Awards Multiple-post awards discussion

I know this is off-topic forgive me . . .

I know this is going to make me sound selfish, but to all of those who say the awards be completely disbanded, we NEED an awards.

Why? Here's why:

Humans are competitive creatures. They love to win. When there's awards being passed out people, of course, want to win them. While I agree that fanfiction is just for fun, and that the awards are just for show, there's a lot of people who work hard to win. And the reason why we must keep the awards is because there's so many alternate ways for overzealous fanficcers to compete in:

1. Size of their PM lists.

2. How many responses per chapter and throughout the whole thread.

3. How many pages per thread.

The list goes on.

Without an Awards, the overzealous will definitely find an alternate method to compete for 'being the best'. And what will we do if that happens? Eliminate PMs? Stop counting how many responses there are? Shove everything onto one page?

Just for board stability, to keep things fun, and to allow overzealous competitors a better medium to learn that this isn't a competition or popularity contest, there has to be an Awards of some sort. Whether biannually, annually, monthly, or whatever, there should be an Awards.

I hope I made sense.

 

Because somehow I missed most previous discussion and am scrambling to catch up.

Qualifications for most underrated should be more strict, and a story that qualifies elsewhere probably shouldn't be there. There was one thread that consistantly averaged maybe 5.9 replies per post....over quite a few pages! It seems to me that that's not really that underrated, and the (crowded) category could use some trimming. I don't see how having it be 4 or less (maybe 6 or less for one-posters) would hurt, and it seems like it would help things a great deal. Underrated is just imho too big for voters to handle (let alone volunteers?).

Before should be 3, Saga and Beyond should be 4. This was what people voted for pretty much because it makes sense. Before is a third the size of the other eras for fics and has a quarter the activity! All eras are not the same.

 

Before should be 3, Saga and Beyond should be 4. This was what people voted for pretty much because it makes sense. Before is a third the size of the other eras for fics and has a quarter the activity! All eras are not the same.



No worries.
The announcement was made earlier that Before would be 3 and Saga/Beyond would remain at 4.

 

heh, yeah, I missed some things skimming. So Saga (and Beyond?) do have half again as many voters - I kinda suspected this.

 

I know this is off-topic. I know this is stupid. I suppose this has already been suggested before, but I'll ask anyway :

Is there a way to make the mark-up codes easier?

That'd make life easier for both hosts/volunteers and for voters. For example, mark-up codes like {[(/link}] and so on, did scare me from voting, and I suspect that I'm not the only one. And I'm not mentioning the fact that the strain for the eyes is horrible.

As for the excerpts: despite the fact that it takes horribly long to read through them all, I think that we do need them. But there were just so many of them in the summer, and I think it's impossible to build a subjective (or is it objective ) opinion about the story's quality if you haven't read the story, or didn't have anything to do with the author before. I read through the excerpts, and found some marvelous peices of writing. But, again, I din't vote because of mark-ups and some other reasons that I won't mention here - you won't see my point anyway.

 

I think you guys have done an incredible job with these awards, and I wasn't involved enough to deserve to have a say - but I would have to echo what CrazyAni said - as a newbie on this site, I ultimately got scared away from voting because it was just too overwhelming... I made it as far as the nomination stage (which I did incorrectly, by "seconding" fics listed on the official qualifying thread, naively assuming that they were indeed eligible) - and after getting my noms sent back to me with supposedly ineligible fics about four times (most of which turned out to not be ineligible in the end?) - I didn't dare to actually vote, for fear that I'd mess something up there too and create more headaches for everybody...

Anyway, I would definitely have to say that the process is prohibitive to newbies... (Which is perhaps no great loss anyway?) My feeling is that you have to be an active participant on the boards here to even have a clue how to nominate or vote - and that's probably exactly as it should be... So yeah, aside from my own personal confusion, I really think you folks have done an amazing job organizing all of this!

 

Would new users be willing to send in nominations in a format something like this?

Demonstration Form

The "form" this link takes you to does not work--you need more than a cheapo personal web site from AOL to get one to function. However, creating a functional version would be possible.

The form could be set up to send the overseer/host/whoever data that's already in copy-and-paste format. People could still put in valid but incorrect URLs or mistype story and author names, but a lot of picky little errors could be eliminated.

 

Ophelia, that is an excellent form! It looks great and easy to do even for people who are extremely busy.

 

Edit (To Layren) Thank you . . . the major barrier to using this method before was the lack of a list of registered voters, since people could type any old thing into the user name field and no one would know if it was valid or not.

Now that we have a registered voter list, however, we could do the same thing we did last time around, and check the submitted name against the registration list. If it's there, a volunteer could send a confirmation PM to the username that came in with the noms. It could just be a copy-and-paste of the noms submission. If the user PM's back from their account and says, "Umm, I *so* did not nominate those stories," you know you have a fraudulent vote, and you throw it out.

 

If someone else coded it to work, I could possibly host it; I have space on Earthlink (and Verizon space shared with my sister, but Verizon < Earthlink when it comes to reliability, IMHO). I could even make up another site name for it since I can have 8 webspace chunks of 10Mb each (no bandwidth limit, AFAIK, unless it gets crazy high, and a text-based form shouldn't eat a lot even if a few hundred users use it) and am only using two of them. It doesn't have to send the results to my email; I know they can be coded to send to any email and even to a bot that sorts the information itself and stores it. I just don't remember how to do it.

 

I could code a very non-l33t version, but I know at least a couple of people who could write pretty code. I've just been reluctant to ask them to do it, since there's been little community interest in the idea, and I don't want to ask someone to do work that would end up going unused. If it turns out that people *are* interested, I can try batting my eyes at some programmers.

 

Leona - Yes, that is definitely very clear and well-organized, and I found it extremely helpful as a newbie... And yet despite my best attempt to follow the instructions, I still managed to mess up! But maybe I was the only one... I do tend to be a bit slow that way!

 

On the form:

The easiest way to do it would be to have the PM Sock check here on the forums. And whoever is doing it, be the one to assign users their username/password for the form.


And we could easily have three different applications here.

1) the Noms application. Which would look very similar to the form talked about. The values could then be stored in a database. Once the nom period is over, then we could generate pm's to those users who have stories that are nominated

2)And gives us the Excerpt Application. Nominated authors get a special username/password to the excerpt program, and they then get to enter excerpts for the stories they get. The user would then be responsible for ensuring it is properly marked up in the edit field (which would cut users off at however long the exercpt is determined to need to be).

which leads us to:
3) The voting app. When voting begins, users use their same username/pwd from the noms app to access the voting one. They are allowed to view/review the excerpts for as long as the voting time continues (their votes would be tied to their username, so that the user can take as long as necessary for voting (as long as it falls within the purview of the voting timeframe).


The admin side would be a simple thing of keeping track of users, tracking when the applications are active, a listing of those fics that are nominated, and finally a listing of those fics that win.


Web Server requirements for this would be: a server-side language (php, asp, asp.NET) and a database, plus someone with enough free time to code the application.

It could easily be set up to differntiate the three eras, allowing access to noms based on date/era. and then at the end of the awards set, we can flush the database, and the application is ready for the next time.


What this does is kills all needs for vote counters, excerpt coders and all those types of things. What it doesnt' kill is the human element for deciding things, as someone will need to look at all the nommed fics to make sure that they are valid for the category they're nommed in, and if not, mark them as "blacklisted" for that category so that they can't get multiple noms...

 

ophelia, holy good god, that's a great form. A couple of questions:

1) The noms could be sent to someone's email, correct? And volunteers could go through them just like they go through PMs.

2) Would the submission emails be more readable for volunteers if you further broke down the fields? For instance, Best Male OC: three fields - character name, story title, author name. Or would it not be any different from the form you've already created? I was thinking that the formatting would be absolutely consistent for everyone's noms, and it might even be easier for people to use.


Maybe all the markup coding in the nom template is scary for newbies? Speaking as an oldbie, even for me sometimes the template is hard to use, since you have to be careful to not paste over a bracket.

The two best solutions I've seen so far to make things easier for both users and volunteers:

1) Layren's - leave out links from the nom list, and thus all you need when PMing noms is the plain http address.

2) ophelia's form (voter registration helps a lot with this one).

 

Ahh, urk. If it's beyond HTML and Javascript I'm not sure it would work on Earthlink without special software. Once it goes beyond basic Javascript I don't have a clue.

It's a shame we can't have "screened" posts here that are invisible, like on LiveJournal; that would solve the whole voting issue pretty quickly. Since that's not an option, it would need semi-complex code on a place that can handle it and work reliably, and won't go all 404.

I think this might actually be a good idea, even if it is a lot of work first time around, because the code can be re-used again and again. Perhaps even with a couple of threads volunteering to test it when they are having a vote (the thread for OC challenges, for instance) to make sure the kinks are all worked out.

 

ophelia: how about a plain text version of that form? That way, you don't have to have anyone host it on a server, you can just post it in the first post of the thread. Not that I don't like the form as it is, just that it can be simpler.

 

then you've just got the existing template which is posted in the thread normally...

 

A suggestion about the nom form- we'd have to be a bit more careful to check for socks witht hat, as we wouldn't be using a system where the mods could see IPs (I think). As a result, what if when people registered to vote, they were given a "new" username that could be generated just for this pupose. All those usernames would follow a certain format, so it would be very easy to spot usernames different from the norm right off the bat, as those who would sock vote I figure wouldn't bother to learn said specific format. We could have a master list of names taken- we'd then be able to know who had voted. A little cross-check heavy, but very safe.

 

IP checks are only needed when someone registers, which they'd have to do via PM. Once a username is registered, it's considered understood that it's legit. So once a username was on the registration list, it could be accepted any number of ways.

As for how the form works--the kind of form I was thinking about would actually have three parts to it--a "front end," which is written in HTML, a "back end," which is written as a text file, and a cgi script, which I would get pre-written from somewhere else. (There are lots of them--some isp's have cgi form scripts already uploaded for you to use.)

Earthlink says it has cgi support, although home-user ISP accounts tend to have limitations on what you can do with cgi. (I don't know Earthlink well enough to say what it does and doesn't allow. I know AOL is worthless when it comes to cgi, and Comcast isn't much better. AOL and Comcast would be the ISP's I have.) A friend of mine said that he thought he could probably get us space to host a cgi form script on his work server if I paid the company $5-$10. (This I can afford.) I also know around 3 or 4 other geeks who run servers out of their houses. My guess is most wouldn't have a problem with a form script that would have to handle hundreds of entries for about 10 days--and then nothing for an entire year. (There are probably fanfic and/or TFN people around who have servers of their own as well. It's a fairly common thing for computer professionals to do.)

The lovely thing about cgi forms is that they format user input for you. This past summer, volunteers were going buggy hand-coding this:

Best Collaboration
{link=http://boards.theforce.net/fan_fiction_stories_classic_jc_board_reply_only/b10016/3149441/p1] Future Galaxy: Beginings{/link] by Orion_Star and LanceJade

Into this:

Best Collaboration

Title of Nominated Piece: Future Galaxy: Beginings
Author of Nominated Piece: Orion_Star and LanceJade
Link to Nominated Piece: {link=http://boards.theforce.net/fan_fiction_stories_classic_jc_board_reply_only/b10016/3149441/p1]Future Galaxy: Beginings{/link]
Total Number of Nominations During Your Shift: 1
Names of Each User Nominating this Piece During Your Shift: Some_User

(That URL's for a 2001 story I found at random on page 100 of the Classic board, incidentally. Any resemblance to current stories living or dead is purely coincidental.)

With a form, you can match data fields with the places you want to put things in a block of text. The text file on the host machine might read:

Best Collaboration

Title of Nominated Piece: [Title]
Author of Nominated Piece: [Author]
Link to Nominated Piece: [ ][Title][/link] Total Number of N...(That's just the September New Stories Index

 

*wanders in, tries to be quick...ish*

1. I liked the Awards, generally.

2. For most policies, I just want to know clearly what they are; I am therefore leaving most of the policy discussion, especially mechanics, to people who are better equipped to see what has and hasn't worked.

3. That said, for my part, I would be perfectly fine with using a form, or with being told that if I couldn't get my nominations/votes/excerpts formatted properly they wouldn't count.

3.1 However, couldn't posting excerpts "as-is" if they come in wrong cause text falling after them in the same post to be messed up?

3.2 I admit to having been perplexed at first as to why we were supposed to break code in the PMs. (I remember being uncertain for a while as to whether markup worked in PMs at all, which probably didn't help.) I eventually either figured it out or got an explanation.

4. I felt that I had multiple conversations that went like this:

"Could someone please tell me what the current policy/custom is?"
"We aren't talking about that now. We'll discuss changing the rules in the Post-Awards Discussion."
"....."

This was mostly about "campaigning." I found these exchanges much more distressing than anything I saw that could actually be considered campaigning. I think.

5. I do not think the survey was constructed so that we really have a consensus on campaigning yet.

Well, I do think it's clear (but seemed generally clear before the survey) that most people used it to refer to behavior they considered inappropriate. But even in my very limited experience I got the impression that there was a lot wider range of definitions for it than were covered by the survey -- everything from "Campaigning is just spam that happens to promote a story in the awards; it's already forbidden and doesn't need special rules" (which would have needed a "none of the above" option) on up to... well, I don't know what the strictest definition would be, but I don't see any intuitive reason why "Nominate ____" is any better than "Vote for ____" -- I'd guess it was forbidden, but it wasn't covered -- and I'd be very shy about "Eligible for ____," "Nominated for ____," and "Qualified for ____," as all those announcements seem to me like veiled variations on "Of course I want you to do something about it!" -- but they seem to be allowed (and employed by people who are strongly opposed to "Vote for") -- which does make sense given that thanking people in your own story thread is encouraged.

But basically I'm still not sure where to draw the line, between thanking people (and associated announcements) and excessive self-promotion (or other-promotion!). Unless it's pretty much declarative vs. imperative mood. That would be easy. And make sense from a courtesy standpoint.

6. I liked the twice-a-year awards, especially since they kind of fit with the six-month lock on inactive threads, and had been voted on. But I do not know whether the people who voted so overwhelmingly for them were volunteering to make it easier (or for that matter, at what point you get "too many cooks" phenomena), and the other fanfic communities I've been in that had awards generally did them on an annual basis. That did go by calendar year, though.

7. I agree with... I think it was Oqidaun? The point of fanfic in general and the Awards when we have them is that it's supposed to be fun.

That said, I do think it's important to remember that for some people, competition is fun. I understand that it can get out of hand, but I don't think it's automatically a bad thing.

8. With regard to people writing for the awards... I don't think it ever occurred to me to limit my writing based on what I thought would win. It did however occur to me to try expanding into some story-types that I might not have considered without some sort of prompt, though. For instance, in some of my previous fandom communities, the reaction to songfic is "Oh, no, songfic!" -- not giving it an award category. (On the other hand, I've written it