At 8/23/24 11:39 AM, TomFulp wrote:The first day of each month traditionally kicks off Monthly Voting but starting next month:

Voting for the Best of August will begin on Saturday, September 7th and end on the 14th.

This will allow more time for late-month entries to settle in and give all of us more time to reflect.

As usual, if you are part of the voting pool (based on XP), you will receive a message from P-Bot inviting you to vote.

The changes don’t end there!

Monthly voting has been overhauled to work on mobile.

We’ve broken apart Movie and Game ranking into unique processes, with the ability to revisit and edit your rankings up until the deadline.

Even more, we’ve introduced Art and Music categories!

Here is the new workflow for selecting your favorites each month:

Page 1 - Introduction and Category Selection

This page contains introductory text, followed by the option to vote for Movies, Games, Art or Music.


Page 2 - Select Your Favorites

This page will list the nominees for your category. It will place nominees you’ve favorited at the top, followed by nominees you voted highly on, followed by the rest.

Rather than sort items on this page, you will merely select up to ten favorites by clicking the checkbox to the right of each item. If you hit the max of ten, you will be prevented from selecting additional items until you deselect an item.

At the bottom of the page, there’s a link to proceed to the ranking process.


Page 3 - Rank Your Selections

This page will contain your selections, ranked 1st to 10th. Use the drag buttons on the right to drag your items up and down, until you’ve achieved a Top 10 you’re happy with.

This page auto-saves and you can revisit it to make edits. We’ve included an optional link at the bottom you can click when you’re done, which will take you back to the Introduction screen.

The Introduction screen will now tell you which categories you’ve completed voting for, to keep track of where you left.


What You Can Do Now

There are a lot of potential nominees for Art and Music and it will help if you vote on and/or favorite art and audio you like during the course of the month. This will make your favorites easier to find on the list and will also help us refine the nomination process over time.

Prizes & Prize Sponsors

We currently award $100 each to the top five movies and top five games, with a $200 bonus each to the top movie and top game based on original material.

With the introduction of these new categories, additional prizes are in order. To start, we’ll award $100 each to our first place Art and first place Music. There isn’t really a budget for this, so your Support would be greatly appreciated to maintain or even grow these prizes, otherwise we’ll eventually need to withdraw them.

We’d like to try something else, too: Revisiting prize sponsors but in a more consistent format than the past. If you would like to be a prize sponsor, please set up a Supporter subscription at a minimum rate of $50 per month. PLEASE only do this if you have cash to burn and love seeing it go to artists on NG. Maybe you're a business and would like to get your name alongside something cool?

Once you’ve set up the subscription, PM me and let me know which category (Movies, Games, Art, Music) you would like to sponsor. I’ll add you to a spreadsheet, ranked by contribution amount and will include you in the list of sponsors each month when the Best of the Month are announced.

As an example, one person donating $100 per month could increase the Movie prizes from five tiers to six, plus have their name dropped in a post that will become long-term site history.

Never hurts to ask, right? Imagine if a successful business or member of the community decided to toss in $1k per month; we could double the base prizes for movies and games, or establish five tiers each for art and music, with an extra $100 first place bonus for each.

Shout out to @PuffballsUnited for already giving $100 per month!

@53xy83457 has pledged $50 per month towards Art prizes!

@TeamTrivial has pledged $50 per month towards the Game prizes!

Note: If we do introduce cash prizes for additional art and audio tiers, we’re thinking that if a single artist wins in more than two tiers, the cash prize would get passed down to runner-ups, to avoid a situation where a popular artist sweeps every single prize tier. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens there.


Read up on other site news and Summergrounds Showdown!

Also check out Bacun's Rebutia Plush. Ten days left to make it real!

At 8/24/24 07:51 AM, TomFulp wrote:

At 8/23/24 09:01 PM, EYOXIN wrote:any chance newgrounds will add ActivityPub support? PixelFed uses php as well and it would be incredible if y’all reached out to the developer so their could be a version made for newground. This would allow newgrounds to easily have an app and also for our art posted here to be seen by people on mastodon, pixelfed, and lemmy

This is something we still need to dive into, to see what all it would involve.

A tricky thing with NG is that if we end up serving files to millions of people on third party apps, it would make the whole situation here even more untenable with hosting fees.

At 8/27/24 02:49 PM, PsychoGoldfish wrote:

At 8/27/24 10:23 AM, TomFulp wrote:

At 8/27/24 10:22 AM, HeroPapaya wrote:Is the voting pool decided based on total xp earned, or xp gathered throughout the month?

Total XP, as well as being active during the month.

To elaborate just a bit more:

It's the highest level users who actually voted on stuff during the month we're voting on. If anyone has a high level, but didn't vote at all, they aren't included.

As Tom mentioned, we're looking at some ideas to get more people included based on other actions that show they were active in the voting month, but as of right now, we're still picking the voter pool they same way we've been doing for years now.

That may still change before the Best of August vote depending on how things go with deploying all the other changes I've made (so far things are looking good).

At 9/12/24 10:21 PM, TomFulp wrote:

At 9/12/24 07:09 PM, HeroPapaya wrote:How on earth could you possibly prioritize only 10 songs when there are so many extremely good tracks?
A small detail, when will the voting close? September 14th, but at which time?

Voting closes at the end of the day EST on September 13th.