After being involved in several discussions concerning adding puppeteers to the cast list, I have come to the conclusion that the easiest solution is to create a crew role for them.  What does everyone think?

If you make them crew, a role cannot be assigned (for cases where a puppeteer plays one character). Or, it could be a a custom assignment, but that could not be contributed.

Alien:

This affects far more than Puppeteers, also Additional Voices and even Stunts which are sometimes included with Cast and sometimes NOT.

The best suggestion I have seen thus far, is to stick with the Cast Rule, but to be allow Puppeteers, Srtunts and additional voices to added under Crew when they are not part of the cast. That should make everyone happy. Fact is we don't have the ability to deign what Cast when the data is not in the Cast listing and pretending that we can opens the door to virtually everything being Cast.

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Quoting TheMadMartian:

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I have encountered quite a few but, to be honest, I don't care either way.  I just want a way to stop the fighting over this issue.

What proportion would you say you see in cast credits versus elsewhere in the credits?

Quoting TheMadMartian:

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If I had to guess, since I can't think of an example off the top of my head, I would have to say most are elsewhere in the credits...which might explain why we don't see this very often.

Thanks. I am sincerely curious about the attention this topic has garnered. I'm wondering if more time has been spent talking about them in the forums than all of the time ever spent contributing one. 

I haven't yet located anything online in terms of organizations of puppeteers. In the Oscar categories, we're still not tracking the Set Decorator, an Oscar co-recipient with the Art Director. In the Emmy categories, in addition to Set Decorators, we also don't cover the following Emmy recipients:

Camera Operators
Technical Directors
Stunt Coordinators
Casting
Character Designer
Character Animator
Background Painter
Choreography
Hairstyling
Lighting
Title Design

I'm not advocating that we add any of the above (with the exception of Set Decorator, but that's my pet peeve that an Oscar recipient has been excluded), but it seems to me that these roles would be more important to add a crew role for before we get to adding puppeteers. The fact that the above roles are recognized by the awards industry indicates their relative importance to me over the ones that don't get the awards.

On that basis, as I said earlier, I'm in favor of leaving out puppeteers. In fact, I would remove all reference to them from the rules.