So here is the promised post on Round Two of the White Knight Awards. I really did mean to post this last night but time (and leather bodices) got away from me! Anyway, the main crux of the matter is this - I have not given up on the awards site and it has in fact been bubbling away in my subconscious since the last time. Round one was fairly stressful for me - as anyone who saw me in the staff room at lunchtime tallying up the screeds of votes will tell you - and I've been working on ways to make it less so this time around. The wonderful engelsteorra has offered to help me out with a means of tallying the votes automatically which will remove a whole lot of the stress and make this enjoyable for me again. 'Cause after all, that's why I do all this in the first place, because I enjoy it.

Some of you will remember from last time around I was considering changing from a popular vote to a judges decision. I was never completely happy with that idea (hell I was brought up by a Marxist, of course I'm going to sit in favour of the voice of the people wherever possible! *g*) so what I've done is take the suggestions made by lots of you and am proposing to implement a kind of screening process where necessary. I'm putting a cap on the number of nominations per category - I'm thinking around 10 or 15 maximum - and if the number of nominations goes over that judges will be asked to narrow the field down to that number. Here's my proposed new set of rules:

1. You cannot nominate yourself (nor can you vote for yourself)
2. Only one nomination per author will be allowed in each category
3. Authors nominated in the ‘New Author’ category last round are ineligible for that category this round.
4. Ship categories will be created as and when enough fics are nominated in that category (4) The remaining ship fics will be divided into het and slash
5. Working public links to the actual story must be provided – not just to an archive site’s home page.
6. Best site nominations must be Xander sites – ff.net TTH and other general sites are ineligible, as are sites devoted to another character. Shipper sites and personal sites are fine so long as Xander is the primary focus.
7. There will be a limit to the number of fics and authors per category (15) – if the number of nominations exceeds this, fics will be included based on the following criteria:
- Relevance to category
- Presentation (including Spelling/Grammar)
- Characterization
Judges for this will be drawn from a broad spectrum of the fan community and those who are themselves authors will not be asked to judge a category they are likely to be nominated in. The final winner will be decided by popular vote.
8. Het, Slash and Gen are acceptable in all categories unless otherwise stated.

Does that sound like a reasonable compromise between judging and voting? Hopefully by doing this the quality of nominations will be much higher (I'm not in any way saying the fics nominated last time round were poor but to be honest there were some I was... surprised to see nominated (putting it politely))

The next thing is a plea. I'm looking for volunteers to act as judges for the screening process. I'm hoping to open nominations this weekend and those will run for three weeks until the 2nd May (a Monday) so you wouldn't have to do anything until the first week (possibly the first fortnight) of next month. Some of you did volunteerafter the last round for which I'm eternally grateful, but are you still willing to do it and does this timing suit you?

The second plea is - are there any categories (outside of ship ones) you would like to see added this time around? (Or removed?) Last years nominees are here to give you an idea of the categories we had. hpchick already gave me a few ideas last year ( including Dark which I know I had on my notepad to include first time round but somehow never made it to the site *headdesk*)

So.. um, that's it. If you'd rather not leave a comment here then feel free to email me about it. Thanks!