@jorrdy12 @DaveTheAnalyzer

The award voting of 2019 is already underway and about to enter the tie-breaking phase, but I wanted to take a moment to recognize those members who have been loyal members of the forum since joining in 2016.   This is for those members who joined back in 2016, have posted at least 100 times, and who remain active members of our community up through the current year.

The special banner for those of you who joined in 2016 and who are still around can be found attached to this post.  Feel free to save the file, upload it to the image-hosting service of your choice, and to place it in your signature.

The following members may add the Member of 2016 Award to their signatures if they wish to do so:

jorrdy12
DaveTheAnalyzer

Though 2016 was a rough year in many ways for the forum, marking a low point for both activity and new members, it also marked a pivot point for the forum towards better days. You two are part of that change that has resulted in the steady increase in activity in our little corner of the Internet over the last three years. Thank you both for your contributions and we hope that you will continue to stick around in our welcoming community! 

In case you too joined back in 2016, have posted 100 times or more, and are still active but are not on the list, please send us a note and we'll correct the mistake as quickly as possible. 

That's right, Chomper!  It is your month! 

Uh... why are you chasing the cameraman? 






In this topic please feel free to discuss Chomper as a character, to share your own creations (fanfics or fanart), or to mention some of your favorite fanworks of others involving this character.  For a full set of rules please see the Monthly Character Showcase topic but keep in mind that this is meant to be fun as opposed to any sort of contest.

I will go ahead and get the discussion started with the following questions:

1) Considering the fate of Littlefoot's mother, do you think that the ramifications of Chomper and Littlefoot's friendship have been explored sufficiently in the series?; and

2) What were your initial thoughts concerning Chomper as a character?

Big thanks to Vojeds for the lovely gif!

The rules of the 2019 award votes will be run essentially on the same rules as the last four years with those who are entitled to vote and to be voted for in the award ceremony need to have joined the GOF at least two months ago, must have posted at least a 100 times and must have been active within the last two months.


Here are the full rules:

The voting process officially opens on Saturday, September 1st. You can find the voting topic here.

Voting for the initial 5 categories will last for 1 month and will close at 23:59:59 on 30 September 2019 (forum standard time)

We understand it is a wall of text, but we would like you to at least read through the rules once before you start voting so that you won't breach any rules.

♪♫♪ OFFICIAL RULES AND REGULATIONS FOR 2019 GANG OF FIVE MEMBERSHIP AWARDS ♪♫♪

1)  All selected GOF members listed are invited to participate in the GOF Awards. These candidates have been granted participation on clearing of the following conditions:

A. Have a post count of at least 100 posts
B. Have been active on the GOF within the past 2 months as of as of 8/24/2019
C. Have been a member of the GOF for at least 2 months as of as of 8/24/2019

The list of eligible candidates for this year's awards can be found in the voting status topic! If your name is not on that list, you are not eligible to receive an award in this year's nominations. If you find you fulfill the three criteria listed above and still are not on the list, please contact one of the admins about it. We do our very best, but mistakes are always possible.

2)   You are to offer one (1) nomination per category highlighting the nominee's GOF username in underline and/or bold to aid with the tallying process. We strongly advise all participants to vote in every category if possible.
Understandably there may be some areas you are not too sure on if you haven't been involved directly (e.g. the RPG section) or are genuinely unable to select one candidate but we urge you try to offer a nomination if you can.

3)   If you want to be entitled to win an award, you will have to vote for at least 4 out of 5 categories. In case you did not vote in at least 4 categories, you will not receive any awards you are entitled to. The awards will instead go to the member with the second highest amount of votes. If you are not interested in winning an award, but still wish to vote in several categories, you are allowed to do so.

4) If you skip 2 votes in the first 5 categories, you are obliged to vote in the Appreciated Member award in order to win an award yourself.

- The Appreciated Member Award voting will be held after the main 5 categories have been finalized and the awards distributed, since only members who didn't win any of these 5 categories can be voted for the Appreciated Member Award. DO NOT reveal your nomination for the Appreciated Member Award alongside your votes for the initial 5 categories because it won't be counted.

5) All nominations must be accompanied with a few lines or a brief statement as to why you feel your choice deserves the award. It doesn't have to be long, but it should at least help enforce your choice so that it can be counted as valid reasoning. Feel free to express credit to those member you felt were close contenders for an award if you wish. Nominations without explanatory comments will count as a skipped vote, so make sure to include them!

6) If you do not complete all your nominations in one post, please submit the remainder of your nominations in a separate post. Please do not edit/update previous posts, since this will confuse the one keeping record of the votes. We will constantly update your votes and will not go back to check older posts once votes are cast.

7) We discourage voting for yourself in any given category for the awards. if you genuinely feel that there are no other eligible candidates who deserve a specific award then you are permitted to vote for yourself in 1 category only. Voting for yourself more than once will count as skipped votes. In case a tie in number of votes comes up, the candidate who did not vote for themselves automatically wins the award.

8) The candidate who gets most votes for an award will be permitted to add one of the drafts of the award to his or her signature. The candidate with the second most votes can choose one of the drafts of the awards after the winner has chosen his and can call himself the runner up! Runner ups must have at least one third of the votes the winner had and cannot use the same banner as the winner. Runner ups do not have to state that their award is a runner up, they can be just as proud as the actual winners.

9) In case two members get an equal amount of votes and are both entitled to either the award or a runner up award there will be a tiebreaking vote. These will be held after the main voting and before the Appreciated Member award voting. This final tiebreaker will decide who wins the award.

And lastly, we would like to remind you all that the awards are here for fun. Any activity that could be considered ruining the fun will disqualify you from the awards and might even result in a harsher action if necessary. Here is a list of what we find unacceptable: We want all of you to have as much fun as possible and we can only assure that if you help along yourself.

Thanks for reading. If there are any other questions feel free to post them below

- The main categories for this year's Awards are as follows -
~Fanart Award
~Feedback Award
~Friendly Member Award
~Proactive Award
~Role Play Gamer Award

No need to sneak around, Shorty! The spotlight is on you this month.

In this topic please feel free to discuss Shorty as a character, to share your own creations (fanfics or fanart), or to mention some of your favorite fanworks of others involving this character.  For a full set of rules please see the Monthly Character Showcase topic but keep in mind that this is meant to be fun as opposed to any sort of contest.

I will go ahead and get the discussion started with the following questions:

1) What was your first impression of Shorty as a character?; and

2) How has your perspective of Shorty changed over the span of the films and the television episodes? Would you like to see more content featuring Shorty as a recurring character?

Petrie, you're on!



Ummm.... well, I'm sure he will regain consciousness soon... 

In this topic please feel free to discuss Petrie as a character, to share your own creations (fanfics or fanart), or to mention some of your favorite fanworks of others involving this character.  For a full set of rules please see the Monthly Character Showcase topic but keep in mind that this is meant to be fun as opposed to any sort of contest.

I will go ahead and get the discussion started with two somewhat related questions concerning our favorite grammar-challenged flyer:

1) Has your perspective on Petrie changed over the course of the films and, if so, how so?; and

2) What are your thoughts overall on Petrie as a character?

Pssttt... Guido, you're on!



Heh... go on out there, Guido!  The fans aren't THAT scary!

In this topic please feel free to discuss Guido as a character, to share your own creations (fanfics or fanart), or to mention some of your favorite fanworks of others involving this character.  For a full set of rules please see the Monthly Character Showcase topic but keep in mind that this is meant to be fun as opposed to any sort of contest.

Just to get things started I will pose an initial series of questions to the Guido fanatics on the forum: What were your initial impressions of Guido and how did they change over time?  Also, are there any ideas involving Guido that you would like to see explored in fanfiction or fanart?

Rhombus: We will change up the Guido icons a bit later.

Good evening, everyone!

We are deeply appreciative of those of you who are able to assist the forum financially via Patreon or PayPal.  It is the generous contributions of members like you that allow this forum to survive and thrive.  We thank you all from the bottoms of our hearts. 

Today we have used some of your contributions in order to add some promised improvements to the forum experience.  In particular we have added three mods, with a fourth modification (a responsive theme) being implemented fully once we worked out the kinks.  Here is a rundown of the forum upgrades:

Improvements to the PM System
We now have a "conversation" system in place of the old PM system.  Now, don't worry, your old PMs are still there.  But the new system allows for PMs to be grouped by conversation as it was in the old Zetabords system. You can also invite new members to a conversation and they'll see everything that was before their join, but the owner keeps control over the conversations. Each conversation has its own group of participants, these are the people who can view the messages and attachments posted there. The owner of the conversation can specify if others can add participants to the conversation. Finally, attachments are now allowed in PMs as well.

Improvements to media embedding
We have greatly overhauled the media embedding system on the forum.  You can now simply post a link to YouTube videos, Twitter posts, FaceBook posts, and GoogleDrive documents and the forum will automatically embed the post for you!  You should no longer use the YouTube button to embed videos, since that feature is now deprecated - simply put in the URL and the forum will do the rest!

Improvements to Search Engine Optimization
This is mainly behind the scenes, but we are modifying some things behind the scenes in order to improve our search engine rankings and to dethrone the abandoned TapaTalk board from the #1 spot for Land Before Time forums.

Coming soon - a responsive theme
It has not escaped our attention that the forum looks subpar on mobile devices. We are currently preparing a responsive theme that will allow for a better mobile experience without compromising the look and feel of the forum on personal computers.  We will let you know when this change is implemented. 

So there you have it - a prime example of how your generous contributions are not only maintaining the forum, but also upgrading the experience for all members.  With your continued support we trust that this great community will last for many years yet to come. 

If you have any questions or concerns regarding these modifications then please do not hesitate to let us know.

~ GOF Admin Team

I am somewhat surprised that there is not a topic on this year, but I will go ahead and get it started. After a rather controversial league championship stage of the playoffs the New England Patriots and the Los Angeles Rams are about to meet in the 53rd Super Bowl.

I guess I will get the discussion started by posing three questions for everyone:

1) If you plan on watching the game how do you plan on doing so? (alone, at a party, sports bar, etc.)

2) Who do you think will win tonight?

3) Who would you prefer to win?



For me the answers are:

1) I will be meeting up with some friends at a local Buffalo Wild Wings.  Though most of them are not sports fanatics we do enjoy using the occasion of the Super Bowl as an excuse to get together which is increasingly more difficult with the pressures of work and (in some cases) kids

2) I will go ahead and guess the Rams will pull out a close win

3) The Rams. I despise both teams in this Super Bowl, but any day the Patriots lose is a good day. 

Beginning on February 1, 2019 we will be trying something new on the forum to celebrate our favorite Land Before Time characters – a character showcase!    Each month one of the major Land Before Time characters will be showcased on the forum’s news header, will be featured in our active topic buttons, and will have a special showcase topic dedicated to them.

These showcase topics are not meant to be overly formal matters but rather are supposed to be open for fanworks and discussion about these characters.  That being said there are some basic rules for posting in these topics that will be enforced to keep things moving smoothly:


Rules:
1.Within each showcase topic, people can discuss the characters, post fanart of them, or post short fanfics concerning them.

2. To prevent the topic from being overburdened with long posts, any fanfic concerning the featured character should either be limited to less than 1500 words, or, if the story is longer than that, you should host it on a fanfiction hosting site and link it here with a brief description of the story. 

3. There will be no set contest for the resulting fanfics and fanart in the showcase topic (this is just for fun), but they can be cross-submitted to the respective prompt challenges if they also qualify for the active monthly prompt for that challenge. For details on those challenges, and to check what the requirements for those are, you can find the fanfic prompt challenge rules here, and the fanart prompt challenge page here. Also, regardless of qualification, the resulting showcase fanfics will be added to the fanfic prompt challenge masterlist as an addendum so that they can be recorded for posterity.

4. The showcase topic will not prevent the discussion of other characters elsewhere in the forum, but the discussion and fanworks in the showcase topic should be limited to the featured character.

5. And, of course, the usual forum rules shall apply.


Schedule:
The schedule for showcase topics this year shall be as follows:
February 2019: Littlefoot 
March 2019: Cera 
April 2019: Ducky 
May 2019: Guido 
June 2019: Petrie 
July 2019: Spike 
August 2019: Shorty (What? No Shorty emotes?  )
September 2019: Chomper 
October 2019: Ruby 
November 2019: Ali 

We look forward to seeing what everyone comes up with in this new feature of the forum.  If you have any questions feel free to leave a message in this topic and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

Edit by Mumbling: added links to existing Character Showcase topics.

I am pleased to announce that I have tabulated the results from the 2018 fanfiction award voting.  Here are the results for your consideration and double-checking:





We will be following the prior year’s protocol for fanfiction awards this year. This means that if you would like a banner for your fanfiction then please let me know by PM. You can only pick one of your stories to receive a banner this year, so if you had multiple entries then you will need to specify which story I should prepare a banner. Each banner will include your story name, the overall average rating it received, and the number of votes. The draft banners that we will be using this year are as follows:









I would like to take this moment to thank each and every one of you who participated in the fanfiction awards this year. Participation in the fanfiction awards exceeded last year’s amazing total, which makes this the year with the most fanfiction activity since 2011.  This continued interest in fanfiction in the community makes me confident and hopeful about continued creativity in the Land Before Time community.    I look forward to seeing what you all come up with in the year to come!