Okay, so most of these questions haven’t actually been asked, frequently or otherwise. But I do anticipate that several of them will be, so I thought I would go ahead and cover my ass now. If you have any questions that aren’t covered here, please leave a comment, email, tweet me, whatever!

What’s this whole hall of fame thing about anyway?
It started as just a small addition to the Introduction. A sort of “suggested reading” list of five or ten stories. It quickly became clear that ten stories wasn’t enough, so I expanded the whole thing to its own page and twenty stories per era (roughly defined by new album releases). The idea now is to put a spotlight on the stories that really define an era–the ones that are the most popular, best written, most groundbreaking, trendsetting, etc.

But you didn’t do a poll for every era, did you? The website hasn’t been around that long.
Correct! My own firsthand knowledge, along with input from other authors, various other halls of fame, recs list, award winner lists, etc, informed my lists up to The Walk era. The Shout It Out era was a little more difficult, because I was so closely involved in both writing fic and making friends with other writers, so I decided to do a poll then.

How is this poll different from the SIO poll?
In a couple of ways, actually. Firstly, there were only 60 stories then, compared to a whopping 100 now! Secondly, I can now use a feature of Google forms to enforce the “vote for exactly ten fics” rule. Google forms also allow votes to be edited now, which may be a useful feature. Lastly, I’m enlisting some special judges this time too–more on that in a minute!

How did you pick the stories for the poll?
I am pretty obsessive about keeping an eye on what fics are out there. While I could bore you with all the details of my process, the gist is that any fics that reached a minimum amount of chapters and seemed reasonably well written made it onto my list. Some rather new ones didn’t quite make the cut because of their newness.

What if a story I want to vote for isn’t on the list?
I advise you to check two things first. First, if the story is part of a series, check that it isn’t listed under the series title or (if there is no series title) lumped under the first fic in the series’ title. If it still isn’t listed, check that it was in fact written (for the most part) after January 2013. If so, you may check the box labeled “Other” and write it in.

But I don’t know all of these stories! How am I supposed to vote on them?
You have a few weeks! Plenty of time to do some reading 🙂

But why do I have to pick exactly ten stories?
Simply put, it provides the best statistics for me. More than that spreads the votes out too much, but less than that allows for what I call “drive by voters”–those who will just vote for their one or two favorite fics/authors, and ignore the rest. Those might indeed be very popular fics, but if you don’t pick a few other deserving ones, the votes are hopelessly skewed.

Are the votes really anonymous?
100%! Please do not abuse this to vote more than once.

So what’s this whole judges thing all about?
While the SIO poll was a big help, it was also clearly a big popularity contest. I decided it would be helpful this time to have something in between the total popularity contest and my own biased choices. In come the judges! They’ve made their own lists and will help me to break ties. An introductory post about them will be posted shortly after this FAQ.

When will we know who won?
It isn’t really about “winners.” You can view the poll’s running total after you vote. The poll will close on September 8, and I will have the final list, as determined with input from the poll, the judges and myself within about a week of that.