Man, that's kind of sad... I kinda always hoped, that I would one day make a program that would at least make it to the voting phase... :-(
I think i might know the reason of this though: I've already met students, that have TI calculators, but have never heard of ticalc.org. Maybe advertising the site on facebook or something could help a bit with rounding up new voters?

Congrats to all the winners!

I don't think submissions or voting was particularly low this year - however ticalc.org staff aren't as active as they used to be due to other commitments no doubt.

I dunno, the most votes in any category reached 19 this year. The 2010 one had 95 votes in one of the categories, so we are at exactly 1/5 the votes in 10 years.

If you look at the attached URL, it is a screenshot where I plotted two different regression lines based on "Most votes in a POTY category, years 2010 to 2019." You'll note that the community is going one of two ways: Either people are going to write in to ticalc.org in 2022 demanding to be refunded their votes, or we are going to see a huge spike in activity and by 2022 we'll be back at 2010 levels.

*runs*

I wasn't speaking in terms of comparison to previous years though, but I do agree with your point that community participation is on the decline as we find the platform becoming increasingly niche. The history of the community is up and down and always has been - in 2008 there were only 2 featured programs for the entire year and thus that was all POTY was voted on.

I'll be sad to see it go should that be the case but it would open the door for some of the rival file archive websites that have been building steam over the years.

Speaking as someone who was involved in pulling together the POTY stuff for a few years, I can say that it's a rather surprising amount of work to get everything squared away and off the ground, especially in the face of other commitments. And, to be perfectly fair, I always felt like Travis was putting in twice as much work as I was. Especially with the expanding number of categories, it's a lot of extra obligations to fall on their shoulders.

Of course, it's always sad to see a tradition fade, but it does indeed free up energy that can be put toward things that are perhaps of greater value to the community as a whole.

Hi Ryan :)

As one of your successors on the writing part (from the beginning, I've been the main writer of most of the articles posted by Xavier), and also earlier one of the people who triggered bursts of newsing work for yourself by inciting people to upload their archives to ticalc.org in time for the POTY, I can only echo what you wrote: features and the POTY are a lot of work for both the writers and Travis...

The huge number of categories featured in 2019, and therefore the higher burden on Travis (looks like I have a history of creating burdens of ticalc.org staff...), was unexpected to me. I expected at most 6 categories, and even 5 (single monochrome TI-Z80 category, 84+CSE, TI-(e)Z80, TI-68k, Nspire) made complete sense to me.
Heck, I even created a winner by default in the 85 category, though I always strived at avoiding them, because that's how I won my own single POTY (tiosmod+amspatch), as nobody had had time to feature / suggest at least another featureworthy archive uploaded the same year in the same category...

Perhaps the POTY categories could be drastically consolidated to reduce the work load - perhaps just (e)z80, 68k and Nspire or even monochrome vs colour?

Monochrome vs colour wouldn't work that well IMHO, since for example clour nspire programs work on monchrome too (mostly). On the other hand categorising by processor(ish) would be a really nice improvement! This would also help eliminating the problem of having categories with only one (i'm looking at you TI 85) or two entries.

Congrats all on the POTY results. Sad to hear this is likely the last one though.
Thanks for everyone's hard work over the years nonetheless, and I look forward to more news and programs submitted in the years to come :-)

Congratulations to the PotY winners this year!

That said, I'm sad to hear that this might be the last year of Program of the Year, considering how long it's been part of my time in the community (and transitively, how big a part of my life the community has been). It inspired Cemetech's own Projects of the Month and Projects of the Year, but I think the imitations can never be quite as good or quite as prestigious as the original. I hope that there are so many great TI-84 Plus CE programs published and featured in the next year, and such an upsurge in activity, that you have no choice but to extend it for a few more years.

In fact, TI-eZ80 programs already make up a sizable chunk of the features queue :)

Months before the decision to probably wrap up the POTY came as a result of the low number of votes combined with the time Travis spends organizing the contest, I had started writing down ideas for different styles of news items (which would probably take me less time to write, too).
For instance, a couple "Nice-looking but unfinished games" news items containing short descriptions for 4-6 programs. Also, some sections in our archives contains zero featured programs, AFAICT.

It is very sad there will not be a POTY 2020. Seventeen good years. It is also sad people are losing interest in TI-Basic/z80/ez80, or calculator programming in general. I still will always program on calculators, since TI-Basic was the language that gave birth to my interest in programming. Those of you out there who still care for calculator programming... well, calculator- on! I guess. If that made sense.

I guess ticalc.org weren't kidding with this announcement. Not only are they not having POTY, they aren't featuring programs [at all] anymore either.

For now they are still accepting uploads, however I suspect the discontinuation of that facility will be in the next press-release?

Tis a sad decline for a once great website.

Very sad indeed.

Wow. I think you are the most recent reply I have ever seen on this website. It is cool to see a thread from later than like 2003.