Main Page Recent Site Changes History of X-Day X-Day Logo Graphics Details and Rules View Participants View Submissions Results and Winners Create Account / Reminder Log In / Log Out Contact Us Archives: 1996-2002

Initial Plans for the 2004 X-Day

This page outlines my starter summary plans for the 2004 X-Day, which will be a delta from the current year's competition. Some of these are influenced by the Survey results, and others were just mine and/or were mine and then were validated by some survey results. These will probably be changed further. You are welcome to suggest additional changes that I can incorporate here; earlier is better, as the 2003 website may be frozen and archived within a month.

Let me emphasize that the following are only ideas and 2004 is not going to be exactly like this. If anything looks confusing or wrong, it will probably get fixed later.

X-Day Staff and Event Organization

1. Next year the X-Day staff will be called "Staff"; the "judges" name will go away; I kept it in 2003 in homage to the previous years.

2. I plan to have some artists in on the ground floor for planning and implementing the site's visual design.

3. I will try to get someone else to write the rules for next year, who is able to do it less verbosely or otherwise easier to understand than myself.

4. I plan for the dates of various X-Day sub-events to be all known in advance, and in the August to September timeframe, as with most previous X-Days. I plan to start promoting X-Day 2004 in June or July or so, by which time a basic introductory site (complete with the new visual design) should be up and explaining the rules and encouraging people to link to it et al.

5. Related to the previous item, the submission and voting periods will not overlap, so for the entire voting period the submissions list will be stable. (I let them overlap in 2003 so the competition could end before January.)

6. X-Day 2004 will have two technically separate sub-events running back-to-back. The first is the "showcase" portion where each person can submit up to a couple dozen items which others can rate from 1..10 and give text feedback on them. The "showcase" lets a creator show off what they were doing in the past year without the pressure of having to compete, but the rating and feedback facilities will let them receive others' thoughts on their stuff, and "second opinions" on which may be the creator's best works. (Each creator can decide for themselves whether comments left for them are public or for the creator only; the person leaving the comment can not decide this.) The second sub-event is the "competition", where those who actually want to put their work up against others will pick up to their 5 best works (as the creator decides; limit 1 per category) to do so. (Note that for simplicity all works that will compete must be listed in the showcase portion first.) In the "competition", each voter simply ranks the submissions in each category that they like by the order they like them. A weighted vote is then placed for every item in the list, with the first item in each voter's list getting the same value as the first of other voters, and with the weight decreasing from the beginning to the end of the list (works a voter doesn't like won't go in the list at all, and receive zero). Specifically, in a list of 1..N items, the weighted vote given each list item E will be [(1+N-E)/N]. The winner is the item with the greatest sum of contributor vote values. Only submissions in the "competition" portion can actually win anything. This split into two events should make it easier to show off your works without being constrained by competition limits, and it keeps people from overloading the competition.

7. I plan to set up a "promotion network" early so that word of the X-Days' existence (new or continuing) can spread to the far corners of fandom, and not just certain clusters that know each other. I know this is an issue, partly by the high turnaround rate of participants between years, and from people who say they weren't told about it until too late, and by the large numbers of fan works I see stumble on with Google or web site links that never participate.

Accounts and Multiple Creator Submissions

1. People will still have to make accounts, and must confirm them against an verified email address. This will not in principle be changed. However, I expect there will be a way to change which email is associated with the account part way through the contest if necessary. Likewise, you should be able to change your password or public name.

2. There will be two account types: 1 for individuals, which can submit and vote, and one for named groups, which can submit works by that group but can not vote. In the latter case, the group leader or someone else the group that agrees to represent them will provide the validating email address. (These features were omitted in 2003 mainly to make my coding work simpler.)

3. For works made by multiple individuals, every person that worked on the item will need to make an account of their own, and those will all link to the same submission, before the submission will be listed on the site. This will be the method for giving their approval to have the item compete, and it will also let someone find the work by looking under the name of any of its creators. This also lets each creator get their own say in the voting process while having equal status as submitters of the same work.

4. Participants will not be listed to the public next year unless either they submit something or they edit their public profile. This is similar to the change I made in early December for the 2003 event.

5. The web site will no longer send emails when users edit something on it, unless they choose to have it done. At the very least, they will get the email to confirm their email address, but otherwise none unless they want them. And at this, they will probably get a few options such as for what types of actions generate emails: eg, submitting something, editing profile, voting, "judging"; currently all of the above do it.

6. I may require that if several participants are sharing the same computer, such as with family members or couples or friends, for example, they explicitely declare that fact as a way to explain how several accounts may have the same IP address(es). (This info would be seen probably by just the X-Day staff.)

Voting Procedures and Rules

1. The method of voting will change again to utilize a method which works well in such things as political party leader elections. You "vote" in the "pick a favorite" manner like you did in X-Day 2002 and before, but this time there are multiple voting rounds. In each round, the item with the least votes is discarded (those with no votes are discarded first), and then the people who voted for the discarded submission vote again for one of the others; this continues until everyone has to pick between exactly 2 submissions. Awards are given in the reverse order that submissions are discarded; the last one standing gets 1st place, the previous gets 2nd, and so on; the total number of awards given depends on how many submissions were in the category, as with 2003.

2. To make things easy for you, we simulate the multiple-voting-round by giving each person a priority queue to fill; in this you "rank" all the submissions in order of preference, arranging them to start with the ones you like the most. For each round, the submission at the top of each person's queue counts as their vote. When a submission loses, it is removed from every person's queue, and the new top of each queue is your vote in the next round. (I did not utilize this method in 2003 as it would have been too complicated to code properly in the time I had.)

3. Text feedback can still be given separately from your priority list as in 2003; ratings on certain attributes may also be provided, but they won't count towards awards.

4. I may possibly have a two stage voting/submissions process, like this (or I may not):

1. Allow submitting a much larger number of works.
2. Rating period like in 2003 so people can give feedback on them. This is because lots of people like to submit less-than-stellar submissions for the feedback.
3. Short period where submitters can see feedback, and then pick a much smaller number of their submissions for the final round.
4. The main voting period will begin, among the smaller number of remaining submissions, following the new voting method discussed above, where the final winners are determined.

Submission Procedures and Rules

1. Only new works will be allowed, those made since July of 2003, unless they competed and won in X-Day 2003. The allowance for old works in 2003 will have only been a transitory feature. Websites or works which keep changing every year will be able to compete again even if they won before, as it shouldn't be the "same" web site as before.

2. The "non-competing" distinction will go away in its current form. The term will simply refer to items in the "showcase" that aren't in the "competition".

3. The "categories" and "sub-categories" distinction will go away. We will simply divide works into, say, 40 "categories" within which all submissions compete. Part of the reason for this is that it is hard to know where a lot of types of things best go; eg: do comic strips go with art or fiction or websites (I made "Media" for this, but showings there were lacklustre.) Also, it saves having, for example, an "art" page containing 200 submissions while "media" contains 15 or "websites" has 50. On the other hand, various similar categories can still be grouped where similar policies and rules apply to all categories in a group.

4. The limits for submissions will be lowered, such as to 1 per new category and 5 overall. I want to raise the submission count through having more particpants rather than more works from fewer participants. I know this is possible, since it seems over half of this years participants are new this year (a high turnover rate). Note that, when a work is attached to multiple accounts, it will count for each at a fraction of a whole work; eg: a person can have either 1 works where they are the sole creator in a subcategory, or 2 where they split ownership with another person; between those two people, there is still the 2 submission limit.

5. I may explicitely require that all submissions must be by amateurs. In other words, they must be by people who do them for fun and not for getting paid (or possibly for padding a portfolio). But to clarify, if someone makes works A and B, and they get paid for A, B can still compete. Alternately, paid-for works may be allowed in their own category for professionals. I will need to discuss the details of this with the staff to propertly nail it down.

Type-Based Submission Categories

1. A new mandatory attribute will apply to all submissions where you say what continuity the work follows or starts with, such as: [original comic, ultimate, movie, evolution, xtas, other, or hybrid]. This is mainly for information sake such that it is easy for people to recognize them.

2. Some of the categories will be rearranged, especially in fan fiction. Any works shorter than 17,500 words (below Novella length, for example) will be organized by subject or genre or type of narrative style rather than by word length (which may not best indicate how much work was applied). For example: farces, parodies, drama, romance, pathos/angst, introspective, adventure. Long works may be split likewise too if there are enough of them.

3. The lower limit for fanfic sizes may be raised, such as to 1500 words from 500 words. Poetry would be exempt from this.

4. "web sites" that are mainly galleries for the owner's own fan art or fiction will have their own category, separate from "normal" sites, and separate from sites which are mainly collections of other peoples' fan art or fiction.

5. Any artwork which is copying a scene or pose from a comic (copied from art made by another person) must be put in a separate category for that purpose, and not be combined with non-copied art; copying art demonstrates a relative lack of creativity on an artist's part. Similar to how photo-manips are separated.

6. Given that all fanfic is not canon and therefore it is all technically Elseworlds (by its broadest definition), the determination for whether narrative fan fiction goes in an Elseworlds X-Day category will be based on its integration potential with the canon stories. If there is no way at all that a story could be reconciled with canon, then it is Elseworlds. If it can be reconciled with canon, because either it says the same thing or talks about something that canon leaves unresolved or ambiguous, then it is not and/or does not have to be Elseworlds. Note that non-reconciliation with trivial (rarely discussed and non-obvious) details in canon doesn't have to be grounds for Elseworlds requirement as even conon contradicts itself at times. Note also that in our context, there are multiple distinct canons, such as the original comic or Ultimate or Evolution or the movie or XTAS; since every submission must identify with a basis continuity, that will be the baseline for it.

7. There will be tighter restrictions on allowed content, such as to make things better for all ages of readers. For example, any graphic depictions of sexual acts will be explicitely banned from all categories (it may be fine to say that it did happen, but not to detail every movement); they were allowed in 2003 for fan fiction (but not fan art) if appropriate content warnings were given, but that will end. Also, works which consist mainly by volume of implicit sexual depictions will be banned. Works done in bad taste will be banned, such as those in which foul language is dominant. Works which are exceptionally violent relative to the original comics will be banned. Works with just small amounts of the above and/or having good taste will probably be accepted as long as they have content warnings. I will need to discuss the details of this with the staff to propertly nail it down.

If you choose to bookmark this web site for later, or link to it from your own web site, please use this url: "http://www.xday.info".

Click here to read the privacy policy for this web site.

This site has been designed to be fully useable on any web browser; you should be able to navigate to all site pages, use all input forms, and read all of the site text, including all Fan Fiction. However, this site is graphics-oriented and will look better in a relatively new web browser that supports images and cascading style sheets; obviously, you also will need graphics support to view the Fan Art. The site should be fast even to dial-up modem users.

This web site displays and/or incorporates creative works by a wide variety of people; each work is Copyright (c) by its contributor, and they are credited in each place where their work is displayed in full or in part. Portions of this web site that do not have explicit credits, including the main organizational design, textual history or instructions, visual layouts, graphics, and program or database code, are Copyright (c) Darren Duncan and/or Shannon Pipik.

This site is not affiliated with Marvel Entertainment Group, who are the trademark and copyright holders of the 'X-Men' and associated characters. Any references made on this site to said property constitutes fair use.

Site last updated 2004 June 11.