~*~Favorites of FanFic Festival Social and Questions Thread~*~ Survey! We want YOUR opinions

To mavjade & Briannakin:

Thank you for hosting this. I do feel a Favorites Festival is less labor-intensive than a full-blown awards.

Categories

I found the "epic, short story, etc." ones easier as well as "alternate universe, canon-compliant."

The timeline categories were harder due to overlap and filtering issues: e.g., was the story tagged a certain way?


Characters and Relationships

I like the way these categories were set out. I'd keep these.

I totally enjoyed, as with the awards, the author and reviewer categories. It's a chance to celebrate an overall level of quality.

Drop-off of participation

Besides perhaps the timing, maybe having more categories per week?

The anonymity is a great option to include for those who feel inclined to share their favorites that way.

 

In answer to this, honestly, I just got lazy. Posting the links was more work than I wanted to do. Bad excuse, I know. But it's the truth.

 

Thanks to Briannakin and mavjade for hosting the Favourites.

I like coming here because anything to do with acknowledging ficcage makes me feel warm and fuzzy.

As for next time, more categories per week sounds usable.

 

First off, I think the festival is a really cool idea and seems like it went very well, so kudos to everyone involved! I'm glad to hear it was less work and it seems like a lot of stories got acknowledged (which I think should always be the goal of the awards).

Thoughts on future festivals: To start off I should say I didn't participate in this year's event at all, except for peeking in occasionally. (I've been busy in real life, but also my muse is just much more interested in NSWFF right now.) So take my thoughts for what they are worth, which may very well be nothing.

Time: The festival took place over about four months, I think? That just seems way too long. I don't think it's possible to keep any audience excited about anything for that length of time. I would keep it at two weeks, maybe a month at the most. I understand trying to spread out the fun, but I'm guessing participation dropped off due to both natural loss of momentum over time and procrastination ("The categories I want to nominate in aren't going to be up for two months, I'll work on later." Two months later.... "Oh, the awards are still going on. Wasn't I thinking about nominating something? Eh, it's probably too late and I don't really remember what I was going to do anyway...")

Categories: There were a lot. Perhaps an overwhelming number. And I would guess keeping track of categories is what creates the most work for the hosts. I would propose eliminating categories. Instead, readers simply share their favorite stories, and provide a short description or explanation as to why the story is their favorite. So Reader 1 shares three stories they particularly enjoyed. Then Reader 2. Then Reader 3. And so on. The same stories can be shared more than once, but if the same story keeps coming up, readers are encouraged to find a different story to share. I would say each reader can share up to three stories a day, and up to maybe seven stories total over the two weeks. Categories could be worked in to the explanation, if desired: "I love Story X because of the way Luke and Mara's relationship is portrayed." "Story Y is a favorite because John Doe is such a great original character."

Index: I love indexes. I think they are important to for helping readers finds stories, especially after the festival is over. I think a running index would be especially important under my proposal, so readers can see if their favorites are already on the list. The index could be alphabetical, but also by category (to a limited extent) to help readers find new stories. I wouldn't think it would be too much work to copy and paste stories into the index as they are shared, I even volunteer to be indexer.

Anonymous Submissions: Seems like they worked really well, I would do them the same way going forward.

 

Okay, I'll probably come back and comment more later but should probably leave something now since it's been a while since the survey was posted. I did like this festival style of awards and it seems like a good fit for the general activity level of the boards these days. The really extended time length did kind of lead me to procrastinate, but that may just be me. But I do think that a shorter time as suggested by others would be a good idea.

 

Sorry for the lateness of my reply; RL has been busy now that we're on summer schedule.

Categories: I agree with @Findswoman that I missed the genre categories (humor, romance, drama, adventure). I found myself making a mental list of stories along genre lines towards the end of 2018 ("this would be a good story for Best Romance"), so I was a little bit at loose ends when I didn't have those categories anymore . Maybe it comes from being a librarian, but it's an easy way for me to group stories together. I also found some of the more open-ended categories harder to choose stories for because they weren't easy for me to decide what the definition of a story that really stuck with you or one that deserves to be read by more people was, because I felt that all of the stories that I read could qualify for those in some way.

Length: The Festival did seem to go on a little too long. Like @Tarsier noted, it's hard to keep enthusiasm and participation up for something that lasts a couple months. I wonder if having people submit their favorites in one or two large batches, similar to the way nominations and voting were done would work? Then the volunteers/mods could announce them over the course of a week or two?

Anonymous Submissions: I'm up in the air about this. While I didn't necessarily mind seeing who nominated what or having people see what I nominated, it felt a bit awkward at times, particularly when it came to doing thanks. Knowing who nominated me, I felt a bit strange saying "I'd like to thank everyone..." but it would have felt really weird to say "Thanks for nominating me, JaneDoe and JennyReader! I appreciate it!" in public. This was also a lot of the reason I didn't do acceptance skits this year; without the Awards format, the characters really wouldn't have been accepting accepting anything, and again, it just felt kind of awkward having a general thank you skit in this situation.

Random thoughts: Perhaps having some more promotion for the Festival would help in the future. With Awards, there's usually a lead in period where there's a colorful banner about nominations starting and then another for voting. Maybe doing something similar would help raise awareness and enthusiasm? (And I would be more than happy to put together the banners again, if you think that would be helpful.)

 

I'm dealing with health issues and a dissertation and Mav is pretty busy with work so please don't make us feel guilty about not being able to work on it. I am planning on sitting down sometime this weekend and trying to get it done. It's just easier for us not to try and accept help at this point because we have a system going on and we are almost done.

 

No worries. I was completely intending to sit down and work on it this weekend. June was just a mess of DRL and I have so far been spending most of July playing catch up with my dissertation, Some things just fall to the bottom of the list and indexing this has been one of it.

 

And here comes the slowpoke who will need hours to figure out what just happened. But yeah, a THING HAPPENED and I believe I figured out how it worked, so let's fill this survey out, shall we?

Please, take care of yourself, this can wait! A like of support, of course.

Festival format in general.
I wasn't a part of it, but it was fun. I still prefer spontaneous award skits in the actual thread, though, because it makes things easier to follow. One can make use of skits with the new format, too.

Categories.
All cool, glad to see the reviewer category back and I adore the stories that don't fit category. That's a perfect idea - sometimes stories don't fit into anything even remotely common, but they still need to be recognised. I have just read the weirdest thing in all existing universes because I saw it listed under that category.

Yes, to both. Please. Indexes would make it easier to catch up (one for this year's results, also - in fact, I could make it, let me be useful) and as I pointed above and as Tarsier said, that could lead people to some unexpected discoveries.

And I really, really don't like the idea of seeing who did or who didn't nominate me. For people with fragile self-esteem and various headshrink-worthy issues, that would've been pretty hard to process during the process itself. This way it's easier, but still...scary stuff!

P.S.

Hello to my secret superfan, whoever you are. I love you, too!

Lemme guess..."you know"?

 

The index is now up and sticked. It will remain sticked for the rest of 2019.