Nominations closed — thanks to everyone who nominated! Also very special thanks to Pharaoh for keeping the nominations list up-to-date! The first round of voting will be up in the next day or two.
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This the page for the 2016 FSTDT Awards nominations!

Note: you must be a registered user to make nominations. Nominations from anonymous and unregistered users will be deleted at my discretion. Make sure you're logged in before you make any nominations. If you don't have an account but you want to participate, register here! Don't be shy, because that's me!

In your nomination, try to include a brief explanation of why it is worthy of an award and a few exemplar quotes where applicable. (See my nominations below for an example.) You may make as many nominations for as many awards as you want, and you may nominate as many times as you want (i.e. all your nominations don't have to be in one comment, and I would much prefer you post a new comment than than edit your original comment when adding more nominations). Also feel free to suggest categories and give feedback on how I'm doing and handling the awards this year!

Categories that don't receive much attention will probably be culled from the final vote. The deadline for nominations is December 17.

The nominations will be aggregated and organized on this page to keep from cluttering this one.

And one last (but very important) thing: Please provide either quote URLs or quote #s / IDs where relevant (e.g. fundie-nomination exemplars, quote nominations)!

...and now, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, the categories are:

Fundie Nominations
• Religious fundie of the year
• Right-wing / conservative fundie of the year
• Left-wing / liberal fundie of the year
• Conspiracy theorist of the year
• Sexist of the year
• Racist of the year
• Single-issue wonk of the year
• Vulture of the year
• Batshit-insane person of the year (generally / overall)

Quote nominations
These are regardless / independent of the fundie who said them, but you can make a double-nomination (i.e. nominate a fundie and nominate one of their quotes for X quote of the year). Quote nominations may be from any section and about anything: religion, politics, conspiracy theories, racism, sexism, etc.

• Funniest quote of the year
• Nightmare fuel quote of the year
• One-liner of the year: Two sentences and 250 characters max, ideally less.
• WTF?! quote of the year: The most bizarre, incomprehensible, or "out there" quote (this would be a prime example if it were from 2016)
• Incel quote of the year: Just since there's been so damn many of them

Board nomination
• Board of the year: may be fundie, racist, conspiracy theory, etc.

Commenter / Submitter nominations
• Best submitter of the year
• Best commenter of the year
• "Best" troll / shitposter of the year

Comment nominations
• Funniest comment of the year
• Best rebuttal of the year

Misc.
• Conspiracy theory of the year: Because this has truly been a banner year for CSTDT...
• False flag of the year: ...mostly because of these
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17 Dec Update:
Today's the last day to nominate!

With that news out of the way, I'll go into detail about the candidate-selection and voting process. If I make this whole thing sound complicated and confusing, it's not really. It just seems that way because I'm going into a lot of detail. Just go with the flow come voting time and everything will make sense. Since I'm going over the voting process in length here, this'll probably be TL;DR for many (most?) people, so I'll also include the most important information here on the voting pages.

Fundies (religious, left-wing, right-wing, conspiracy theory, sexist, racist, single-issue wonk, vulture, batshit-insane person) must have at least one accompanying example quote to make it to candidates. Fundie nominees that still need quotes after today will be disqualified and removed from the list of candidates.

Quote categories (funniest, nightmare fuel, one-liner, WTF?!, incel) and the remaining categories (board, submitter, commenter, troll, best comment, best rebuttal, conspiracy theory, false flag) must have at least three nominees to make it on the list of categories up for vote. Those with fewer than three will be disqualified. (The same also technically applies for the fundie categories, but they have all surpassed the minimum number of three fundie nominees, rendering the whole rule moot for them.)

Voting for fundies and voting for the remaining categories will be done in two separate posts concurrently. Fundie categories will have four rounds of voting, each lasting a week (give or take a day for preparation), and the remaining categories will have two rounds, each lasting two weeks. That makes the total time for voting about a month (That's also about the same amount of time Distind generally allotted to voting, though he didn't do it in rounds.)

For fundies, the four rounds of voting will be:

First round (December 19–24) – Will select the top 3 exemplar quotes for each fundie. If a fundie already has only two or three exemplar quotes, then they will be exempted from this round and will be up for voting in the next. If a fundie has just one exemplar, then they will be exempted from this round and the next, and they will be up for voting in the third round.

Second round (December 25-31) – Will narrow the exemplar quotes down to one.

Third round (January 1-7) – Will choose the various fundies of the year! Their winning exemplar quotes will be embellished with their awards.

Fourth round (January 8-14) – Will pitch each of the winning fundies against one another to choose the one single darndest, fundiest fundie of the year. Their exemplar quotes will have two awards put on them: the category they won and fundiest fundie of the year.

For the remaining categories, the two rounds of voting will be:

First round (December 18–31): Candidates in each category will be narrowed down to three.

Second round (January 1-14): The three remaining candidates will be narrowed down to one, the winners! Each of the winning quotes will be embellished with their awards. Winners in the other categories will receive a special mention in a Shy Says post because I don't know what else to do. Any suggestions?

As with nominations, users must be registered and logged in to vote. If you don't have an account and wanna vote, go make one and use it! I will be the only one in charge of voting and tallying the votes. Letting more than one person do this is just asking for errors. While I'm busy handling voting, Pharaoh and Ravy will be the ones approving new quotes for the most part. They'll also be doing comment moderation after I have a little chat with them regarding trolls.

Oh, and another thing, when you cast your votes in the comments, each comment will be hidden after I count its vote to keep from losing my place and double-counting. So don't freak out if your vote suddenly disappears. That will actually be a good thing: it means I counted it. :) Hiding the votes will also have the benefit of preventing a bandwagon effect from influencing the vote.

But remember, I'm hiding the comments, not deleting them: if you vote more than once, I'll catch you and ask you to pick a vote to keep and discard the other one(s). If they're for the same candidate, I'll just count them as one. If you repeatedly vote more than once, all of your votes will be discarded and you won't get to participate in any remaining rounds of voting. (Any votes will be ignored if you try.)

Votes will be tallied using a combination of automated SQL queries and manual counting to ensure what the queries return is correct. To make manual counting easier for me, follow the ballot format I give on the voting pages exactly, that way my SQL sorcery will count it correctly with minimal fuss and all I'll have to do is verify it.

Whew. I think that covers everything. If you read it all, thanks for hanging in there with me!