final detail" clarifications. It's bending them to fit your preferences.