What is POTY?

Try it out on https://popholmes.tech/poty.

Before going into the details of how it works, lets first talk about where it started!

Let’s look back …

Pop of the Year (POTY) is a social media event held by PopHolmes. As its name suggest, its all about the funko community picking the best pop of the year. This event has been held every year since 2020. As the PopHolmes community has been created in 2019, POTY has always been a big part of it.

How does it work?

There are two main phases: Submission and 1v1 Brackets.

Submissions

Since every year hundreds of Funko Pops are released, it is not feasible to have a big tournament with all released pops, as that would require many matches as well. This is where the submissions phase comes in. PopHolmes defines categories, where the users have to decide on which pops from these categories they like the most. They can then submit these pops. After everybody has submitted their pops, the most picked pops from each categories are picked to later participate in the 1v1 Brackets.

1v1 Brackets

The selected Pops then face off in a knockout tournament, where the community votes for the winner of each round until only one Pop remains: the official Pop of the Year.

Fig 2. Winners of the POTY 2024

Fig 2. Winners of the POTY 2024

You can find the results of the POTY 2024 on popholmes.tech/poty.

Cool idea, but problematic execution ..

When POTY was first introduced, the PopHolmes communities on Discord, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter) were still separate and self-contained.
So it made sense to run the event individually on each platform.

But this also meant a lot of manual work: collecting submissions, validating them, running votes, and tracking results independently for each platform. For the first three years this was manageable, but as the community grew and the lines between platforms blurred, the cracks started to show.

We had to make a decision:

  • Should we centralize the event on a single platform (and risk losing participants)?
  • Should we use existing poll/tournament software (but lose flexibility)?
  • Or should we build our own system, tailored to how our community works?

We chose the last option - and that’s how the POTY Website was born.

Combined platform, but how?

Our goal was to create a single hub for submissions and voting while keeping the experience familiar for Discord, Instagram, and X users.
The website needed to be simple enough for casual fans but flexible and scalable enough for admins to run the whole event from one place.

The core principles:

  • Unified experience: one platform for everyone, regardless of which community they came from.
  • Fair voting: make it easy to participate, but protect against abuse.
  • Automation: reduce the manual work that used to take weeks.
  • Transparency: show the community how votes are progressing.

Keep it simple, scale when necessary

For the first version, we focused on the bare minimum:

  • A submission form for categories.
  • A bracket system that automatically generated matchups.
  • A voting page where each community member could cast their vote.

As participation grew, we scaled up - adding better tracking, IP hashing for anonymity, admin dashboards, and analytics.
The rule was always: keep it lean, then add features when they’re really needed.

Data Collection and anonymity

One big concern was preventing duplicate votes while also respecting anonymity.
Instead of storing IP addresses directly, we hashed them using SHA-256. This gave us a way to prevent double voting without keeping personally identifiable data.

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private static string HashIPAddress(string ipAddress)
{
    using (var sha256 = SHA256.Create())
    {
        var ipBytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(ipAddress);
        var hashedBytes = sha256.ComputeHash(ipBytes);
        return Convert.ToBase64String(hashedBytes);
    }
}

This approach means that:

  • Users remain anonymous
  • The website can still enforce one vote per IP
  • No sensitive data is stored

Closing thoughts

POTY has grown from a small, manual community event into a scalable, custom-built event platform. It represents more than just picking a winner, it’s a yearly celebration of the PopHolmes community itself.

Every time, when the final Pop is crowned, it’s not just about the figure that won, but about the fans who came together to vote, debate, and celebrate their shared passion for Funko Pops.

Special thanks to Adam, who owns the PopHolesm Discord Server, for making this possible!