I think that the fairest and most democratic way is to let the members vote and give each member a number of votes determined as follows.
100 votes for every week of membership - this will reward loyalty to the forum.
50 votes for every comment made during the previous week - this will encourage participation.
75 votes for every photo posted since becoming a member - this will further encourage participation.
Each week the member is allowed to distribute a percentage of his votes amongst any four photos that he chooses. To allow for ties, the member then states how his first choice votes are distributed among the other three photos. He then states how his second choice votes are distributed. Likewise his third choice votes.
The photo with highest number of votes is chosen as POTW provided that it gets more that 60% of the total votes cast and more that 40% of the total possible votes of all members, whether they have voted or not.
Should no photo meet these percentages, then the member's first choice votes are distributed as he previously nominated. The process continues until there is a clear winner.
When all of this descends into confusion and chaos, the moderators then decide on the POTW by whatever method they feel works for them and we can all go back to enjoying looking at the images we like instead of being critical of the mods for trying to make the forum more interesting.
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