Well, after all that, it appears that my virtual season will not be considered eligible for consideration for an award, nor any of the individual episodes I nominated be considered for any of the awards either.

The joke is that I thought the dicey bit would be the rule about their having to be written no earlier than 2003. All the episodes were written long before that (starting in 1996, though revised later). After all, I had to write 22 of them, and they aren't exactly drabbles! But nothing was published/posted until 2004. And they were all revised before posting.

However, the community has rejected FK4 on a completely different ground altogether. This is their reply:

I'm very sorry, but we have to reject your nominations on the grounds that fics that people have do download onto their computer in order to read, is putting an unreasonable burden on the judges and voters. I've discussed this with the other mods and the judges and the consensus was, no one is going to download more than a dozen fics to their computer for voting and that we have no way to guarantee people won't be downloading a virus to their computers.

If you can provide us with links to viewable fics, ie visible html pages, lj, ff.net, or any alterate locations that do not require download, we would be happy to add all of your nominations. We can give you until 6 PM EST on 8/17 to provide an acceptable alternative. I'm sorry to be difficult; but I can't post your nominations as currently listed leading to zips.

Which was so not what I was expecting that I got pretty mad, as you might expect. I re-read their rules, and there's nothing there about zipped files. So I sent them back this:

Of course there's no HTML version! The whole point of FK4 was to do something resembling the scripts of the fourth season of the show. It is true that I modified the format to make it more readable (since real scripts tend to be pretty boring, as they lack the visual detail you get when you actually watch the show). But I made every effort to get the modified script to resemble, on a superficial visual level, the way that a full script would look—as best I could without having the computer program for script format.

When it came time to upload the 22 episodes onto my server, I discovered that putting the Word versions of them up unzipped would exceed the webspace allotted to me by my ISP.

Being on a limited budget, I can't afford to pay for more webspace.

I should add that you do not say in your rules that the stories may not be zipped. You say that they have to be accessible. I gave you the URLs for the webpages from which you download them. There are certainly people who read the whole thing, one episode per week when it was first posted. (I know this because I got feedback.) Clearly they found FK4 accessible!

So the readers in 2004-5 found it accessible. FK4 fits your rules as you stated them. If you want stories not to be zipped, you should say so right in the rules.

Of course that may mildly have relieved my annoyance; but it's not going to make any difference. They've made their ruling, and that's that.

I hope you will try FK4 anyway.