Hello EF! It’s officially a new year, which means it’s time to look back on the completion of our last trip around the sun together.

And what a trip it’s been! The last twelve months have been rife with changes for the archive—amazing changes. In fact, I started this post by revisiting our 2022: A Year In Review post from last year, reviewing some of the initiatives we planned to undertake. Just the tip of the iceberg, really.

In 2023, accomplishments include:

• Introducing Finishing Months, which will return in 2025
• Launching EF’s first mini-event
• Introducing Drabblemania, a spin on our July event
• Ironing out many of the kinks remaining after our former host’s March 2022 update, such as finally returning the site to Eastern Time
• Ditching that host for a brand-new host home that we love
• Establishing Elysian Fields as a not-for-profit
• Creating the first logo in the site’s 17-year history, courtesy of amazing triple-threat bewildered
• Reaching the milestone of 1,000 authors
• Introducing a new commenting award, inspired by the commenting machine Magnus374, and attainable by any member who leaves 1,000 comments or more in a single month. Since then, another member has joined the ranks: violettathepiratequeen! We also retroactively applied this award to any member who has achieved it in the site's history.

And really, y’all, so many other things. It’s been hard to keep track of all the improvements and changes that have been made this year, large and small. We’re not slowing down, either. Already we’ve announced new awards: Star Commenter Award, the Superstar Commenter Award, and the Artist of the Month Award. There is a lot more coming in the way of improvements and updates, so stay tuned because our team has been busy.

Speaking of our team, one of the best things that happened to EF in 2023 was the addition of cawthraven to the Mod team. Even before she was an official Mod, she was working closely with DarkVoid116 to help troubleshoot, implement, and roll out many behind-the-scenes improvements and updates. Suffice it to say, that has continued.

And all while we continued the proud history of site events, with Finishing Months in January-March, the Satisfaction-athon in February, Challenge Month in April, Drabblemania in July, the Truce Challenge in October for the site’s anniversary, and our fourth Secret Santa Fic Exchange. Once again, you guys blew our expectations out of the water.

So are you ready for awards?

In the fourth year of recognizing the milestone that is Completed Fics, we had 113 authors complete a total of 612 fics; that’s a staggering 225 more fics than last year.

All authors who completed a fic (one-shots count!) in 2023 have been issued this award:

The other award seeing its fourth year is the Event Complete Award (formerly the Challenge Complete Award). This was awarded to site members who completed any site event challenge in 2023 (that is, the challenge events that are overseen by the EF Mods and come with spiffy thematic skins and stuff). The exception here being Secret Santa, as finishing the fic is baked into the challenge itself.

And speaking of Secret Santa, we have some numbers to share.

We had 44 event contributions, which have garnered 1124 likes and 539 comments. All participants who completed their fics and/or art should now have their participant award on their profile.

P.S. If you haven't read the fics yet, you can find them all on the Secret Santa event page, which is also accessible by going to Events >> 2023 Secret Santa.

We also have issued awards to our most prolific members. These are chosen by the numbers.

In 2023, we added:

• 10,328,329 words
• 729 stories
• 5,430  chapters
• 1,654 new members
• 120,624 new likes
• 49,227 new comments to the archive (comprising 2,096,789 words)

Top 10 Commenters

• magnus374 (195,698 words)* (Recipient of Most Prolific Commenter Award 2023)
• Nightcandle (186,360 words)
• violettathepiratequeen (114,845 words)
• swonderful (108,290 words)
• Green (99,988 words)
• pfeifferpack (91,802 words)
• All4Spike (71,625 words)
• bmerb (66,024 words)
• The Danish Bird (49,244 words)
• acekoomboom (49,002 words)

Top 10 Authors

• scratchmeout (458,340 words)* (Recipient of Most Prolific Author Award 2023)
• Holly (414,070 words)
• RavenLove12 (365,302 words)
• Geliot99 (331,713 words)
• honeygirl51885 (312,928 words)
• all_choseny (285,868 words)
• acb6293 (272,588 words)
• Desicat (246,564 words)
• ClowniestLiveEver (244,439 words)
• CheekyKitten (241,374 words)

If you are missing an award you should have received, please reach out to us (elysianfieldsarchive@gmail.com) and we’ll verify and get that corrected.

Folks, we had an amazing year. Thank you all so much for what you give to our wonderful community. We eagerly await the amazing contributions we know you will make to the archive as we celebrate another year of Spuffy. And we’re just getting started.