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Upcoming Awards!

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Gama

Gama

Let's get funky!
Gama - Former Bulbagarden Forums Head Administrator
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As you may have gathered from the discussions that took place some months ago, the other WW mods and I have been working on completely revitalising the current awards system, based on the advice and opinions of its users, to maximise the enjoyment and utility that the Awards provide and so that we don’t have to change the format of the Awards every single season. This is what we have come up with:

Frequency

Firstly, the awards will now be tri-annual. We felt that quarterly was too often but were also concerned that bi-annual would be too infrequent. We feel this is a healthy middle ground. The months in which the Awards will take place will be January, May and September.

Categories

We have also changed the categories somewhat. They are now:

Best Journey Fic (Any work which centres around a journey or quest that involves travelling to specific places, including, but not limited to, collecting badges and contest ribbons.)
Best Expansion Fic (Any work which expands upon the existing canon, whether it be into the past, future or previously unseen aspects of the present.)
Best Non-Pokémon/Crossover (Any work which does not feature Pokémon or crosses Pokémon with another fandom.)
Best Dark Fic (Any work which explores dark themes, including, but not limited to, explorations of morality, the experiences of villains and/or villainous teams and particularly grim worlds.)
Best Alternate Work (Any work which does not easily fit into any of the above categories, including, but not limited to, poetry, crack fics and shipping fics.)
Best Protagonist (The central character of any work.)
Best Antagonist (A villain featured in any work.)
Best Supporting Character (Essentially, any character that is not the central protagonist or antagonist.)
Best Reviewer (Any Writer’s Workshop user who gives reviews.)
Best Newcomer (Any Writer’s Workshop user who has become active on the forum since the last Awards season in July.)

Overall Awards

The winners of the first five awards will then compete for the ‘Best Work’ award and the winners of the next three awards will then compete for the ‘Best Character’ award.

Nominating, voting and judging

All categories will be nominated by the users. Moderators are eligible for nomination. Fics that have not been updated since the last Awards season (July) are not eligible. Nominations will go from 15th January – 22nd January.

The ‘Best Reviewer’ and ‘Best Newcomer’ categories will be voted for by users. The other categories will be judged. We aim to have ten judges. @Legacy @LightningTopaz, @Ryuutakeshi, @Stellar Haze and myself are the confirmed judges so far. We would like to give Writer’s Workshop users the opportunity to judge for the Awards as we believe being a moderator is not necessarily reflective of writing skill and, therefore, to have the best judging panel possible, judges should not be limited to mods. To that end, a judging application form will be released when the nomination thread is opened. Judges will be announced at the beginning of the voting/judging phase. Judges will still be eligible for the Awards but will not judge categories in which they are a nominee. The Overall Awards will also be decided by the judging panel. The first judging/voting phase will run from 25th January – 1st February. The second judging phase will run from 1st February – 3rd February.

Prizes

Winners of each award, including the Overall Awards will win both a personalised banner and a badge specific to that award. As with previous awards, all banners will be recorded in the Writer’s Workshop Hall of Fame. In addition to this, any user who can obtain eight badges (including over several award seasons) will be recorded in the first post of the Hall of Fame as a ‘Writer’s Workshop Champion’.
 
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This sounds great! And for the first time, and I mean this with compliments, I feel it is properly thought-out. Quite optimistic about this new system; looking forward to see how other users will react to it.

Now to decide who to nominate...
 
This all looks very well thought out. I like the idea of having more people than just mods do the judging, it's a good way to stop mod fics from dominating (although the main reason for that is they're usually just plain really good). I might just apply to be a judge... Looks like I'm going to be doing some major reading this weekend in preparation for nominations!
 
I should have noticed this sooner... Why did you decide against the 'Best Archived Fic' award?
 
Probaby because archived fics are also allowed to be nominated?

Though, if that's the case, I didn't see anything about those at all.
 
Archived fics are eligible for the next Awards season after they've been retired.

It was something we thought about for sure, but I guess the reasoning was that a permanent archived fic award just wasn't necessary since all archived fics have already been eligible for awards during their active lives already.
 
Legacy said:
Archived fics are eligible for the next Awards season after they've been retired.

It was something we thought about for sure, but I guess the reasoning was that a permanent archived fic award just wasn't necessary since all archived fics have already been eligible for awards during their active lives already.
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Alright, then. That makes sense. If I have any other question, I'll post it here.
 
-is amazingly excited about this and is already looking for whom to nominate-

Quick questions:
1. Are we each limited to nominating only one fic/char per category?
2. Can we only nominate a fic for one category? Ex: Only nominate something like Haze's Academy fic(I feel really dumb for not remembering the name) as either Alternate or Expansion but not both or can we do both?
3. This is more like an observation but wouldn't the alternate fic sort of be bloated with everything that CAN fit into it? Or is there something I'm not seeing?
 
Chaosj2 said:
-is amazingly excited about this and is already looking for whom to nominate-

Quick questions:
1. Are we each limited to nominating only one fic/char per category?
2. Can we only nominate a fic for one category? Ex: Only nominate something like Haze's Academy fic(I feel really dumb for not remembering the name) as either Alternate or Expansion but not both or can we do both?
3. This is more like an observation but wouldn't the alternate fic sort of be bloated with everything that CAN fit into it? Or is there something I'm not seeing?
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Good questions all round. I would say, quickly, that more detail will be provided when the Nominations Thread opens on the 15th but I will answer these questions as best I can now.

1) Users will be allowed to nominate two fics/characters/users per category.

2) You may nominate a fic for as many categories as you like, as long as it is eligible for that category. I should also mention - it is against the rules to ask people to nominate you. Users are encouraged to use the "report" button if they are asked to do so, this can be done for PMs. If you do this, please make sure you specify that it is about the Awards in your report.

3) Well, you are right in a respect. The Alternate category could become bloated but we've done our research. Only fics that do not qualify for any of the other categories are allowed to be nominated for the Alternate category. We did a census of the categories of fics in the Workshop and found that if the categories are divided like this, the Alternate category contains approximately as many eligible candidates as the other categories. Users who have been here for previous awards may have noticed that Shipping no longer has its own category. This is because, in spite of being a mainstream genre in most fanfiction communities, it is not here in the BMGf Writer's Workshop. This makes it an 'Alternate' genre that would compete against other fics that are not of genres that we would consider mainstream in this community, such as crack. We think this makes for a fairer awards system.
 
Thanks for the answers, seems you guys have it all under control. -goes back to deciding whom to nominate-
 
I am excited, but one quick question: is this allowing any story written since the last awards, or from a shorter time period?
 
AceTrainer14 said:
I am excited, but one quick question: is this allowing any story written since the last awards, or from a shorter time period?
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AetherX said:
When will the cutoff date for "active" fics be? I may want to finish up Locked in Battle if I still have time to qualify for these awards... I have a feeling I missed it though :p
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Any fic that has at least been updated once (at least one chapter) after the previous awards will be eligible.
 
AceTrainer14 said:
I am excited, but one quick question: is this allowing any story written since the last awards, or from a shorter time period?
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Any since the last Awards. We know that's a longer time period than is usually included but it wouldn't really be fair to fics that have been updated soon after the last Awards to not do it this way.


AetherX said:
When will the cutoff date for "active" fics be? I may want to finish up Locked in Battle if I still have time to qualify for these awards... I have a feeling I missed it though :p
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There's no late cut off date, it just has to have been updated since July. Of course, you have to make sure there's time for people to read it and nominate it!
 
Oh! I just noticed nobody answered a very important question GaMa asked! Yes! I definitely think mods should be able to nominate, after all, they're readers/authors too so they have that right.
 
Chaosj2 said:
Oh! I just noticed nobody answered a very important question GaMa asked! Yes! I definitely think mods should be able to nominate, after all, they're readers/authors too so they have that right.
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Thank you for answering! I actually left that question in there by accident as it was on the draft version of this message =P but I still appreciate that you took the time to answer.

That said, we never actually came to a decision on that one so I think, unless anyone has any serious objections, we should allow mods to nominate. I can't think of any real problems that it would cause.
 
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