Part the first: Pre-awards chit chat and format discussion.

So, the alert TFFer may have noticed that there were no awards this year, and if you are one of those people, congrats, you get a gold star. Though, truth be told, I’m all out of gold stars, so hopefully you’ll take an IOU. Cool. I’m glad you’re so reasonable about this.

To be fair, Oceaneyes has her reasons for not wanting to do the awards, and I don’t blame her. It’s probably a pain in the ass running threads and counting up all the votes, and in the end, is it really worth it in the end to run a yearly awards thread if only a handful of people are actually participating and winning?

Well, that’s where I come in. I like the yearly awards, and don’t want to see them die, so I’m going to take them over. It may be just this year, or it may be forever. We’ll see.

That being said, I am reformatting the TFF awards.

My first order of business: I am combining the actual TFF awards with the Bogus awards.

For all you cute little newbies or those of you too lazy to go read the Cleft, in years past, we had two different awards threads: One for the actual awards, and the other for a less serious, sillier set of awards known as the “Bogus Awards.” For the actual awards portion, I’m keeping the same awards, but in the interest of keeping the amount of awards limited, we’re going to be cutting a bunch of them. For your convenience, here’s the list of last year’s TFF Awards categories:

Best Staff Member
Best New Member
Most Popular
Most Helpful
Most Intelligent
Best Lurker
Most Hardcore Gamer
Nicest Male
Nicest Female
Funniest Male
Funniest Female
Most Sarcastic
Most Attractive Male
Most Attractive Female
Most Bizarre/Random
Music Guru
Best Roleplayer
Best Writer (Literature forum)
Best Graphic Artist
Best Traditional Artist
Member with Best Avatar/Signature Combo
Most Interesting Journal
Most Creative
Best Club/Social Group
Best TFF Duo

Ideally, I want to have two dozen awards total. One from the actual awards, and one from the bogus awards (If you’d like to have more actual awards and less bogus ones, post about it). So, my first question: how do we begin cutting out categories? I feel like some of these are kind of redundant. We have two different awards for artists, two awards for writing, and a most creative award. Maybe these can be cut down to just “Best artist” and “Best Writer?” Maybe instead of having gender specific awards, we just have one award (ie instead of Nicest male/female we just have nicest member (heh heh heh))? I don’t know!

As for the bogus awards, if this all goes well, and isn’t a total disaster, I want these to change every year. I came up with a couple of examples: “Most likely to be sexually harassed by che,” “Most likely to write sexy Cloud fanfic” “The Meier Link Memorial Award for Exceptional Spelling.” These are all poor examples, but I think they get the point across. Why can’t we have just dumb little awards poking fun at the community? TFF is a tightknit community, and that’s one of the reasons I like it here.

Also, I’m thinking of doing a bit of an overhaul to rules and stuff, but seeing as I literally went like, 5 minutes from Alisyn saying “Go for it” to writing up this OP, I’m not even sure this is coherent, so I’ll think up some rules later.

SO, things I want to discuss in this thread:
How do we keep the TFF awards fresh?
How do we get people active in them? Also, how do we get newer members to be active in them?
If you’re someone who doesn’t participate, why? What would make you change your mind, and think about being active in the awards?
How do we keep it from getting too cliquey, so that only a couple of people win all of the awards?
What do you want to see out of the TFF awards?

For the awards themselves:
Do you like the idea of combining traditional awards with the bogus awards? If so, what should be the ratio of serious to bogus awards?
Any suggestions for rules? Eligibility? (I already have an idea for Pete’s Law, mostly because that name makes me chuckle)
Suggestions for actual rewards? In years past we’ve just had little banners and stuff people have put in their sigs. I think that’s pretty alright, but if somebody else has a kickass idea, I’m all ears.

Basically, I want the awards to be something people can get excited about. Frankly, the TFF awards are stale, and if we want to keep them around, they need some serious tweaks. I want to workshop this. If this is something that we take until the end of the year to work out, then hey, these will be 2013’s 2012 TFF Awards. So please. Comments, thoughts, suggestions.