At long last, the 2007 UFO Awards are complete! I am pleased to announce the results for Best Overall fanfiction of the year:

First Place: "Only In The World of Dragons" by atruwriter
Second Place: "Of Course" by insidiae
Third Place: "Only in Hyrule" by CrazygurlMadness

The award badges for the Best Overall round can be seen here. Congratulations to the winners!

This concludes the 2007 UFOs. Nominations for the 2008 awards will run through January 31st.

The "Best of Fandom" winners have been announced!

The UFO Awards website has been updated to include labels for all the winners on the Archives page. Click here to go there.

If you would like to see all the pretty badges I made for the winners, click here. (Heavy graphics warning.)

There is a plain-text listing of the winners in the discussion thread on the .moon forum, click here to join us there.

Congrats to all the winners! :)

In addition, the second round of voting is now open! The "Best Overall" ballot is made up of the First Place winners of the Best of Fandom round. Voters are required to read all of the eligible stories before voting. More details are available in the discussion thread or on the UFO Awards website.

Happy reading and voting!

A day late, but thus far NOT a dollar short, voting for the 2007 UFO Awards is now open!

For 2007 we had a total of 190 entries, of which 158 were seconded and accepted and became official contest entries. Categories have to have at least three entries to be voted on, which gives us 17 categories on the ballot (a 100% increase over last year!):

• Avatar: The Last Airbender


• Batman Beyond


• Card Captor Sakura


• Fruits Basket


• Fullmetal Alchemist


• Harry Potter


• Kaleido Star


• Kim Possible


• Legend of Zelda


• Life With Derek


• Ouran High School Host Club


• Princess Tutu


• Rurouni Kenshin


• Sailormoon


• Veronica Mars


• Witch Hunter Robin


• Works in Progress

Things are really taking off! We have a wide variety of categories this year, some new, some old. Big thanks to everyone who nominated and seconded stories! Now get over there and vote! :D

You can jump directly to the voting page via this URL:
http://www.dotmoon.net/awards/awards_vote.php

*Be aware that there is a Members' Choice tally running in addition to the regular tally. Members of .moon should make sure to login to the site before voting.*

The ballot will allow you to vote in as many or as few categories as you want, so don't worry if you're not familiar with them all. You can even go back later to vote in any category you didn't vote in the first time. You can only vote in a category one time, though, so make sure you're really set on your choices before submitting your ballots!

This is the first round of voting, to determine the top three stories of each fandom and the top ten stories of the WIPs. This voting stage will run through June 30th. (Still a couple of months behind where I'd like the timetable to be, but we're two months ahead of last year, so it's a start.) After that, the first place stories will face off for best fanfic of the year!

Don't forget, nominations for the 2008 UFOs are open as well. ^^

At long last, the 2006 UFO Awards are complete! I am pleased to announce the results for Best Overall fanfiction of the year:

First Place: "If You've A Ready Mind" by mistful
Second Place: "The Burning Time" by Misora
Third Place: "Faith" by The Noble French Fry

The award badges for the Best Overall round can be seen here.

Now that that's all taken care of, I've gone ahead and sent out the first wave of notification emails for the 2007 UFOs. All of the seconded nominees whose categories are likely to go to vote have been sent a notice asking them to accept their nominations. That's as far as I was able to get before my eyes started to cross. ^^;; Responses are already rolling in, and the 2007 awards are off to a great start! This year, I plan to send warning notices to the unseconded nominees and those in categories that need more entries, so the smaller fandoms have a fair chance to get in the game. I'll be doing that within the next few days.

In not-so-happy news, I was very excited about using the new private messaging system to notify LiveJournal users of their UFO nominations... until I discovered that free accounts have a limit on the number of messages you can send. Isn't that just like LJ, to do something so mean? -_- A lot of people don't include their email addresses in their profiles, so my only other option is to post comments in their journals, which I really hate to do. Now I have messages waiting that I can't answer, and I can't afford to upgrade the dotmoon LJ account right now because Dreamhost's recent accidental overcharge fiasco emptied my bank account. ;_; Sigh.

Making another attempt at posting these regularly...

While I'm here, voting in the second round of the 2006 UFO Awards ends this Friday. And we need votes like vampires need blood. I am not even kidding. Please, if you have any free time this week, do some reading and voting. Thanks.

This week 7 stories were added to the Library. There were no additions to the Gallery.

Stories

"Conversations in the Rain" by LokiLeysmith (Ah! My Goddess)
"Intervention" by LokiLeysmith (Ah! My Goddess)
"When the Knight is Done" by December (Batman Beyond)
"Ghost of a Chance" by Nephthys Moon PG13 (Harry Potter)
"Hope Like Smoke" by Nephthys Moon PG (Harry Potter)
"Family Ties" by LokiLeysmith PG13 (Sailormoon)
"Kitchen Chaos: A Day in the Life of the Outer Senshi" by LokiLeysmith (Sailormoon)

Find them all at http://www.dotmoon.net/library_new.php!

Just a quick update to show that I am, in fact, working on the site...

Last night I made a lot of progress on the future Marketplace (graphics exchange area). I've added functions for editing each graphic's data, a page for viewing individual images, and a function to add a watermark to images marked "Private." With this in use, by marking a graphic "Private" it will be displayed with a watermark marring the image. To get the watermark removed, viewers can send the creator a message requesting to use the graphic. The aim here is to allow for a "sales" of "private" icons etc similar to what was done on ASMR. Using the "Private" option, you can decide who and how many people can download your graphics.

With those features completed, most of the complicated tasks are finished. With luck, we'll be able to start beta-testing of the Marketplace next week. :)

Also, a reminder, voting in the second round of the 2006 UFOs ends at the end of this month. If you have some time, please read the eligible stories and cast your vote. Turnout so far has been tragically low, I hope we'll get some more participation before the round ends!

The second round of voting for the 2006 UFOs has started! This year, the stories on the Best Overall ballot are:

"Faith" by The Noble French Fry
"How Things Were" by Fading Grace
"If You've A Ready Mind" by mistful
"Witchy Woman" by Vathara
"Oak Evolution" by Dejana Talis
"When I Was A Child" by Sarah P
"The Burning Time" by Misora

Voting will run through November 30th, and the winners will be announced in December. You can vote at any time by visiting the UFO Awards website: http://www.dotmoon.net/awards/

Be aware, however, that I have extra measures in place to make sure everyone voting in the second round has read all seven of the eligible stories. Please don't attempt to vote unless you have done so.

In other news, today is dotmoon.net's Primary Birthday. The site is officially two years old, at least as far as its first members are concerned. :)

The "Best of Fandom" winners have been announced!

The UFO Awards website has been updated to include labels for all the winners on the Archives page. Click here to go there.

If you would like to see all the pretty badges I made for the winners, click here. (Heavy graphics warning.)

There is a plain-text listing of the winners in the discussion thread on the .moon forum, click here to join us there.

I am also looking for feedback on the overall structure and process of the awards. The feedback thread is located here.

Congrats to all the winners! :)

The First Place winner of each fandom category will be included on the "Best Overall" ballot. Best Overall voting will begin on October 1st.

Most of you won't care about this, but I finally fixed a pesky bug that had been driving me crazy since the awards opened. The phantom entry issue is FIXED! Hooray! :D And fortunately it wasn't the kind of bug that lost us any votes. ^^ As far as I know at this point, that takes care of all the issues I've identified, so it's smooth sailing now.

Votes are rolling in! We're getting a great turnout after only a few days of voting being open. I'm very pleased with how things are going so far. Thanks to everyone who's helped promote the awards. ^^

In other news, dark_branwen was added to the beta-testing team today. I plan to lean on her heavily when it's testing time for the Marketplace. :3

Well, there's nothing like a trial by fire.

This morning dark_branwen posted about the UFOs on cult_sbp, and within a couple of hours two MAJOR bugs in the system came to light. x_x I guess even with beta-testing, you can't fake the kind of traffic you get from the real deal.

There was a) a problem verifying votes for the Works in Progress category (not so bad), and b) a problem preventing multiple guest users from voting (VERY BAD). Both issues have been fixed now, so if you experienced either of these problems or know anyone who did, everything should be okay at this point. If you were one of those who tried to verify your WIP vote and got an "Invalid ID" message, your vote was counted, so don't worry. If you got a message that you'd already voted when you hadn't, go back and try again and you should be able to.

Thank God dark_branwen posted that notice this morning (when few people are online and I'm awake and at a computer) instead of last night (lots of people trying to vote while I was asleep). BTW, KR, thanks for plugging the awards, and I'm extra glad you did because I might not have identified these bugs so quickly otherwise. :)

A few other minor issues have come to light, but nothing affecting the accuracy of the vote as far as I can tell.