Slight Change to the Exclusive Monthly & Patron-Voted Story Polls

Hello everyone! This is a little follow-up announcement about the poll I ran a few days ago about limiting popular pairings for the Exclusive Monthly Poll and Patron-Voted Story Polls.

Starting with next month's polls, I will be testing out a new rule that any prompts submitted cannot feature the winning pairing from the previous month's poll. This rule will likely remain in effect for a few months to give it a chance to be tested out. I will then put up a new poll to see if you all would like this rule to remain in effect or not.

Thank you very much for your feedback on this. The hope is that this change will help to allow for a more diverse set of pairings to appear, or to at least prevent popular pairings from appearing for multiple months in a row.

Feel free to leave any feedback in the comments! I can ensure you all that I do read it and take it seriously. I obviously balance my community's feedback with my own thoughts on matters like this, but I'm quite happy to hear out anyone's opinions if they disagree with mine or think there's a better way to handle this issue.

Clarification on how this will work with the two polls:

The two polls will remain mutually exclusive to one another, so any winner from one will not prevent that pairing from appearing in the other poll in the following month.

So, let's say the Exclusive Monthly Winner is Harry/Daphne and the Patron-Voted Story winner is Harry/Hermione. In the following month, the Exclusive Monthly poll cannot feature any Harry/Daphne prompts, but it can feature Harry/Hermione prompts. Similarly, the Patron-Voted Story for the following month cannot feature Harry/Hermione, but it can feature Harry/Daphne.

Detailed explanation on my reasoning for this rule:

The results are quite clear that you (my Patrons) are split on whether or not you want any limitations put in place (52% want restrictions in some form while 48% want no restrictions). Obviously, these monthly stories are a way for your ideas to come to life, and I don't want to take away from that, but it's also clear that certain pairings see much more interest than others.

Looking at the Exclusive Monthly Stories (for anyone in the Prompter-tier or higher), we can see that 4 out of the 7 stories are Harry/Daphne stories (including one which is Harry/Daphne/Astoria). Seeing as the next story coming out in a few days is also Harry/Daphne, that'll make it 5 out of 8 Harry/Daphne stories. 

Looking at the Patron-Voted Stories, we see much more variety: Harry/Daphne (5/17), Harry/Narcissa (3/17), Harry/Bellatrix (3/17), and everyone else is at 2 or fewer appearances (any poll winner that is split into multiple chapters only counts for 1 appearance). However, the last 3 months have all included Harry/Daphne in some form.

So, the two issues I have identified here are: too many Harry/Daphne stories in the Exclusive Monthly Stories and too many Harry/Daphne stories in a row in the Patron-Voted Stories. 

I think that imposing the restriction I detailed earlier will help to address both issues. It will prevent any pairing from ever appearing more than 50% of the time, and it will ensure that pairings will never appear twice in a row within their specific polls. 

While there is still the possibility of pairings appearing regularly due to the two polls being mutually exclusive from one another, I'd prefer to start with a small change and see how it works out rather than overreach and impose too many limitations on something that is supposed to be for my Patrons to decide upon.