Indeed, you might have.

Let me tell you why that would fail, in semi-nice terms.

1. It would start a flame/hate war of massive porportions, one comment about how so and so don't really deserve the right, weather true or not, would explode with the fury of Dr. Cougar.

2. That would not stop the fangirls/boys/assorted fic writer stalking pets out there. They would just have a massive love orgy of trollness.

 

What about this:

You need to have TWO of the following three to be able to nominate or vote in the awards:

1) A post count of 100 posts.

2) 3 months of active posting.

3) 75 rep points.

As far as I'm concerned, these three requirements are enough for a member to be considered as a contributing, active poster with an opinion worth being listened to.

I'd advocate all three being necessary prerequisites to being able to vote/nominate, since the rep points mean that other forum members have endosed and 'approved' the person in question. That way, you don't have a no-name, random person nominating shitty fics like Horus Goes Home, and voting for fics just because they don't know the alternative and would rather just choose a name that they know than go and read the fic in question.

 

I'd disagree simply because if you are not one of the big members of the forum it can be damn near impossible to get rep points.

After all, while I would like to think of myself as big, maybe <_<, I only have 36 or so. But then again for all you "glorious beacons of light" I suppose it's easy.

I would suggest that it is more like either having 75 rep or a post count of over a hundred and 3 months of active membership.

 

While I do think this is fair, out of curiosity, don't you think this might make some people try and spam to get the postcount nearing the awards?

As a sidenote, I really ought to post more often myself - guess I should work on that...

 

Post count and join date both contribute towards rep power. So instead of arguing over an exact post count minimum (which folks will probably get past by spamming during the early parts of next January), make it a rep power minimum. As it's a year from now, I would argue for a rep power of 2.

 

Rep points is a better idea than rep power.

Power can be gained by spamming or lurking. Points you earn. To get to 75 your going to need at least a dozen positive reps.

 

75 rep points is reasonable. Though I have to ask how you define "active posting" as opposed to "passive posting". P) One post a day or more for 3 months?

 

Maybe this is stupid idea, but if we want to rid of stories like Horus Goes Home we should perhaps make more strict rules for nominating the story? For example like Potter Law:
Everybody can suggest but to make it “official” your need an approval of more active and respected member (or perhaps thee of them). Approve doesn’t mean vote, just to admit what it belong to this nomination and good enough for this forum. It will make less weird nominations.

And if I can ask: I don’t understand what was the point of voting for second and third places? Or were those categories? I mean they really got me troubled because while I knew which fics I want to win but I never thought about the rest. *sighs* I feel stupid for asking this, because it was probably written somewhere.

 

75 rep points as a minimum is laughable, especially considering the base is 10. Unless you're involved in politics or a forum like that, it's pretty damn hard to garner rep points, unless you whore yourself in IRC for some.

 

That sounds like a good idea to me. It might clear up some confusion about what belongs in which category, and what specific things need to be present in a fic for it to qualify in the category someone nominates if for.

Also, I agree that rep points could be helpful, though I don't know about many people, but I simply forget to give rep points a lot. Though that is probably a non-issue since we are deciding this (or in the process, I guess), so if no one else has this problem other than me I'll just be more active in giving them.

Though I'm a little worried about folks seeing this and getting carried away--whoring themselves basically for rep points, sucking up to Mods and Admins and more respected members to get them, annoying people, basically...especially around awards time...

 

Rep power idea would work great if I haven't just yesterday seen a poster who's been here for several months and has over 150 posts and still has rep power of 0.

 

All in all, though, the system reflects well the depth of community involvement. Consider two people with similar post counts. Darius, at last check, had 643, and killginny00whatever had 668. Darius also has 9 rep points, while KG has 0.

I'm all for keeping the repquirement (pun fully intended) at 1 - it's not horribly hard to get, and it won't be a disadvantage to those who join a month beforehand and are strongly active in the community.

Of course, for this to work, we'd potentially need to see negative rep make a comeback.

 

Well, were that member's 150 posts worthy of rep points? And if so, like I said, people will need to start giving them more often, not just willy-nilly, mind you, but more often to members who deserve it.

 

Ohh! Did you also know that there is a correlation between falling numbers of pirates in the world and rises in global temperatures?

OMG! Falling numbers of pirates are the cause of global warming!

Random correlations++

Fewer posts does not mean that a person is not able to make a decision over stories.

Examples of intelligent people who contribute to the community who have low posts counts: Rain, Rob, many others.

Then look at TIO and his post count.

Point proven.

And yes: I do always have to bring up TIO.

 

I don't think 75 points is too high a requirement at all. We're talking about a year in the future, people. In a month, a poster gets about 3 chances to make a truly intelligent post in a thread where it counts.

All you need is 5 such posts, and if 3 people rep you for each post, you're good. As far as I know, most people are generous with rep, including myself. If you give an honest, useful review for a fic, I'll probably rep you. I've repped Yojorocks twice in the last three days or so just because his reviews are extremely good.

As far as I'm concerned, if in the space of one year, you can't gather up 75 rep points, then that's pretty sad. All it takes is between 5 and 10 decent posts.

And yes, I mean rep points. Rep points aren't influenced by seniority or post counts. Also, if admins could keep their eye on the rep stats just to make sure that there's no rep-whoring in the two-odd months leading up to the nominations and voting, there's a good chance that we'll have community-approved members voting and nominating stories.

 

Yarrgh: That's for people who join today. But what about people who join 2-3 months before the voting? This system is probably the most limiting from everything that's been mentioned so far.

Also, rep points are representation of how a poster is popular on the site, not how committed he/she is. Take Illusive One for example. He's a constant poster and definitely a more prominent member of DLP, but has only 1 blip on his rep-meter or whatever it's called. Are you saying he shouldn't be allowed to vote?

 

Yes, yes I am.

 

To be honest, I like Rep so much better when it means the exact same thing it does right now: absolutely nothing.

As soon as we start basing anything at all off "rep" it'll turn it into something even uglier. The awards were far from perfect, but knowing 33% of the votes were cast by members with less than 20 posts means nothing to me. They've filled out the form to become members. Of course a big vote brings lurkers out of the woodwork. That's part of the point: to get more people involved. The best I liked about the first year was that the winners weren't necessarily DLP members, so it attracted some of them to the site. This year, most of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd places went to active members, which is probably why the snide remarks and bickering seem even more prevalent than usual. It's easier to bitch and complain when the winning author's not arguing his or her side back.

If we're going to privatize the awards as much as possible, then forget these rules. Let's just invite the people we feel are privileged enough to vote. Because there's probably someone with enough rep points, joined far enough back, and with enough total posts whose opinion is just wrong so often that their vote shouldn't count either.

In my opinion, if you've registered for DLP, you should be allowed to nominate fics and vote on them.

The more exclusive you make the process the less impressive winning and losing is.

 

I think the reason why most of the winners are DLP members this year compared to last year hasn't got anything to do with us voting more for DLPers but more to do with the fact that most good authors that write fics of the kind that we like have migrated here.

 

Riiight... Well, let's just agree to disagree. I'm with Nonjon on this one.