Awards Post 2017 Fanfic Awards "Survey"

Hello and welcome to Mav’s and Bri’s… uh… survey? Discussion? Open town hall? On the Fanfic awards.

This will not be a typical post-awards survey. people simply need to read this wall of text and give us their opinions. We basically want some general feedback as to people’s opinions and then see where the awards should go (and then get some more directed feedback if needed).


This is all thanks to Disney’s mess adventures.

Let’s be honest, we are not writing in the same fandom we were in 2012 before the JCF moved hosts and Disney bought the franchise. Since then, the Awards organization system of Before/Saga/Beyond has not worked (and yeah, we know it is partly due to our hot mess of a prefix system, but that isn’t what this discussion is it about, so if you bring it up, Briannakin will replace your toilet paper with wet noodles). And, no fault to anyone, but figuring out how to fairly organize the awards becomes more of a headache every year. So, Mav and Bri are willing to reorganize/revamp the awards to prevent this.

In no way are the mods going to take over running the awards again (we aren’t THAT stupid/insane/masochistic). However we are willing to spend the summer reorganizing the awards process.

Basically, we are proposing, that similar to this year, we do away with sub-sectioning the awards via era and do it by award type:

The awards would be split into two sections: Era Awards and Category Awards

One team would run the Era Awards. Each year this team would section fics by eras (these sections could change easily in subsequent years to allow for Disney’s expansion). So this year might have had 6 eras that looked something like this:

Before - Legends
Saga – Legends
Beyond - Legends
Saga - before TPM to before Rebels
Saga - Rebels to before Bloodline
Bloodline to episode IX and Beyond


In each of these eras there would be between 2 and 4 of the same awards (probably either Best Story and Best Author, or best AU, Canon, Author, and New Author). We could also add NSWFF as an “era” to allow that forum to have a small awards as part of the overall Fanfic Awards.


A second team would be “Team Categories” and would handle the awards in categories such with “headers” such as Genres, Characters, Relationships, and Crack/Random awards. These awards would not be separated by era and would allow NSWFF to be nominated as well. Each of these "headers" would get their own sock, with 2 Awards assistants. A master list of the awards in each category would be established by a further survey this summer, but of course each year, the teams could add more.

There are other benefits to this sort of breakdown as well. The mods would ask for volunteers according to category (or for the era awards), so no assistant would have to give up eligibility of all their fics in one era. There would only need to be two hosts. And NSWFF could be included.

This is going to take a bit of work by the mods and we want to know if you - the users - want this sort of awards organization. If not, Mav and Bri will leave everything as is. However, if awards organization continues to be the same headache for the volunteers, we will shut down the awards indefinitely.


*Note: If this makes no sense, we will blame it on Briannakin's tiny brain and her camp crud.*

 

That sounds like it makes sense. It might work. We should at least try it next year.

 

We'll have to discuss some of your questions a bit more before replying, but I did want to address this:

The mods 'hating' the awards goes back to long before either one of us were mods, just like the whole bail money when the mods go on vacation. It's a little bit of fanfic tradition that predates us that we try to hang onto. Yes, the awards are a lot of work, but more, it's a lot of stress and to be quite honest, not a whole lot of fun for us. We do the awards not because we have to, but because we love this community and we know it's something people enjoy. We continue the tradition of playing up hating them because it also gives us a place to carve out just a little bit of fun in the stress of it. We don't get paid to be mods, so it adds quite a bit of stress to our lives and the only benefit is our love of this forum. I'm sorry to take away some of the fun, we'll take that into consideration in the future, but I'm not going to promise that we'll stop entirely.

 

Just going off of what Mav said, the awards are a lot of stress for us Mods, on top of our normal modding duties (not to mention DRL kinda dumped on both of us this Awards season), so our continuing the tradition of complaining about the awards is sort of a long-standing coping mechanism. If we don’t let off some stress, then we just pent it up, then we become bitter, and that could lead to us just shutting down the awards all together or even “rage retiring” as mods. Sending each-other stupid gifs has really helped Mav and I laugh when we have needed it, and we kinda wanted to share this with others (since the awards do have a long tradition of regular users either loving or hating the awards). I will admit, perhaps the signatures were too close to the line for some people.

As Mav said, we are under no obligation to do the awards - but we have kept doing them when other sections of the forums have shut down their awards - so our complaining is not meant to be mean. If we truly hated doing this, we simply would not do it.

 

gg

 

It is only bad to complain about work if you are actually not doing work. If you are working your butt off it is your right to complain.

I took the easy route and simply donated prizes. It is a lot easier than volunteering and putting in the crazy amount of work needed to do the awards. My hat is off to the mods for making the awards possible.

 

Okay, first of all, I love so many things about the awards. I love being able to recognize so many people in the forums for the awesome stories they bring us year round. I love that the awards encourage me to read out of my comfort zone and discover hidden gems featuring eras, characters, and genres that I've rarely visited. I love how the ceremony gives all of the writers here a chance to celebrate and goof around. The rest of this may sound a bit down on the awards, so I just wanted to say all of that.

I think what Briannakin and mavjade suggest for next year sounds a bit less overwhelming than this year. I have to say that it was overwhelming this year, in spite of everyone's best efforts. And the overseer and other volunteers worked really hard, many of you much more so than I did. So I want to be clear that I know you all did your best to make this as trouble-free as possible. But I feel like it's becoming clear that what we want to have for awards as a fanfic community is one thing... and what we all have in terms of time and energy is another. We keep knocking ourselves out trying to have everything and have it in one ceremony, and there just isn't the fanficcer-power to do it without seriously overtaxing the regular volunteers. (Not to mention this year's overseer, who was last seen headed for Kashyyyk and muttering about how "They'll never find me there, never!")

I want to second @Findswoman's suggestion that doing separate, smaller awards might make this all less of an ordeal. It is tempting to get it all over with in one big thing, but when it eats at least a dozen people's lives for months on end each year that seems a little much. The awards could eat smaller chunks of our lives and do so at intervals instead!

Of course, multiple smaller awards throughout the year would entail multiple awards ceremony threads and so on. I do understand how that may not appeal at this point, when so many of us are saying "Nope, no more awards, I don't want to think about them again. Ever." But I think it could be done, at least if we lowered the number of categories and/or cut nominations down to one per category. I hate to suggest it when everyone loves having lots of choices -- me included. However, I think that if volunteer turnout remains about where it is, it's a reasonable option. And it seems better than ceasing the awards altogether, as is the alternative if next year doesn't work out a little easier on everyone's heartburn.

As far as complaining goes, I've just done it and don't object to it in principle. But I think that having negative comments about it in signatures feels kind of uncomfortable. The mods have a right to a coping mechanism and I certainly don't feel offended if either of you happen to say something about how exhausting it is and so on in places where everyone knows what the awards even are. It just seems kind of... something, for that to be the first thing a newcomer or occasional visitor sees about it, though. I spent the last couple of months worrying in private while trying to be positive about the awards in front of the people that we were, after all, running them for in the first place. Pretty sure I'm not the only one. I know you both work really hard on this and that stuff was just for fun. Just, maybe consider a bit less context-free "awards are awful" some of the time.

 

I’ll comment on other things in a bit, but something that just came to mind regarding multiple separate awards throughout the year is the eligiblity window. Say we had 2 separate awards, one ceremony in March/April, another in September/October (I think anything less than a 6 month separation between the two awards might make the whole separation redundant - plus the mods would need some sort of break for our sanity), would both awards have the same eligibility window (IE 01/01 - 12-31)? If so, does it make any sense to have awards and the previous year’s fics in like September/October (and people already complain about remembering what fics they want to nominate)? But how confusing would it be to have two separate awards with two different eligibility periods?

Just something to think about.

I’m not totally against the idea of separate awards throughout the year - there are definitely some benefits. But - full disclosure - I am the type of person who likes to eat all her vegetables at once to get it out of then way. I do like getting the awards done in 3-4 months, then not have to even think about them for another 8 months. It gives Mav and I time to work on other things (and we do like to avoid having other things going on the same time as awards). On a personal note, awards took a physical toll on me this year and I don't know if I could do it multiple times in a year.

 

I love the awards. I give tremendous kudos to the wonderfully hard working people who put the effort and care into putting the awards on in the first place. While not having ever volunteered or participated in that fashion, I can see and appreciate how trying an undertaking it can truly be. So, huge thanks to all of you.

That being said, I have to wonder if it is still worth so much time and headache? Do the numbers support still doing it? Is participation at a level which supports continuing the awards at all?

 

Breaking it down to multiple awards or simplifying it somehow might be a better option. We did have FanFic awards way back in the mists of time before the board move, but I don't remember them as being quite so involved, and I know the Awards ceremony was a one-day thing. We didn't have so many categories, just 3 different eras, and we didn't have to worry about Legends vs. Canon. I vaguely remember that the OC Awards were separate and smallish; there weren't many folks doing OCs, so it was fairly manageable, and we didn't include those categories in the bigger picture. And I vaguely remember that only stories started/initially posted during that year were eligible for that year's awards. So, for example, if you'd first started posting your story in 2014 and were still posting chapters in 2016, you would not be eligible for the 2016 Awards. Also, if you'd been nominated in any category the previous awards, you would not be eligible for re-nomination, even if you didn't win the first time. Ensured that fresh things were coming to the top. At least, that's how I remember it.

(When someone bounced up to me and asked me about doing FanFic Awards, my mod strategy was to nod and reply: "Sounds great! Good luck! Behind you all the way!" and then sit back and let them do their thing while being ready to intervene if things got too heated, generally during the hashing out of the rules. I was really rather lazy back in the day...Not exactly a Model Mod. Although I do remember a week of colors was the prize for the winners, along with bragging rights.)

 

gg

 

I'm back from Kashyyyk! Okay, I went underground because it was a crazy time at work and in reality it didn't have anything to do with the awards at all.

However, I'm still going to play devil's advocate and say that, having been overseer for two consecutive years, I'm not sure that holding the awards is worth it.

This isn't so much about the amount of work it involves, it's rather the fact that there simply aren't enough of us to participate -- by this I mean to participate in nominating and voting, not to participate as volunteers. The number of people who are active on the fanfic boards is small and the number who are socially involved (as in, who interact with others outside a story thread) is tiny. At the same time, we want the awards to be as inclusive as possible and to ensure that we have a diversity of winners, but making the awards smaller (by reducing the number of categories and/or splitting the process into several segments spread out over the year) will make it much more difficult to keep a semblance of diversity.

My bottom line is, if we want to have awards and if we want them to be fun for everyone, we have to overlook the small number of participants and to do the work it takes to make them happen. I think that Bri's and mav's proposal to split things up by groups of categories is the best option to make the workload smaller on individual volunteers, and I know that Mr Chyn has been looking at options with Google Forms to make counting noms and votes easier (I hope he'll turn up and chime in at some point in the not-too-distant future, but he's even busier than me these days).

However, splitting things up in order to have more volunteers still means that we'll be playing among ourselves in our very private sandbox. This year we had 17 nominators and 24 voters, and these figures include the volunteers -- which means that half the noms and one-third of the votes came from the volunteers themselves. More volunteers means that two-thirds of the noms and half the votes will come from the volunteers, and I'm not sure that this is a good use of everyone's time.

To answer a few points that were raised above:

Not to be contrarian here, but I can see issues with either of these options

Reducing the number of categories if we have a large pool of fics to choose from like this year (with no era breakdown) is very likely to mean that we'll have just a handful of winners in the end, which would be great for the winners but not so much for everyone else. Just look at the authors who got the lion's share of nominations and wins this year. We're talking about a very small number of people, and having even fewer would take out a lot of the fun.

Cutting nominations down to one per category means that we need an entirely new filter for fics going to the voting round. I tried a gazillion versions of the filter before I reached the one we used this year, but every single version required either two nominations per category or twice as many nominators. The latter doesn't seem likely, so I think we should stick to two noms per category -- or design an entirely new filter, and I wish a lot of luck to whoever will do that

Gosh, that's really from the mists of time I actually indexed the awards threads, so I can tell you that in the heyday (circa 2005) there were 30 categories, multiplied by three eras (total 90!!!). Of course at the time there was a lot more traffic on the boards and the number of nominators/voters was several hundreds, even above 1000 in some years.

Preparing the spreadsheet isn't such a big deal, actually. It takes me just a couple of days to do it for the fic index anyway, so it's just a matter of re-vamping it a bit for the awards (and hopefully next time we won't be doing it at the last minute, because, you know, 2016 ). Also, the % of nominated fics wasn't tiny at all: there were 465 eligible stories, of which 166 received at least one nomination and 76 went to the voting round. Lastly, as much as I'd love to go with the "nomination not valid" principle, it isn't really an option when you have only 17 nominators. If we chucked out all the nominations that weren't valid, a lot of nominator proposals would be left out and the list of nominees would be very skinny indeed.

 

"the number of nominators/voters was several hundreds, even above 1000 in some years"

Yipe!
Yipe!
Yipe!
Yipe!
Yipe!
Yipe!
Yipe!

Nothing smart to add, just this. Sounds like hell. O_O

 

gg

 

Just FYI, at least since 2005, any fic that was started or updated within the eligibility period was available to be nominated and only if a story won in a category was it not eligible in the same category. Before restarting the awards after the move, we went back and looked through the years of awards and that was pretty consistent.
It did used to be one day of the ceremony, but it was changed for two reasons 1) We did a poll and people liked the idea of it being spread out and 2) That ceremony took 6 + hours, but there were 4 mods meaning we could spread out their coverage a bit more and not have to be on all day. With only two of us it makes it much harder.

When I was first made a mod, it was a few weeks before the awards started with 27 categories in all three eras. It was quite the trial by fire.

 

I ran an awards ceremony back in '04. That was when the moderators were in charge. I don't want to think about that time in my life ever again. (And I did it in the middle of an internship at Disney World!) There were four of us and it was still chaotic (IIRC, it was me, Renata, Lady_Padme, and Herman Snerd). Geez, I feel old now.

Seriously, though: The point of the awards is to have fun. Stressing out over it over and over, seeing the complaints every time both from those running it and those watching, drives home one thing: you can't please everyone. You just can't. So the question is, what is it that most of the participants want the most?

In years past, we had the ceremony thread and a temporary social thread for the "audience". That kept One from being cluttered by the other. I, personally, would like to see that return because I'm not really one for wading through the social skits and things for the winners. I feel the same way about the Oscars. I don't care about musical numbers or jokes about what stupid thing someone did that year. I want to know who won and then I want to go to bed.

The list of eligible fics was really impressive. That took a stunning amount of work, I'm sure. That said, I agree with Kurisan: Post the eligibility period, let those nominating do the footwork. If a fic reaches 3 nominations, then those running it check to verify eligibility.

Years when we had separate awards by era seemed to do well. People who cared about Beyond but not Before, or vice versa, involved themselves with that. The categories could be tailored to those audiences. Yes, it meant three separate awards ceremonies, but each had 1/3 of the work of doing it all in one go. I'm not sure that's really necessary now, with a much smaller user base. Just something to think about.

The categories get reevaluated every time. Everyone has their favourite category that they want to see stay. But what ones are actually essential? Do we need a best romance, best comedy, best action, AND a best overall? (I'm not even sure if these were categories this year, I skimmed the thread when I realised I'd been tagged 13 times in it when I logged in tonight.) Which categories get strong nomination numbers? Which don't? I know that the desire to reward authors for everything you can think of is really strong. I've been there.

I do like the idea posited by the mods in the OP. Allowing participants to have their stuff nominated is always a big sticking point, because it's hard to get people to participate if it means they become ineligible. So doing teams would be a good way to go.

I say that if a story is updated during the eligibility period, it should be eligible as long as it hasn't won in a category before. And authors should definitely not be eligible for, say, best author for a story if they've won for it before. There was one story that ran for a couple of years, and the author won a few different awards for it over those years, which I and others felt was very unfair. I don't remember now what story it was. It was over a decade ago. I won best something or other for a story this time. If I were to continue that story (it's finished, so it's not an issue, but I'm using it a an example), it would then be ineligible for that award even if I posted on it through other eligibility periods. John Williams doesn't win Best Score every time they rerelease Star Wars (did you know that A New Hope was rereleased three or four times before 1986?!). Celine Dion won something twice for "My Heart Will Go On", and that shouldn't have happened, personally.

There was another thing I was going to say, but it's almost 3:30 in the morning and after all this rambling, I've quite forgotten it.

 

I thought the awards went perfectly, and I quite enjoyed the mods displayed their desires not to touch the project with sterilised tractor beams. Though I had no idea that it was a fanfic tradition.

 

What if we modeled the awards like the nebula and/or hugos? I'm not talking mod controlled or volunteer controlled but whoever control (not who but how)

What I mean is

Set a concrete date where everyone should be available (e.g. like July 7 of each year maybe?, it needs to be concrete.

the following categories:

A. category by word count 40k for novel length, 7.5k for short story, etc) in the event (moist likely) there are none with said word count, then no award is given for that category. This is for all eras (pretty simple copy paste and word count) This is many categories, actually, novels, novellas, novelette, short story (drabbles should be a part of vignette).

year of eligibility is for new stories from start of year to the end of year e.g. January 1 2019 to December 31, 2019. new story only. If someone wrote a new story on January 2, 2019, and never finish it by December 31st, 2019, but finish it January 2, 2020, he/she should be eligible for the year 2019, but is not eligible for 2020.

B. new authors (only those who have posted their first story from January 1 to December 31 of previous year. See above.

C. Then we should have some cecil b demille type award for an author who is still active and have written every year since he/she registered for at least 5 years?.

D. Rotating Award set by the winner of prior year (the winner of the prior year must say what the award category is when he/she receives the award(reward) e.g. AXCMan when he won in 2019, he says the new category should be poems, and the rotating category in 2020 would be poems. When ABCWoman win in 2020, she tells us the rotating category is songfic, and this category is in play at award 2021, and so on and so forth. Like the olympic hosts kinda.

since the awards would be on the hypothetically July 7, someone need to make a ballot and mass pm?/email? every author who wrote a fic the prior year. this is done 1 to 2 months prior? this would be the only complication I see as people may be want their privacy or whatnot. But since they were willing to post their fic, I see no problem receiving ballots.

Then they vote until maybe June 29? or sometimes like that?

For something to work like that I see we need to have someone to index every new story each month, (if people were busy, just maybe update the index every month? but that someone need to update the index for sure)

eligibility: Everyone should be able to vote freely, and if everyone vote for themselves, then every nominee get 1, and no winner would be announced. That's actually one winner, no one. mwahahaha. p.s. the mods should be able to find out about the socks problem.

Lastly, for the lack of participation problem, as said, if every single one of fics written are drabbles, then I foresee some mighty competition in the short story category (like 1000 competing) and maybe 1 or 2 competing for novels?

The question of rewards:
Maybe a free fanfic cover from one of the artists? but someone wiser than me should be abler to think up more.

 

Always good to see new people, participating.

 

Here I am, with some delay. Unfortunately nominating and voting through Google Forms demands that the index of eligible stories is much more analytical than what we have at this point. This can not be done by a single person or even by a small group. It would have to be crowdsourced. I do not believe that this is feasible.

I will repeat what was said above that making the spreadsheet is easy. It is merely an improved form of the spreadsheet we are using for the fic index, to which I have been contributing behind the scenes.

Having discussed the mathematics behind nominations at great length with Chyntuck last year and this year, I believe that people should nominate writers instead of stories in all categories. One would thus nominate the best epic writer, the best short story writer, the best romance writer and so on and so forth. Nominated authors would then choose an appropriate story from their writing of the year. This would simplify things both for nominators and for volunteers because the size of the sample from which to choose is smaller and it would allow to maintain a diversity of categories.

I will pay dearly for this, but I disagree with my wife and insist that the awards should take place every year. I simply enjoy them too much.