AOTY for 2026?

There is a slight chance I will get off my butt and fish this weekend but I haven't seen anything about AOTY this year. Looks like last years leaderboard is still up and nothing new posted.

Anyway, just wondering if its happening this year. I like seeing other people catch big fish and its a good way to log your own big fish when it happens. And I need some redemption after last year which was my worst AOTY year.   

Scott

I haven't seen a new leaderboard up. I was able to log in a fish but it is in Pending mode and doesn't show yet.

I believe Bsteves, who lives in Oregon, still upedates the AOTY page each year. You may want to PM him or maybe Polepole.

I sent an email to Brian today, asking if he can help archive 2025 and setup 2026. Sorry for lagging. I'll try to figure out how to do it myself in the future, so we don't have to keep bugging him. And I may have some fish to enter...

AOTY is still not up and working for 2026 and it's almost May. I've got a few fish entered under Pending status. It would be nice to see the results of Moo and everyone else's hard work. Do we need photo reviewers? I'm willing to volunteer if that's what it takes.

AOTY is still not up and working for 2026 and it's almost May. I've got a few fish entered under Pending status. It would be nice to see the results of Moo and everyone else's hard work. Do we need photo reviewers? I'm willing to volunteer if that's what it takes.

Bump + ditto ^

Was really looking forward placing behind Joe, Moo, John and Tom *again* 😒

If admin help is needed on the AOTY thing, let me know.
I think it could be Moo's year, but we just don't know.

I had fun playing last year. I don't want to step on anyone's toes, but since it's nearly halfway through the year and no sign of the official AOTY, I made a google sheets page as an unofficial 2026 AOTY: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Sydhhiuk7rnmw7eKPqo9ycnOxahFS8gq7MYl8k6tXkg/edit?usp=sharing


There's a readme with instructions to create a worksheet for your catches. It's not as swanky as the official version. I am not trying to replace or compete with the actual AOTY, just trying to give people an option to track your catches and get bragging rights while the real AOTY is down. It uses peer review (sign off on each other's catches). The sheet automatically sums the best 10 catches using the same points per inch scale of AOTY (assuming I got all my formulas right, it passed initial sanity check).

Give it a try and let me know if you have feedback!

Hey Steeeeve - great name lol

So I've been chatting with Joe about this too.

Also not wanting to step on toes, but also hate to see this languishing as it's already May.

I started a new board over at westcoastkayakfishing.com as I have a lot of experience running online communities (have one going strong 20 years now) and worry about the state of messageboards that aren't actively managed in the age of AI/bot crawlers and such.

Anyhow, if you need a forum or backend written up, I'm happy to set something up.

I do like your approach here of google docs since that's pretty simple and zero maintenance and peer review can work in a pinch and doesn't just put the responsibility on one or a few people.

I asked for permissions on the spreadsheet to take a look.

Also, here's the link to where we were talking about it, would love to have you (or others) join and kick the tires on the Xenforo software:

https://westcoastkayakfishing.com/threads/wckf-aoty.27/

Oh, also, I just realized the actual AOTY site is viewable (wasn't working the last several times I checked this past month) and the welcome page heading at least has been updated to read 2026 so someone may actively be updating it and refreshing it for this year. In which case, again - I definitely don't want to step on any toes.

Only here to help if there's a need.

<update> Looking a bit deeper through the source code, I think that page header and footer are actually auto-generated so yeah, my guess is still nobody is actively updating that page right now.

Thanks! I gave everyone who requested access, and switched over the permissions to anyone with the link (hopefully this doesn't result in it being overrun with aforementioned bots).

If the real one comes up, that's even better.

I'm the wrong type of engineer to make anything fancy which is why I went to google doc route. I'll check out your forum too, if you have ideas on how to remake or improve on my setup I'm open to any and all input.

Thanks steeeeve!

Looking at the google doc now. Looks logical/workable to me.

re: getting overrun with bots, you should be totally fine there. Google would have all sorts of safeguards against that sort of thing... the main things these days that get slammed by bots are traditional websites/messageboards or custom apps that are just exposed to the internet w/out some sort of protective layer. (The SMF software version in use here I think hasn't been patched in 9 years)

For any turbo-nerds out there, I'm looking at source code of AOTY and from what I can tell it's probably a custom Ruby/Rails application, and it seems to share a common codebase with NWKA (possible that sister site/group may no longer be updating?) Hard to say exactly but my best guess is it's still not been manually updated since last year's (2025) stuff.

Hey steeeeve. I gave it a shot. I think I submitted the few fish I had and it looks like it stuck. I wasn't sure how to save, but I guess just going to another box does it. And I approved the fish you submitted. Looks like it tallied the fish as it should.

Let me know if I'm missing something but it was pretty easy. Thanks for putting this together. I'm still submitting on AOTY in case someone decides to keep it going, but it's cool to have this platform where we can submit and see who catches what.

Scott

Okay I lied. I went back and my pictures floated into other areas. Maybe I do need to save somehow?

Joe had a bit of trouble pasting into the spreadsheet too.

I intend to give it a try myself once I have more catches to add. 

I'm actively trying to set up a new AOTY system (again, not trying to replace NCKA but just trying to make something very easy/accessible and much more maintainable with modern software).

Will post again when we've tested it out a bit more.

Feel free to join https://westcoastkayakfishing.com if you want to test it out too or just jump in on the discussion with others.