(24th July 1998)
Some of you may have noticed that I give out the Dionaea Awards, a task
which I have discovered do takes time. And as it easily takes much time,
you gotta have the inspiration to keep on doing this. But what inspiration,
then - where does it come from? Well, mainly from those who get the award,
as they write back and thank me for letting them have one. I guess those
of you who give out your own awards will agree with me in that.
But - how long was Adam in Paradise? After a while, those who took time to send that little mail thanking for the award seemed to dwindle away, and weeks, even months, passed without a single response. That continued even after I wrote it clearly that winners only would be listed as winners when I got a mail back telling me they had put up the award. But still - no response from those who got one. Do you think the winners list look empty? Well, now you know why.
What had happened? Why this change in attitude? I don't know, but I studied the statistics and logs over visitors, and found that there were many more visits to the application form than visited the rest of my pages; People got to that form directly from other sites, and didn't read any of the information I provided. (Except for the one mentioned above.) And when I discovered that most of those applying came "sneaking in" like this, I lost much of my inspiration.
You see, I don't do this only to be kind to others - I want something back for the time I spend this way: I want visitors to all of my pages, not just the application form. And I want a "Thank you" back if I find a site worthy of an award. It shouldn't be too much to ask?
So, what I did was this: I removed the offending form. Those who want an award now, must send me an email asking for one. I figured that if people take time to write an email themselves, which is more work than just filling out a form, they will also take time to send a small mail back thanking me for any award they may get. And hopefully I will avoid those who don't care afterwards - there must have been quite a few of those.
If things doesn't get better? Well, I'll just remove the possibility to apply at all - I do need the inspiration, too.
