The good news - we tied with EOT for both “Most Informative” ThunderCats site and “Best Maintained”, and also scored an outright winner for “Best Graphics”. The only award I’m a bit pissed off about is that we came last for “Best Layout” (with EOT and Angie’s site joint winners, out of three nominees!), and yet I would have said of all the ThunderCats sites online we have the best layout of all - on both Angie’s site and EOT I can never find anything, Angie keeps linking me to all this material on her site that I had no idea was even there! :yikes: Call me smug so-and-so, but I’d actually been quietly confident of securing this award, so am a bit disappointed to lose out on it.
Anything meaningful to conclude from this, beyond the reinforcement that EOT, through having the biggest forum community, get the most votes for their own site?
I ask myself how can a website have Best Graphics but yet not get HTML Award. I’m a bit mad at some of the results and totally think they are a bit skewed if you ask me. I placed a few nominations but I think next year I may just do voting and stay away from the nominations part or I may just refrain altogether from voting. EOT…Most Informative and Best Maintained??? Their front page says the same thing since 2 years ago.
I was actually asked by one of their owners how their front page could be fixed, I tried my darnest to help but it turned out that their site directory is such a mess that it is almost impossible to fix the front page or any other part of their site. These awards are a joke if you ask me, you can’t gather an accurate turnout with less than 20 votes per area.
See, the problem I have with any sort of fandom awards is that it cannot help but create some resentment/bad feelings/one-upmanship between various sections of the community - I notice in EOT’s shoutbox someone saying “Whoo-hoo, EOT and Return to Thundera really kicked everybody’s butt this year!” and, whilst I don’t think they necessarily mean it in a “Ha ha, that’ll screw TCL!” way, it does nonetheless create those kind-of feelings…
Nonetheless, I’ve been all round the three main forums doing my PR bit, so hopefully that will generate some good vibes our way!
I think Im done with those awards and will neither nominate nor vote. Comments like that, especially coming from a “Supporter” of EOT are not needed in the community and I refuse to partake in something that will create animosity. Its sad there is still this competition thing going on with leaders from EOT and Im tempted to say something via their forums but I cant see myself wasting a breath on such pity happenings.
i would encourage the rest of the team to forgo nominating and voting next year simply because its not worth it to waste our time when comments like that will occur. We know what we are accomplishing and we know that we get noticed more than we may think. Lets keep that in mind
I’ve never really paid attention to the awards. For something that is suppose to be a community-wide project, for less than 20 votes to be applied in each category pretty much voids the entire ordeal…IMO. And you can see that the evidence is in the results.
After just completing a grueling 5 week course on Research and Evaluation in which I had to create my own survey/poll, it’s safe to say that if a random group of fans were to judge the 3 top ThunderCats websites (EOT, TCL, and RtT), I’d be confident that our site would stand out the most, whether its for design, HTML, or content.
Anyhow, I think we should just leave it as is and let it be. Who takes these awards seriously anyways?
+1 I think the results this year solidifies my thinking that these “awards” really have no meaning. Hell its one less thing i have to worry about next year
