The first round of voting is complete and the nominees in each category have now been trimmed down to the top 5 (or 6 in the case of a tie for 5th place). Well done to all the authors that made it. 1242 people voted in round 1 casting a total of 20471 votes - that's an average of 445 per category. Here's how round 2 works:

• If the nominee you voted for in round 1 made the cut, your existing vote is kept. If you change it, it will be as if you never voted for the original nominee and supported the new one from the outset.
• If the nominee you voted for in round 1 didn't make it to round 2, you can now make a second vote in the same category and your original vote will also be kept in the final scores.
• If you didn't vote in round 1, you can still vote in round 2

Click here to cast your votes

You'll be pleased to hear that you can now search the site by character name. You can either add a specific filter on other searches using the prefix "character:" or just search normally with the character name as a keyword, and the site will now use the character field to help rank the results so that stories where that character has a significant role now appear near the top of the results list.

Also, when browsing categories you can choose to filter the list of stories by the most popular characters within that category.

To provide the data for this feature, the site will now scan each story shortly after it is uploaded and attempt to a) find which words in the story are names of characters and b) determine which of them has the most 'screen time'. It does this by analysing each paragraph of the story and trying to spot who is the primary subject, and then assigning the entire paragraph to that character.

You can see how a particular story has been classified by referring to the new pie chart on the Statistics tab, which shows the top 15 characters that were identified (as long as the accounted for at least 1% of the story). Note, there may up-to a one hour delay between a story being added/updated and the character data being analysed.

This also allows us to answer another long debated question of whether Buffy, Willow or Xander is the most popular character:
you can now see the Top 30 characters accross the whole site on the Miscellanous Site Statistics page.



There is also an author-specific version of this chart on the Profile page that shows the leading characters in an author's stories.

Voting is now open in the Crossing Over Awards. We have extended the voting period this year to give you time to properly read the nominees. The first round of voting runs until 18th September. On that date we will cut the nominees in each category down to the top 5. Then during the second round you can vote from those top 5 nominees and for your Best Crossover Story.

Remember unlike during the nomination round, you can vote for your own stories. You can also change your vote as many times as you wish during the voting period.

Click here to vote

All CoA nominations have now been approved or rejected by the moderators. Thanks to Ava, Demona, Kiwikatipo & LisaF for the hours they spent checking them.

Those authors who are waiting to see if they get any more nominations before responding may now do so.

UPDATE: I have just discovered a bug in the code that meant approval emails for Best Crossover Series were not sent at the time they were approved. I have resent them now.

Firstly, we are steadily processing the CoA nominations; there are about 80 left to go. All remaining nominees should be notified in the next few days.

Secondly, I accidentally uploaded the wrong background image for the nomination banner resulting in some unreadable mess being generated. If you have already downloaded a banner, please do so again. Also note, there is no need to manually insert the nomination banner into your story / author profile on this site; it will be added automatically before voting begins.

CoA nominations are now closed. We have a few weeks before voting starts while we check the nominees and the authors accept/reject the nominations; we still have 600 or so to process, so it may be a while before all nominated authors are notified.

So while waiting for voting to begin, how about a game of dominoes?

The FFA Dominoes Challenge: No, it's nothing to do with pizza! The challenge is to build the longest chain of stories using open FFA entries where the character from the previous pairing participates in the next without a) repeating a character or b) using a pairing you nominated yourself. Hint: use the search box on the Fic-for-all page to find all pairings for a crossover character.

e.g. If your first story was Buffy / Daniel Jackson then your second could be Daniel Jackson / Dawn and your third Dawn / Harry Potter etc.

Add your responses here

Okay, so we are a little bit late, but nominations are now open for the 2010 Crossing Over Awards. The format of the awards remains the same as in previous years, although we have extended the time periods this year in response to feedback from the last awards. We have also removed the awards specifically for unfinished works as this isn't compatible with an extended voting period.

Some top-level categories on the site do not have their own award category this year as there are insufficient qualifying stories posted. However, for the very popular television category, we have three awards: Crime, Sci-fi/Fantasy/Supernatural and all other shows.

A plea to those making nominations: please make sure you check whether the story you are nominating is a multiple crossover and nominate it in the right category; as we have re-organized the Comics, DC Universe, Marvel Universe and X-Men sections of the site, there are many stories in the Multiple Crossings category that should now belong in the Marvel Universe or DC Universe categories. Conversely, there are often cases where the author fails to explicitly state that their story is a multiple crossover. The general rule for award nominations is that multiple crossovers between fandoms in the same fictional universe are nominated in the category for that universe. Multiple crossovers between fandoms in different universes go in the multiple crossovers category.

A plea to authors: if you have old multiple crossover stories that may be in the wrong place as a result of us moving categories around, please move them.

Finally, thanks to all those who participated in our 'Hug a Donor' challenge.