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Rules: Wooden Rocket Awards.

These rules form part of the constitution of the WRA and are considered binding to any member, applicant or voter in the awards. These rules and regulation are open to amendment and change at any point and without notice by the Ruling Committee of the WRA. Such changes shall be flagged on this page.

1. Sites submitted must have they majority of their content written in the English language for all categories bar the Best Foreign Language site category (where English is not allowed) and the Best Artist site category.
   
2. Any individual who meets the qualification to vote as laid down in these rules is eligible to vote once only, and in that vote, nominate only one site for each category.
   
3. The Ruling Committee of the WRA have the sole right to disqualify through a majority vote any site it deems appropriate from participating in the awards. Its decision in this matter is final.
   
4. The Ruling Committee of the WRA have the sole right to disqualify any vote(s) it deems appropriate from being registered towards the awards vote count. Its decision in this matter is final.
   
5. No site with pornographic, race hate, religious hate or other unsuitable content will be allowed to enter the awards.
   
6. No site with a history of spamming or other antisocial conduct likely to bring the awards into disrepute will be allowed to enter.
   
7. Votes made for sites in categories which they are not appropriate for will be disregarded. No re-voting will be allowed for any individual incorrectly submitting sites to the wrong category.
   
8. Any site where a significant number of its votes are made in a fraudulent manner will be instantly disqualified from entering the awards in both the current and future years of the awards. The WRA committee reserve the right to flag and shame the behavior of any such fraudulent sites on this site and its related publications.
   
9. As a sponsoring party for the awards, SFcrowsnest itself is not eligible to be voted for or enter any of the categories of the Wooden Rocket awards. Votes made for SFcrowsnest will be disregarded as invalid.
   
10. No site owned by any Committee Member of the WRA or staff member of SFcrowsnest or their relatives will be considered eligible for entry into the Wooden Rocket awards.
    
11. Existing award categories can be removed by a majority decision by the WRA Committee at its annual meeting.
    
12. New categories for the awards can be created by a majority decision of the WRA Committee at its annual meeting.
    
13. Sites hosted on free web hosting packages which propagate trojans or offer software which come with hidden advertising and/or user behaviour tracking systems are not eligible for entry.
    
14. The awards are made on a first-past-the-post system. The award winner for each category will be the site with the most votes from eligible users when the vote is closed. Sites which make it into the second and third positions for most voted for sites in each category shall be considered Wooden Rocket Award Runners-up.
    
15. Category winners will be permitted to use the Wooden Rocket Award Winner badge for the appropriate category on their site. Category nominees will be permitted to use the Wooden Rocket Award Nominee badge for the appropriate category on their site. License of the Wooden Rockets Award's intellectual property is granted and limited only to this purpose.
    
16. Sites which own their own domain name will be judged by the content on their top level home page. E.g. if the URL http://www.fictional-sf-site.com/directory/links/web.htm is nominated, it is the URL http://www.fictional-sf-site.com/ which will be evaluated for the category. This rule is waived if the micro-site has over 500 pages of meaningful content (as verified by SFcrowsnest's own search engine web crawler), in which case sections of the same site will be considered for different categories. This rule is waived for sites based on free web hosts such as GeoCities where control of the top level page is not required.
    
17. It is considered within the scope of these rules that sites can highlight the existence of the awards to their users and encourage them to vote - but sites shall in no way be permitted to encourage their users towards fraudulent activity such as multiple voting.
    
18. These awards shall be governed by English law in the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom.
    
19. By voting in these awards the voting individual is agreeing to be legally bound by the rules and regulations as detailed here, and agrees that the judges' decision in any and all matters relating to the Wooden Rocket Awards is final and binding.
    
20. For a vote to be considered eligible, it must be verifiable by having an active e-mail address which belongs to the free monthly SFcrowsnest newsletter list. This is an opt-in list: which means after signing up, voter e-mail addresses will be sent a message with a URL which must be clicked on to activate free membership of the list. This helps stops fraud by (a) users voting with false e-mail addresses which do not exist, or (b) users voting with valid e-mail addresses, but using e-mail accounts which don't actually belong to them. When the final vote count is made, voter e-mail addresses are matched to active e-mail addresses on the SFcrowsnest monthly newsletter list. Voters who are not on the newsletter list have all their votes disregarded. Other fraud detection methods are also in place such as IP address tracking, time-to-vote-volume automation trigger detection, as well as random variance analysis. We will not detail all these techniques here for the obvious security reasons.

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