This is not a complaint! However, once upon a time, the CCTN did a fairly well job of running recurring "Report" articles of new issues. Although Janice O'Neal did the Nevada Report for sometime and then it was picked up by Tyrus (as I recall) and Greg Susong did the Riverboats and Archie Black did Atlantic City (Yes, there were others as well and I apologize to not credit them in this post) it seems that some things have changed.

Atlantic City issues seemed to dry-up, Colorado as well. Riverboats still made an appearance in the CCTN, but there were interruptions. Nevada issues (except for Northern Nevada by Larry Hollibaugh) went lacking (i.e., not being regularly reported) and all of these were a great resource to the OTY participants in the past.

I launched the Un-Official OTY Viewing Site in an effort to just bridge the gaps of the CCTN, but there were two significant constituents of the site. One was that it was self-service. The hope was that when people posted scans of they might think about up-loading the scans to the OTY site as well.

Secondly, I purposely wanted the site to be "Non-Official" because I knew that I did not have the time to keep it update and valid. Aside from deleting the occassional picture of Hotrod's tatoo or other non-related scans, I knew it would be an onerous task to police and keep all uploads valid candidates.

The first aspect proved difficult because scans were never the same quality or orientation. Two sided chips (meaning the sides are different) often only showed one side. Scans of both sides where the chip is shown side-by-side did not fit in to the box well, as the site was intended to show both sides as two different scans.

One of the things that started to happen was that OTY Nominations referenced the Un-Official Viewing Site. Descriptions read like the descriptions there. Nominees were essentially only from what was displayed there. I've even received picture sheets of scans from the Un-Official OTY Viewing Site. While there was generally a good cross section of chips (COTY candidates) the tokens were a dead zone. Last year every known Silver Strike was shown, as acquired from the Silver Strikers catalogue pages (with permission). The year before that the Site was filled with strike scans from one of the Strikers (I apologize, as I don't have your name at my finger tips!).

In the absence of getting the scans moved to the Un-Official OTY Viewing Site (for strikes) I had asked the StrikeStrikers.com catalogue wizard to add year of release to the scans. This is done and therefore Silver Strikes released in 2008 can be viewed there. http://www.silverstrikers.com/WebPages/MainPages/Strike-Online-Catalog-Page.html

So, while at one time it was easier to kind of know what there were. It recent times it has been a bit more difficult.

Again, I am not complaining, just mentioning some information as I see it.

Jim Follis
LM 3872-53
OTY Awards Chairman