When you get to a manageable number... maybe set up a rotation? Each vote lowest vote total gets taken off the list, and one of the fics not currently on the voting list gets added on?
That's a great idea, and in theory I agree with it perfectly (assuming that the initial whittle-down is inevitable - for obvious reasons I rather dislike that particular part).
However, in practice it would be a bit hard to figure out which one to add each time (it would pretty much require its own voting, which at best will confuse everyone else, and might well need a separate thread).
One unfortunate consequence is also that, since NSFW stories appear to generally get a bit less votes (perhaps because of the lesser audience), it is not too unlikely, random fluctuations aside, that the "manageable number" will not include a single NSFW fic.
(Which is likely to be a bad thing, because then the NSFW writing juices might end up funneled into otherwise SFW fics.)
In fact, looking at @Starluck's spreadsheet, if the "manageable number" is 10, most likely, we will lose all six NSFW fics, All Alone, Nemesis and Junior Hero.
Which, ironically enough, wouldn't really include any of my personal favorites (though I'd be out a trade deal), but it will still significantly diminish the remaining variety. (And one more dropping fic and I'd be out of War Games, which
is among my favorites.)
Fun fact: four of the probable drop-out fics - Nemesis, MirrorVerse, NSW and All Alone - are predicted to disappear off the list sometime within measurement error of their next would-be win. (In all four cases, most likely just after rather than just before, but random fluctuations can make it either way.)
As such, I wonder - can a fic still win a round if it's already off the voting list but still has more overall total points than anything else? (For example - I'm basically making this up - if we remove Nemesis with 1600 points, and then five votes later the highest ranked fic still on the list has 1550, will Nemesis win that round?)
