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During the first two rounds, we've found that people have some questions about the nomination process. This page will offer some tips on
nominating, explain what we we're looking for, and clear up some misconceptions about some of our policies regarding nominations.
First, a few tips on nominating:
- Each category has limited space so choose your nominations wisely. Every story you enjoyed reading doesn't necessarily need to be nominated. Saturating the categories with too many fics will make it harder for your favourites to win.
- Carefully read all the rules and categories before you nominate. You don't want to see your favourite story disqualified because you missed a rule or chose the wrong category.
- Gather all the necessary information before you start filling out the nomination form. You'll need a link to the fic, a completion date, rating, and a reliable way to contact the author you're nominating.
- Check the nominees list before you nominate. Each nominee is only allowed in three categories, so be sure your nominee isn't already on the list before you nominate. Obviously, you can't know if something has been nominated but not accepted and added to the site but you can make sure it isn't already listed.
- Check to see if the author has already reached their maximum nominations for the round. If they have, chances are your nomination will just end up deleted so it may be better to wait until the next round.
- If possible, you might want to consider contacting the author and making sure they want to be nominated. You don't have to, we contact them anyway, but not everyone wishes to participate so if you know the author you may want to ask first.
- If you nominate a fic and time goes by and it's not on the site, contact us first to check the status instead of nominating it again. Chances are high that we did receive your nomination but we can't add it to the site because there was a problem with the rules, or the author has not responded to our email. Re-nominating won't change those things, it will create a bigger backlog of nominees though which slows down the process and increases the chances of errors being made.
There has been some question about what we're looking for in our nominees. This is our fault, we've worded it differently at different
times and we apologize for that. Do we want the best of this fandom, or your favourites? Well, the answer is both. We all want to think that
"the best" of the fandom is also our favourites. We all also have different views of what "best" means. One person may place a lot of importance
and weight on grammar and spelling. I think we all place importance on those things to a certain degree, but another person may be willing to
overlook some grammar errors if there is exceptionally good characterization. Someone else may be willing to overlook questionable characterization
if the plot is well thought out. We don't want to say that any of those people are wrong. Whatever it is that makes a story good for you makes it
worthy of a nomination as far as we're concerned. You don't have to agree with someone else's choices, but they do have the right to their opinions,
as you have the right to yours. If you disagree with the choices for nominees in a category, nominate your own favourites that fit the category.
We'd love to see more variety in many of the categories but that can only happen if everyone nominates their favourite stories.
Now, for a couple of misconceptions about our policies:
- We accept any and all fics related to Doctor Who (New or Classic), Torchwood, and The Sarah Jane Adventures. We are not, and never
meant for anyone to think we're sidelining or don't welcome any character, pairing, or genre. The original intent of this site was mostly
Who and Torchwood but we expanded to accept Sarah Jane when asked. Classic Who was always part of the site but there was some misunderstanding
about that during Round one. Round two offered a Classic Who section that was not as well developed as New Who because we are not as familiar
with that part of fandom, but now we have a mod to focus more on Classic Who and many of you have also offered comments and suggestions that
we've tried to implement to improve both Classic Who and Sarah Jane. We also welcome more suggestions.
The same is true of characters; we welcome any character you write. No, we don't have individual categories for each because it's not practical,
but that is why we have length and genre categories as well as "other characters" categories. You don't have to place a fic in three categories.
If we see that a certain character is cropping up a great deal in the genre/length sections or in the Other Characters categories we'll add it in
for the future, so by all means, nominate your favourite fics with the less popular characters.
- We are not asking you to limit your nominations because we don't want you to nominate, because we dislike what you're nominating,
or because we just don't want to work. We're asking you to limit yourself voluntarily because if you're nominating dozens of stories we're
concerned that categories will be flooded with only one person's favourites or that perhaps you aren't truly nominating your favourites and
just wish to help us fill categories. We don't mind being buried in nominees if you truly think they all deserve a nomination; we just want you
to be sure that you really believe they do.
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