• This is a dang braggin’ rights contest. There’s no money involved, and this is not, of course, a scientific poll. If you find yourself being annoyed by the informality of this contest, just think of it as a parody of the ridiculous system that Corporate Radio currently uses to establish its various “Top 40″ lists. This contest is about as useless and invalid as that system, but at least we’re being honest about it.
• All songs that make it into the Top 5 every month advance to the “Finals,” which begins on the first Saturday in December and lasts through noon Central Time on New Year’s Day.  The song that gets the most votes in The Finals wins a plaque that costs less than $20. Hoss will mail it to the winning band sometime, usually, before the end of January. Nobody gets anything else, dang it. And even if we had the money or prestige to offer something else, we probably wouldn’t. Offering something of significant value for this silly little contest makes winning too much of the focus. The point of the show is, actually, to help indie bands of all types to call attention to themselves. Winning and losing is just a sideline consideration, at least as far as Hoss is concerned. Anyone who gets overly worked up about winning or losing a $20 plaque should consider seeking therapy.
• Despite the informality mentioned in rule #1, we will do what we can to keep people from voting waaaay too many times (and thus crashing the system) like they did when we tried this contest in 2006 and 2007. The system is set up to allow each IP address to vote once very 24 hours. Because most home and business computer systems share a single IP address, this means, unfortunately, that each household and workplace will likely be able to cast just one vote per day. Bitching about that unfortunate fact, will not make it change. When HossTheBoss.com is no longer a low-budget operation, we will be able to consider adopting software that will allow multiple votes daily from single IP addresses.
• Overzealous fans of a particular song will likely find it easy to override the system and record multiple votes per day from a single computer. We also hope that, if you figure out how to vote more than once a day, you will consider what we’re trying to do here for independent music and just resist the temptation. If you ignore that request, we do have a few means at our disposal for blocking you out of the system, (including taking the song you’re voting for out of the contest), but we really don’t want to have to waste our time battling with your silliness. Basically, if you hack into our system and record tons of false votes, you’ll only be helping us decide to just not do the dang contest anymore. (If this thing becomes too much of a hassle, we’ll probably just move on to something else.) Why would you want to do that? Please re-read rules 1 and 2 very carefully, and contact Hoss if you feel you need therapy. He’ll do his best to find you someone who can help.
• The number of songs in any month’s contest will vary. In most cases, we’ll have 40 songs in the months that have 5 Saturdays and 30 songs in the months that have 4 Saturdays (so we can kick 10 songs out every Saturday during the live show). But that number may vary.
• We will usually kick the bottom 10 songs out every Saturday, but we reserve the right to kick out a different number as needed to make sure we have the right number around for the end of a month.
• Hoss breaks all ties, and he reserves the right to leave certain songs in the contest if they would otherwise be eliminated.  Its his dang station.
• Hoss chooses all guest DJs, but he does not care what songs they pick. His only rules for the guests are that they cannot choose a band more than once in a month, and they must secure permission from the band and/or the band’s agent in order to put the song on the contest.
• Hoss may clean up the grammar errors or typos in what the guest DJs say on the site about their picks, but he won’t ever change the meaning of what they say.
• Hoss strongly encourages all DJs to make sure the bands understand that their songs are in a voting contest. The bands that promote the songs the best are usually the ones that get the most votes, of course.
• The Song Info. section for this contest will contain links to websites related to the bands in the contest. We also invite all bands in the contest to post comments on the site in which they are welcome to provide more links. The bands that get the most votes are very likely to earn even more links on the site because we’ll be writing about them more.
• Bands that find themselves sick of this contest in mid-stream need simply to send an email to Hoss, and he will remove their songs from the site and station immediately. (If your reason for withdrawing is petty or otherwise ridiculous, you can expect that Hoss and others will editorialize about it, of course.)
• If you don’t like something about this contest and want to whine about it publicly, we won’t stop you. Just post a comment anywhere on the site. We won’t take it down just because you don’t like us. But, if Hoss finds you overly annoying and/or abusive (toward him or toward musicians on the site) you could find yourself banned or your comments deleted. Never fear, Hoss is not a big fan of censorship, so he’ll hardly ever exercise this option, and except in the rarest of cases, wrathees will get ample warning to change their annoying or abusive ways before Hoss deletes or bans them. (None of this applies to comments that are obviously spam. Those will usually be deleted immediately with Hoss’s automated software, and the one’s that the software misses can expect to be weeded out quickly by hand.)
• While we’re becoming more and more organized with every attempt at this contest, we still might decide to make changes as we go along. We’ll announce those changes on the live show and in the contest notes section.  If you get upset about any changes, please refer again to rules 1 and 2.

That’s it for the rules, for now. If you have a suggestion for more, please let us know. In the meantime, have fun with this dang thing. A lot of people have found it somewhat addictive over the years.