The end of 1995 was the year of the Awards. Many groups got their big Awards that year. Amoung them were the Spookys (alt.tv.x-files.creative), and the ASC Awards. Most of those awards where straight up votes, or at best choose your top three (which is the route that the Golden Orgasms took two years later on alt.startrek.creative.erotica.moderated)

At the time, there were no major archives of USENET postings like DejaNews and it's successor, Google Groups. So we had to rely on collections of lists of what was posted. Fortunately Stephen Ratliff had begun collecting such a list, beginning on February first of 1995. That was quickly agreed to be the beginning of what has been termed as the ASC Year.

Over the Christmas Holidays, Stephen realized that a straight up vote, not only hard to conduct in the days before widespread Web usuage, really added nothing to the group. In fact it would quickly become a popularity contest. Therefore he proposed a different method. The ASC Awards would be a feedback-based awards, which seems to be a unique idea of the times. Instead of saying which you think is the best, when the list of stories were posted, the voter, now referred to as the commentator, would respond with what they thought about the story.

The theory was that the feedback method would encourage feedback, and that measurements of the length of the feedback would result in a fairly good measure of how well a story was like. However, no qualifier on the content, good or bad, was placed on the comment. For the first few years the feedback was measured in lines. In 1995 a 5 point scale was used.

The 1995 Awards had ten categories, all but one, crossover received votes. This was the only year that stories appeared in multiple categories.

This was intially an nominated award, when first posted, but within three days it opened fully. From almost the first posting of this award, a behind the scenes campaign developed to name this after then Archivist Alara Rogers. By the time Stephen was ready to announce who won, he had over a dozen independant proposals for it to be named after her. Although it was named after her for her archiving work, it is only fitting that the first winner was Alara Rogers.