Should we resurrect the GRcade Forumite of the Year (& others) Awards?

Am I right in thinking that we've had three GRcade Members Awards (so far):

- the 2009 four-round extravaganza, which consisted of a vote to define the categories, a nomination thread with said categories, a thread for people to vote on the nominees, and the awards ceremony thread itself.

- the 2010 version, with just the nominations thread and the results thread this time

- the 2014 version, with one sole thread, where Cora didn't get enough people interested in voting and it never properly happened.

(Also: when these "alternative awards" were posted on Twitter, were they the actual results with the votes that had been received, or did a randomer just pick the winners they wanted? Does anyone know?)

The reason I ask - I see that SONM have an awards system (click here to see a random thread where you can see this illustrated nicely) whereby the user's award is displayed as a small icon under their username. Not suggesting we implement the same (although we have ♥ symbols next to COWG contributors; SONM's system is essentially an extension to this approach) but if a community as small as theirs can sustain an awards system, surely we could too?

I quite like the idea of the icon under the name. I don't see why it shouldn't work, and the forum seems in a better place now than is was a year a go so worth a shot I guess.

The alternative awards were just some guy on Twitter.

I think times have moved on since the days when we, as a user base, had time to categorise, nominate and vote on each other. Picking 3 members (or threads or events or ...) to nominate in each of 15 categories adds up to 45 things to think about. It's going to eat a lot of time and we're mostly busy, grown-up people now (compared to 2010, when most of us were still in Uni).

What I would propose is that someone comes up with 6 'awards', and asks everyone to vote for only 1 person (/ thread / event / logo / ...) in each category. That's only 6 questions people have to fill in one answer to! For example, for "funniest member" I would obviously vote "Dblock", and that would be all I would have to write for that category.

By making it super-easy to vote we would hopefully get lots more responses.

Yes, by using such a simple voting system you risk having a lot of ties, but who cares? It's just supposed to be fun, it's not like there's a grand cash prize (unless Mockmaster really steps up his game).

If this gets off the ground I'm happy to put an icon under someone's name like they do on SONM.

That sounds like a good way of dealing with it.

I like your idea for fewer categories, Karl. No nominating, no top threes, just straightforward voting.

If it were up to me, the categories I'd pick (and the order I'd announce them, for dramatic effect ) would be:


Which just so happens to be six.
They're six categories that have previous winners, too, so if you'd like to do the icons we could retrospectively hand them out to the appropriate winners.

Corazon de Leon wrote:quoting Cora so he gets notified about the thread

Cora, do you still have the votes (the ones that you actually received, that is) from 2014? As if we applied those votes to this system then we'd have some 2013/14 winners as well as 2009 and 2010. I think it'd be cool to announce those, after all this time, to show the new format to everyone, and then come January we could do a 2015 awards thread.

(Moved to Stuff at Dan's request)

An idea I also had would be to do one award a week every week for a period of six weeks, maybe in the run-up to Christmas? It means people would only have to submit one vote - i.e. only think about one thing, only write a few words - every week. It would lower the barrier to entry even further and maybe even heighten the spectacle.

Awards are a fun idea but it has to be done quite simply. Nobody can be arsed to nominate and then vote on a huge number of categories all in one go.

Karl's idea of one a week for six weeks is a good one. People are more likely to join in if they have less to do!

Yeah splitting it over the weeks sounds the best call. Although tbh for all that I like the folk on here I could probably only properly recognise about 20 people so it seems like a high percentage of active members will be receiving an award.

This thread can now be locked, as I've started the awards thread