Website Awards?

[OneMillionFurries]

I'm currently browsing old geocities sites, and I notice a few of them have awards given to them by other users. I have seen a few of these awards on modern web revival sites, but not nearly as many compared to buttons and webrings. What are your thoughts on these awards? Here's an example of one.



I was thinking of making an award I can give out to people with pages dedicated to their irl pets, but I'm not sure if anyone would be really interested in it. Thoughts?

[TheFrugalGamer]

I remember these! Over time, some folks would have an entire page dedicated to all the ones they had collected, and you could see the sorts of social circles they had formed based on who had what.

I think it's a neat idea to revive them. I should also point out that the forum itself has an awards-type system called gifts! It uses 32x32 (or smaller) icons, and you can upload them to people's profiles by going to their userpage and clicking "show gifts." It's sort of hidden; I don't think most notice it, but I think that makes it fun.

[OneMillionFurries]

Right? I think it would be really cool to revive them personally. It can serve a similar function to buttons and webrings, but more personal! ^^

Yes I love gifts! I can't wait until I become a full member so that I can finally start gifting other people  :D But to me gifts on this forum definitely have a different function than website awards, y'know?

[xixxii]

i think website awards are cute and it can be a motivating factor to work on a specific kind of project! and it's nice to have a compliment in the form of a badge you can put on your (virtual) shelf. i really treasured the screenie awards i got as a kid on neopets, even though i never got any of the prestigious ones...

it seems like neocities folks really like digital collectibles of all kinds, but are really prickly about anything that seems vaguely like "clout-chasing" (and historically web awards almost always lead to some amount of "does anyone else hate web awards?? so elitist!!" drama haha) so i'm not sure how well it would go over in general. hard to say!

thinking about it, merit badges like in girl&boy scouts / achievements like for video games could be really fun collectibles.............. hmmm...... 

i think it's worth doing! it is nice to make presents for people, and i imagine anybody with a guestbook would be happy to get a little present along with a nice comment.

[OneMillionFurries]

i think website awards are cute and it can be a motivating factor to work on a specific kind of project! and it's nice to have a compliment in the form of a badge you can put on your (virtual) shelf. i really treasured the screenie awards i got as a kid on neopets, even though i never got any of the prestigious ones...

it seems like neocities folks really like digital collectibles of all kinds, but are really prickly about anything that seems vaguely like "clout-chasing" (and historically web awards almost always lead to some amount of "does anyone else hate web awards?? so elitist!!" drama haha) so i'm not sure how well it would go over in general. hard to say!

thinking about it, merit badges like in girl&boy scouts / achievements like for video games could be really fun collectibles.............. hmmm...... 

i think it's worth doing! it is nice to make presents for people, and i imagine anybody with a guestbook would be happy to get a little present along with a nice comment.

True. I wasn't around for all that drama and hadn't thought about it possibly leading to that. As you said, I just want it to inspire people to make pages for their pets (or whatever else I decide to make awards for :P)

I may try it out! Worse case scenario, if people start drama over cat page awards I'll just stop doing it lol

[Dibs]

I feel like website awards are a great thing for people to do, but perhaps best, as above, kept to inconsequential or super specific things rather than the 'best website award' end of things. I think awards were more like acknowledgements for the most part anyway, rather than actual awards worth fighting over.

[PurpleHello98]

I feel like website awards are a great thing for people to do, but perhaps best, as above, kept to inconsequential or super specific things rather than the 'best website award' end of things. I think awards were more like acknowledgements for the most part anyway, rather than actual awards worth fighting over.

I agree---maybe even "great site award" as opposed to "best site award", to avoid the levels on competition.

I know some people used to give awards out, but I think some of the biggest ones (such as nostalgic, for instance) don't update their sites anymore. I've actually thought of making some sort of award myself someday---maybe a "This is one of my favourite sites" type award to, as I said above, not try and present a site as objectively the best or anything. I think it could even go with my recently semi-redesigned links page, perhaps. But I'd like to expand beyond that---I'll have to think about it. It'd probably require relearning graphics editing, anyhow.

[tertiaryapocalypse]

i think site awards are super fun!!

thinking about it, merit badges like in girl&boy scouts / achievements like for video games could be really fun collectibles.............. hmmm...... 

^^ i LOVE this idea. not sure what kind of merit badges would exist, though... maybe something relating to what kinds of pages you have? i'm imagining one for setting up a shrine or something right now

[fin600]

Merit badges sound like a great idea. Maybe even a generator for them that puts text on a template so people can make their own merit badges? I imagine them as being little medals that say something silly like 'Certified Shrine Enjoyer', 'Virtual Pet Addict', or 'Bastion of Buttons' and then a little text for why they have that badge. I made a mock-up in MS paint, I'm no good at pixel art, unfortunately, but I think it gets the idea across.

[Eunice]

I've still got some awards I was given when my site was on Geocities. I like them! Sometimes one's site would be listed, in a list of people who won the award. So you got a bit of publicity that way. And the person who gave the awards would get a bit of publicity also, as you'd like it to them. Then you could look at other winners' sites, sign their guestbooks, that kind of thing.

[villain]

I have been thinking about making these for my site for a while, I really like the idea but I think it's use is best when used to encourage what you want to see in the indieweb sphere. I suppose in that sense it would indeed be more like merit badges as some users expressed above - ideas I considered include awards for having no dead/empty links in your navigation, for having a page with useful resource links for other webmasters, for having simple interactive games or webtoys or for having a gallery page with over a year's worth of art in it. When I get around to making these I will be sure to post here!

[asterhalloween]

Oh my goodness!   I made some website awards a while ago (almost a year ago now?!), mainly just for fun and/or just as little secrets you could find on my site (with the secret awards as "proof" you found the secrets) and I didn't realize that this was a thing that was already happening! It makes me want to start making more awards but I don't really have many ideas at the moment hehe. maybe ill come up with something!

In case anyone's interested, I made a template for these on my website https://asterhalloween.neocities.org/helloworld?z=/awards its pretty simple but I've made about four awards so far :3 (one custom made, one free use, and two seeecret ones )