The Sunflower Awards 3.0

Announcement

Hello again, Sunflowers! I thought we should post this announcement, since we've been posting an announcement in our other projects, about getting hacked and how that changes things. Our other projects are very different though, so this will be a little different from those announcements.

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What Happened?

As I mentioned above—and as you saw if you kept up with our personal message boards or this one—we were hacked. Our account and works were deleted. After working with Wattpad Support for a few days, we were able to retrieve and reactivate the account, but we're having to re-upload all of our projects, including this one. We're working on rebuilding everything for the whole community.

On the bright side, many of our projects had some much-needed updating that we hadn't gotten around to yet, so we've slightly adjusted our rules for a few projects and have given them a refreshing new look! :)

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What Does This Mean for The Sunflower Awards?

We have all of our important info (scores, reviews, judge usernames, contestant usernames) in spreadsheets, so we're still able to continue on, fortunately. Judges have already been contacted, and we still expect results by the original deadline, Feb 28th. We might just be a little slower at posting results with having to rebuild everything. 

I'm going to post probably about a third of the results on March 1st, posting the results in the order they were received. I was hoping to wait and post all results at once, but this will be much easier to manage as we work on rebuilding everything. Don't worry though, we're aiming to post all results within the first two weeks of March. We expect some judges might need a few extra days, but we're going to do our best to post results in batches rather than one at a time. Our original results goal was all of March anyway, so we're still on track. It's just a matter of how many judges won't be done by tomorrow, the deadline.

I'll go through and tag you all here, as I expect some of you missed the tag on my personal message board about it. Judges, you will be contacted tomorrow about the deadline if you haven't given us your results already. If you were disqualified and were tagged here, you are still disqualified; it was just hard to remove the usernames of every single disqualified person.

We mentioned this in the new "Intro" chapter: we will not be reposting many of the introduction chapters from before. We lost them for good, and frankly, we don't see the need for recreating them when the awards are almost over. These are the chapters no longer included: "Rules," both "Forms" chapters, "Judging Criteria," "Deadlines," and the "Flower Garden." Judges, if you have been contacted about your shoutout but haven't responded yet, please do so ASAP. We're reposting them as we receive that info.

If you were a previous awards winner, contact us! A requirement for these awards was that you couldn't have won the last awards, Sunflower Awards 2.0, but I imagine we won't have that requirement in the future, as we no longer have access to that info. If you remember winning, we will do our best to give you your prizes back, but you must let us know first.

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How Can I Help?

There's nothing any of you can do that's awards-specific, but we'd appreciate it if you commented and voted if you're interested—and only if you're interested; this is by no means a requirement. It'd be more helpful for our more permanent projects, like Sunflower Writing Circle and Sunflower Book Club. If nothing else, just check them out. Hopefully, Wattpad's algorithm will do its thing and get us back to the top again. Our book club used to be one of the first search results, but it obviously isn't anymore. Many of our projects have taken a pretty big hit from this.

If that's not something you're okay with, which is completely fine, at least add this book to your library, public reading list, and refollow us (if you unfollowed before). Those were a part of the original rules and they really help with recognition and keeping you informed of any new updates/the results.

Thank you so much for the support! We can't wait to start posting the results! :)

- Cassie (ccallis0246)