Cleaning Up the Mess
Greetings denizens of the mylar_fic community,
I'm speaking to you in lieu of ladywilde80 because she can't access LJ from her workplace and we felt that this needed to be dealt with immediately.
The post made last night to deal with questions and concerns regarding the Fic Awards has been deleted. This is not because we don't respect your opinions, we do, but there has been fighting that is simply hurtful to many people, and certainly counter-productive. We felt we had to halt this in it's tracks now, before things got even more out of control.
To be fair, the fighting was only amongst a small group of people, but it upsets and angers others and these things tend to build and grow until they become far more of a problem than it ever should have been in the first place. So I'll thank everyone who stayed calm and reasonable, regardless of their opinions. Calm and intelligent discourse is always appreciated.
I would also like to take the time to say that the whole concept for the awards came about rather suddenly. We held open discussion and poles on how to proceed with things and discussed the issues as they came up. We tried to keep things as democratic and fair as possible. We're new to this, and trying to do our best to keep everyone happy; however, this is one of the biggest communities in the Heroes fandom and not everyone is going to be happy. There's not much we can do about this, but we are trying our best.
So, let's deal with the issues brought up:
QUESTION: Why did some categories only have 3 noms in the voting list when they got more than 3 noms total?
ANSWER: To quote ladywilde80:
The gist of it is that I could not have included every possible nomination submitted. There were way too many single nominations which in turn brought some categories up to twenty or more fics.
For example: Best Supporting Character (Female) had 19 nominations. Only three had multiple nominations, therefore those were included and everything else was removed because each one received only one vote making it unfair for us to simply chose one at random and include it to bring the total up to four.
I would like to note at this point that, if and when these awards are run again, we will not be including all the fics ever written, it'll be more like what was written in the last 6 months/year. As it stands, if we hadn't trimmed things down we would have seen 10-20 noms in almost every category and that's just too unweildy to deal with (it's been a very long week as is). In future we might not have to trim things down, but for this time around trying to keep to 4 noms per category was the only practical approach.
QUESTION: "Maybe you should redo the [nom] vote so people know how to vote and so on?"
ANSWER: No. We're sorry if some of you didn't think the rules were clear enough, and we will take what we have learned here to make things clearer next time, but we nearly killed ourselves pulling these lists together and we can't do it again so soon. Plus, we (ok, I) don't think there were enough problems to warrant it.
QUESTION: "In the interests of making as many people as happy as possible, would it be incredibly annoyingly hard work to list all the nominations?"
ANSWER: Once again, we don't have the time or energy to do this right now. See the list of noms? Double or triple it, at least. I think I might cry if asked to code a post with that many more fics. However suggestions have been made about a big rec post sometime in the future to promote lesser-known works. It's something worth considering for the future and you could posts the lists yourselves. Discussions can be had, but whatever is decided on should wait until the awards are over.
QUESTION: People self-nominated? WTF?
ANSWER: As has been pointed out, it was technically allowed. I assure you, though, that a) very few people did it and b) it pretty much didn't affect the outcome.
Replies to this post will be screened to avoid further unpleasentness, but I will go through the responses and un-screen everyone that plays nice.
I'm speaking to you in lieu of ladywilde80 because she can't access LJ from her workplace and we felt that this needed to be dealt with immediately.
The post made last night to deal with questions and concerns regarding the Fic Awards has been deleted. This is not because we don't respect your opinions, we do, but there has been fighting that is simply hurtful to many people, and certainly counter-productive. We felt we had to halt this in it's tracks now, before things got even more out of control.
To be fair, the fighting was only amongst a small group of people, but it upsets and angers others and these things tend to build and grow until they become far more of a problem than it ever should have been in the first place. So I'll thank everyone who stayed calm and reasonable, regardless of their opinions. Calm and intelligent discourse is always appreciated.
I would also like to take the time to say that the whole concept for the awards came about rather suddenly. We held open discussion and poles on how to proceed with things and discussed the issues as they came up. We tried to keep things as democratic and fair as possible. We're new to this, and trying to do our best to keep everyone happy; however, this is one of the biggest communities in the Heroes fandom and not everyone is going to be happy. There's not much we can do about this, but we are trying our best.
So, let's deal with the issues brought up:
QUESTION: Why did some categories only have 3 noms in the voting list when they got more than 3 noms total?
ANSWER: To quote ladywilde80:
The gist of it is that I could not have included every possible nomination submitted. There were way too many single nominations which in turn brought some categories up to twenty or more fics.
For example: Best Supporting Character (Female) had 19 nominations. Only three had multiple nominations, therefore those were included and everything else was removed because each one received only one vote making it unfair for us to simply chose one at random and include it to bring the total up to four.
I would like to note at this point that, if and when these awards are run again, we will not be including all the fics ever written, it'll be more like what was written in the last 6 months/year. As it stands, if we hadn't trimmed things down we would have seen 10-20 noms in almost every category and that's just too unweildy to deal with (it's been a very long week as is). In future we might not have to trim things down, but for this time around trying to keep to 4 noms per category was the only practical approach.
QUESTION: "Maybe you should redo the [nom] vote so people know how to vote and so on?"
ANSWER: No. We're sorry if some of you didn't think the rules were clear enough, and we will take what we have learned here to make things clearer next time, but we nearly killed ourselves pulling these lists together and we can't do it again so soon. Plus, we (ok, I) don't think there were enough problems to warrant it.
QUESTION: "In the interests of making as many people as happy as possible, would it be incredibly annoyingly hard work to list all the nominations?"
ANSWER: Once again, we don't have the time or energy to do this right now. See the list of noms? Double or triple it, at least. I think I might cry if asked to code a post with that many more fics. However suggestions have been made about a big rec post sometime in the future to promote lesser-known works. It's something worth considering for the future and you could posts the lists yourselves. Discussions can be had, but whatever is decided on should wait until the awards are over.
QUESTION: People self-nominated? WTF?
ANSWER: As has been pointed out, it was technically allowed. I assure you, though, that a) very few people did it and b) it pretty much didn't affect the outcome.
Replies to this post will be screened to avoid further unpleasentness, but I will go through the responses and un-screen everyone that plays nice.