I never meant to pass you over when I posted this message Adam. The suggestion which I brought up here is indeed mentioned rather briefly in the staff room, where it didn't provoke and opposition though. The suggestion was discussed in much more detail (resulting in the suggestion above) in an MSN chat at which you weren't present. I apologize for this one as the results should have been laid out in the staff room.
As for the previous suggestion, I have serious doubts about its suitability for the GOF for several reasons.
One of them is the extreme cutting down of member involvement in the whole awarding process. I think that one of the important points about the whole awarding is that we all think about what everyone did for the GOF and in making up our minds about a particular award we think about everyone's contributions and grow more aware of what everyone is doing on the GOF (not just the ones who ultimately receive an award). The whole voting is almost a kind of GOF project while with the "Exceptional Contributor" it may easily become a popularity contest not suited to credit the individual performances of members in the many different fields currently credited with different awards.
I'm quite certain that the GOF members are a friendly and helpful group no matter whether there is an award for it or not, but I don't think that this is a reason not to give credit anymore to those whom the community feels stood out by being especially helpful or friendly.
While on the one hand the suggestion cuts down many individual awards it pours them out on another end. Of course I see where the thought is coming from that everyone who creates art and takes the trouble to share it with the GOF should be credited for it. But if indeed everyone who posts anything gets an award I don't know if it will still be perceived as credit. If 20, 30, or even 40 or more art awards are issued every year to anyone who posted any kind of art I'm not sure if it would still be perceived as special enough. If dozens of people have the same award in their signature the credit one feels from receiving that award may feel somewhat hollow.
In a different case, namely the singing awards, the very same problem is actually addressed in that suggestion. It is suggested to give up all the individual awards for one single award to credit participation in song projects. When we created those awards, they were partly meant to encourage people to join our singing projects and I think these awards served that purpose very well. You (you're not wearing yours anyway) and I and others too would get rid of the individual singing awards in their signatures if there is really the need to give up on them, but I think many would not like the thought of giving up on the awards for the songs to which they contributed and who would blame any of them?
And finally a funniest quote award is suggested, something I don't oppose generally, but which seems once again to work in the other direction as some of the other suggestions.
We want to get rid of all the individual awards in favor of an Exceptional Performance award because we have too many awards.
But we want to give everyone an award who contributes any kind of art whatsoever to the GOF because we don't have enough awards to give due credit to every artist.
But we want to get rid of the individual singing performance awards because we have too many awards.
But we want to have a funniest quote award because it is no fun to have too few awards?
The suggestions don't work in the same direction so to speak. There is one "advantage" of the suggestion over the one I brought up, namely that this suggestion means much less work for both, the staff and the members, while the suggestion I brought up means more work for the staff and to the members too if they want to cast more than one vote on a particular award (while on the other hand decision making may be easier because of that option). But is the voting really so much of a chore that we want to cut down the work by all means?
Personally I don't think so. I prefer the suggestion I brought up as a compromise between allowing more people to get credit but not flood the GOF with so many awards that they are not perceived as credit anymore.
