Okay, I didn't really get involved with reading or anything this time around. But maybe splitting it into a two phase judging procedure would work, like this:

First, there's an initial nominations period, when all and sundry can nominate fics for the awards. This is followed by an initial vote, open to the public, which will narrow the number of fic's in each category down to a smaller no, say five. These five then are read by the independent (and anonymous) judging panel, (who've each undertaken not to nominate fics, nor participate in the first vote) who will make the final decision. If you did go on a panel, I would be willing to be on it, but it would depend on how busy I was at the time.

As for the time period, I really think you have to leave a long-enough gap to allow new fics to be written. If you have the next round too soon then you're going to end up with the same fics being submitted.

HTH

Laughs.

But then I already knew that.

I don't know about WKA, but with SunnyD there's a lot of categories that are more popular than others and I'm always afraid that finding winners will be harder. I think that's one reason our last round had so many ties.

As for voting... I think there are benefits to both popular and judged voting. In general categories, people who ship one pairing over another may vote based on that (I'm guilty of doing that myself). Judges on the other hand generally have a set of guidelines they have to follow in order to pick winners rather than the popular voter's "I like that best".

I hope some of that helped.

Elisabeth

I still say have the judges go through the initial flood of nominations. Have the panels winnow it down to five, make sure the five are all in the right category, and then let the final winner be decided by popular vote.

I'm also all for limiting the number of times one person can be nominated in a category (definitely one per).

The five a category sounds about right too.

Someone also suggested to me a non-Xover category would be a good idea too.

Could I also suggest a minimum number of nominations per category? You could say that if a category doesn't get at least 3 or 4 nominations, it will be disqualified or absorbed into another category? For example: Xander/Anya only has 2 nominations, you could put those nominations into the Xander/Other Female category and eliminate the Xander/Anya category for the voting.

I was just wondering, could people vote more than once? If they could, is there any other voting system to limit the number of votes per person?

I was actually thinking along those lines - categories which didn't really receive a lot of nominations this time round will probably be absorbed into another category - for example the Xander/Other Female which I did have on my notes but somehow never ended up on the site this time around *headdesk*

What might be an option, expecially for the shipper categories, is to give the nominators the option of saying which category they think a story should be in, and either myself or a judging panel could make the final decision on whether there are enough for each individual pairing to have a category. (I'm tired so I'm waffling and being a little repetitive - sorry!)

Because I wasn't all that organised for the voting pages this time around, there was actually nothing to stop people voting more than once. However there was an IP identification on the votes I got in and I used those to single out the multiple voters and discount those. I've now worked out how to fix it so that people can only vote once in each category next time around. It's done through a similar system - IP and cookie checking - so there are ways around it if someone is really determined to vote more than once, but it would take a lot of thinking out on their part.

Maybe there could be two rounds of popular voting? The first would narrow the stories down to 5 or so in each category, and the second would pick the winner from those 5? It would help to avoid a scenario where a story wins with 10% or less of the popular vote (I don't know if that happened this time around, but...) That might just make a lot of extra work for you, though.

Also... I hesitate to suggest this, because it sounds like discrimination, but maybe there should be seperate categories for slash fics and het fics in ALL categories? I'm concerned that, if you leave things the way they are now, voting in the general caregories will just turn into a war between the slash crowd and the het crowd, and whichever crowd is bigger will win. It seems, to my untrained eye anyway, that this is what happened this time around, since quite a few of the general categories had a het fic as winner and a slash fic as runner-up (or the reverse, on occasion).

Just an idea I thought I'd throw out there.