There had been quite a few announcements and there has also been the prolonging of the vote being put up here in the prominent announcement section. Anyone can look up the award voting thread, the rules, the tally and the participation list. However, since the vote IS voluntarily I don't think it is a good idea to harrass members into voting by emailing them. People who have been voted for cannot receive the awards without having voted themselves. The lack of participation in itself may be a vote concerning the interest (or lack of such) in the award votes. I'm sorry for all those who did take their time to vote and who were very active about the award voting, but with too little overall participation the vote is lead ad absurdum and we may have to consider discontinuing this tradition based on the participation at the end of the vote (there's still some time to go till tuesday).
Limited participation also cuts down the number of candidates who can be voted for in the appreciated member award (those who voted but received no award).
Sorry if I wasn't clear: that list of suggestions mainly applied to things that could be done to promote next year's Awards (if they happen). I feel it's a little too late to do any of those things for this year's Awards.
As for this year, I personally didn't notice any announcements pertaining to the GOF Awards in the weeks preceding to the actual event (though my GOF attendance for much of that time was admittedly sparse). It wasn't until I checked the Saurus Rock section just now that I noticed
this thread for the first time, which I presume is the one you are talking about. I hadn't seen it before, and am kicking myself for not doing so and offering my help
(I deeply apologize for that
). This illustrates what I suspect to be perhaps the main reason the Awards have received so little participation.*
I strongly suspect that the problem has more to do with members not noticing the Awards than not caring about them,* because frankly the Award threads are not all that noticeable. The Saurus Rock section is tucked away in the Fridge, so any Awards-related threads (which ideally should be visible to all members) can only be seen from the main page if the thread in question is the most recently updated thread in the Fridge. Failing that, one would have to enter the Fridge and glance up at the Saurus Rock section to notice the thread, or find it while browsing the "Today's active topics" page (which not everyone does). I know I'm just stating the obvious here, but my point is that for an event which aspires to (more or less) forum-wide participation, the threads that announce the Awards and wherein voting takes place are not optimally visible to forumgoers.
Consider the Star Day section: it only receives the attention it does because members' birthdays are automatically shown in the Board Statistics, so any member who scrolls down while visiting the main page is notified of the event. And there are still members (albeit mostly newer ones) who don't know about the Star Day section (which seems to me to also be less active this year than in previous years). The GOF Awards, by contrast, have no such readily visible notification, and they are updated far less frequently and at much less regular intervals than the collective threads in the Star Day section.
As for my PM suggestion, yes, I agree that might come off as a bit intrusive, though I imagined such notifications as being along the lines of friendly, pressure-free invitations, rather than any kind of request. It's worth noting that some of the newer members may not even know about the Awards, and they may be downright thankful to be notified that that their contributions to the GOF are being noticed and that they have a chance at an award. At any rate, these notifications could simply be limited to the members you mentioned who are leading the votes in their respective categories but have not voted themselves, not every single member who has been nominated but not yet voted, if that's what you thought I meant.
*Iris makes a good point about the decreasing forum post count. So perhaps my theory that the section is not easily noticed is the main reason for the lack of participation is inaccurate. Nonetheless, I think that drawing more attention to the Awards from the main page
would improve voting participation.
