The XYZZY Awards ceremony for 2015 will be held on the ifMUD on Saturday, May 28, at 8 AM Honolulu time – or, should you inhabit a slightly more populous slice of the planet, 11 AM US-Pacific, 2 PM US-Eastern, 7 PM UK. We hope you can join us as we announce the winners.

As promised, I’ve been looking into possible alternatives to ifMUD; in that process, it has become clear that running the ceremony smoothly takes a pretty specialised setup, one which is very difficult to replicate in any kind of plug-and-play chatroom. At this point, I’m not confident about running a ceremony successfully from any of the alternative platforms I’ve looked at, and I’d rather not delay the Awards any more. I’m still very conscious that ifMUD is a difficult environment for anybody who doesn’t frequent it regularly, and I’m hoping to have a viable alternative in place by next year – even if that means recruiting a volunteer willing to build a custom platform. In the meantime, we’ll be producing a ceremony-specific guide to navigating the MUD – we don’t pretend that this is a complete solution, but we hope that it’ll help for the time being.

Voting is closed and will remain so through this week.