As previously mentioned, we wanted to get some feedback on the awards, especially as this was our first time. We've created a separate thread to talk about the award categories, themselves, but this thread is for providing thoughts and feedback on the process, how we did things, etc. We know there are a lot of areas we can improve the process, so we wanted to get the ball rolling on that while it was still relatively fresh in everyone's minds.
Any feedback is greatly appreciated - looking forward to hearing your thoughts and suggestions!
I hate to do this as I started the other discussion thread with negativity but this was badly handled.
You do not release the names of people who have been nominated before everybody has had a chance to nominate someone, you get more responses that way and those nominating feel like they are contributing to the process. Here we had people saying "what's the point, my choices are already in it." and the idea of these awards was to foster community spirit, not to promote apathy.
And using the quotes from people in the nominations thread? Bad bad bad. You can identify who has nominated whom. And those without quotes? Are you trying to say they not worthy of thought by their nominators? Look, we know that people have different styles of writing (hell, it's the primary thing we know through forum communication) and so certain people will just make a list of names and other people will list their thoughts alongside the names and that you are 'merely' repeating what you are given, but listing reasons beside people for some and not listing it for others influences voting. Look at Exceed Expectations; if a random person had joined the forum and voted without knowing anything about the people other than the names in the voting thread, do you think that all candidates were presented as equals?
When you decided to run this community event your job as moderators was not to just spam the thread with what others had said verbatim, you could have left the nominations thread open and then edited out anything that was not specifically a nomination if you just wanted that effect. You should have taken all the nominations in and then summarised the reasons people nominated each individual in a single sentence in your own words, possibly even having to search out a reason yourself if no one responds with a reason for a specific name, that's your responsibility as people we look to as heads of this community/those running this event.
Look, I might think the awards are not what I would have done, but when the community decides they want something I will do what I can to make it work. I did post information about this event in the G+ group though not with as much as completeness as I should have, and I will do better if there is another one next year, you should too.
I worry about the recency factor when people considered who should be nominated. If someone had said something funny recently or contributed in some other way recently, I would imagine they'd be more likely to spark a thought of "I remember when that person did that thing, so I'll nominate them". But if a person had contributed something solid months earlier, they might not get the nod they deserved.
I don't know of a good solution to this, other than somehow tagging contributions along the way with some kind of a "nomination-worthy" tag so that when it came time for nominations, that list of tagged things formed the nomination list and all people had to do was peruse the list, remember "oh yeah, that was cool when that thing happened", and make their votes.
That would be, of course, far more work than it's worth though.
I think a lot of the problems were due to it being a first run. The recency issue, no one knew anything like this would happen, so I doubt anyone made mental notes that so and so did this or so and so was really funny there, I think that will be less of an issue next time.
The nominations were a little roughly handled, but then next time we can have a little more advance preparation and those won't be issues.
I really hope we do it again.
(Also as a nominee I would rather not have a nominated badge, that might just be me though.)
Greatly appreciate the feedback and thoughts. Please keep them coming!
I'm going to post my thoughts to (hopefully) help the conversation along…
Love to hear if anyone else is in favor of this. I'll wait to provide my thoughts until there's a little more from the community.
What couldn't?!
That's a great idea! I haven't seen that on other forum awards processes I've been involved with, but I like it. Puts a little more work on the staff (which is probably why I haven't seen it, before ), but for a site our size, it shouldn't be too big of a deal.
Definitely agree on this one. We made the impromptu decision to go with using quotes when it was requested by the community, not thoroughly thinking through the risks.
Interestingly, that was the original plan. Unfortunately, again, we as staff ran with the suggestion to make the nominations private without thoroughly thinking through the risks. Would folks be okay with us just having a nominations thread everyone posts on?
To the emphasized point, I personally did not want to speak to why a person was nominated, primarily because there's a risk of me biasing perceptions (which is honestly the reason I didn't want to modify/reword the nomination blurbs, either). I can't speak for the other mods, but that was my feelings on it. Again, we didn't thoroughly think through the risks on using the blurbs when it came up.
I think in the future we'd be better off not doing the blurbs.
Of course, if we have the nominations thread, it's a completely different situation. We could decide folks can give a blurb, if they want. In fact, we could nominate a person already nominated with a completely different blurb to help strengthen that nomination. What are everyone's thoughts about that? Bad idea?
Agreed - always a concern with this kind of thing. (That's why studios like to release Oscar-worthy movies towards the Oscar submission deadline. )
I've seen a variety of things folks try to use around this, including simply "Like"ing a post, voting posts up/down, or building "Reputation". But yeah, it's a lot of work to improve something that's meant to be a fun, relaxed experience in recognizing contributions to the community.
If there were other benefits to the mechanic (that outweigh the costs and risks), it might be useful.
Anyone have any additional thoughts or ideas on this they'd like to share?
Yeah… That might be painful. I'm betting you were kidding, but yeah, we could look at doing them more frequently. Maybe 2/year? What time period makes sense to folks?
Nominee badge: I'm with phantaskippy here. I was apparently nominated, but I don't want to have a badge for that.
Nomination thread: I made some contrary noises before the whole thing, and I stand by those noises: Knowing who and how many people nominated someone is probably not a good thing. Pooling all nominations and then putting them out in one big nominee list means more work for the mods (because they’d have to sift through a lot more messages with all the double nominations) but on the other hand, that is how most ‘real life’ awards are handled.
Quotes: I don't believe the verbatim quotes were helpful. I think there is a distrinction to be made between awards for general conduct (Inspiring Presence, Bolster Allies, Truth Seeker and Harmony) and those for particular submissions (Exceeded Expectations, Unique Capabilities and possibly Bring What You Need). For things like a piece of artwork or a particular gaming aid, you could definitely post a link to the item and let the voters figure out for themselves what they think of it. Whereas the general conduct awards are largely based on an accumulation of positive impressions of a particular user. And for those, I don't really think that a quote (or anything else) would help people to make up their minds. As phantaskippy says, nobody knew this was going to happen, but now we do we can make an effort to make a mental note of when someone has been really helpful.
Upvoting/Liking posts: Yeah, this is (IMO) a pretty terrible concept for any forum. The only way that I have seen that work is on sites where you can give a particular project a 'thumbs up', which are then collected somewhere and once in a while the projects that met with the most approval get showcased. However, I really don't see how this or 'Liking' could actually be used to help anyone figure out who 'deserves' an award. All it gives you is a pile of odd data, heavily influenced by when something was posted, how many active users the forum has had during the time, the popularity of the user, plus a bunch of totally random stuff.
I was the one who suggested little blurbs next to peoples nominations. I had envisioned...I need a different word...I imagined that mods would distill everyones blurbs into a single simple blurb that encompased the general feelings of why people nominated them. I agree the verbatim blurbs were not great.
Maybe next time folks can provide a link to somewhere on the forums highlighting a reason for the nomination?
For example. Lets say theres a catagory for "Best Fan Speculation", you can nominate your person and link to said best post/thread they made. This kinda goes hand in hand with the "how do I remember what you did months ago?" thing. Having concrete examples to cite would help voters and also could inform future catagories.
I think the best way to deal with Blurbs would be to simply list what that person had done on the forums where possible, and where not feasible simplify the comments into a short concise message.
Something like:
Silverleaf: Makes things out of yarn, insults american beer, likes train puns.
Although that does sound a little like a singles add.
I still want to see Villain awards for the forum.
Maybe we'll have to give out villain badges to the mods.
I agree with most people that nominee badges are a 'bad idea',
Just based on this it sounds as if Julia only found out by accident, can we have someone alert the nominees that they have been nominated?
<sigh of exasperation> While I don't think Phantaskippy is making this mistake I do wonder how many people knew that t hat particular hilarious post was outside the nomination period. Nominations next time might be better off saying "Nominations start now, anything from the past year to today are open season", no grace period between the post and nominating, cuts down on confusion.
Would folks be okay with us just having a nominations thread everyone posts on?
I think not. I think it would lead to less nominations again, for much the same reasons I mention before ("Why bother, my choices are already up").
We could decide folks can give a blurb, if they want. In fact, we could nominate a person already nominated with a completely different blurb to help strengthen that nomination. What are everyone's thoughts about that? Bad idea?
That's dangerously close to allowing campaigning.
What time period makes sense to folks?
I think once a year is fine. Although it makes remembering individual posts a bit difficult it also means that we weren't not under constant pressure to perform regularly.
I don't think we should have nominee badges. I almost don't think we should have winner badges, but I suspect I'm in the minority here. I appreciate that we're recognizing people being awesome, but I don't think we should make a big deal out of it. The formality of the nominations, voting, and badges makes it feel a little like we're making a competition out of the forum. While I doubt that this is the intention, the internet is already overflowing with places where you can get more upvotes/points/thumbs/likes/whatever; I liked that it didn't feel like that here.
That said, I assume we will continue to have some periodic awards. In the future I would prefer:
That users PM their nominations to moderators. At the end of the nomination period, the moderators compile the nominations into a list that gets posted. Nothing gets posted before nominations are closed.
That the nomination list is just names. No blurbs. No links. This shouldn't turn into a competition of who has the most links. If there are blurbs, everyone should have one and they should all be written by one person.
Not having this more often than once per year. I was joking about two weeks being short enough to override primacy and recency.
Can I ask why people don't like badges? I see them as a public way of saying "this person has been recognised as doing something good by the community". Nominee badges for me actually lessen the popularity contest effect, since it's not so much "this person was the most popular in this category" as "all these people are extra awesome".
It's more of a vague gut reaction than a specific dislike for them. Part of it is that it feels like a collect-points-earn-badges kind of thing that I alluded to before. It seems a little cluttery (particularly coupled with the idea of having nominee badges as well). And if we're saying that "all these people are extra awesome," the implication is that anyone without a badge is not (nomination is free and unlimited, but someone could easily be overlooked; especially if they haven't been active around nomination time).
), but for a site our size, it shouldn't be too big of a deal.
Unfortunately, again, we as staff ran with the suggestion to make the nominations private without thoroughly thinking through the risks. 
)
: