2017 Ursa Major Award winners announced at FurDU 2018

That's OK KO!, right? Has that vibe. Don't know if their creators had any involvement in the fandom, but I thought Here's the Plan and Kouka and Bibi had their charms, though I can see why the latter isn't to everyone's taste; it feels like it's from a bygone era. His recent work is pretty cheesy, too!

For many that would be a positive factor! But I imagine the variety of features Inkbunny offers was the clincher.
The award is for best website, not best content, and even Inkbunny's detractors admit the site is technically sound.

What many don't realise is that some features (e.g. keyword/artist blocks) exist specifically to allow controversial topics.
Banning content that some find uncomfortable is the easy option, compared to finding ways to accommodate it.
And perhaps some voters thought that effort to maintain freedom of expression is worth some recognition, too.

Unlike last year, it seems e621 didn't notice the nomination or see fit to get out the vote.
Inkbunny did, albeit to a de minimis level - one tweet, one FB post, and one day of site banner promotion.
The result: e6's vote halved, and IB won. If you want to win, you have to act like you want to win, at least a little.

Oh, and ALAA put e621.com on the voting form, rather than e621.net. That probably didn't help…
Still, I doubt many would've voted first or second preference for a site they don't already know.

This was Inkbunny's fifth nomination, and it's been growing all this time, so it shouldn't be a huge surprise that it won eventually.

Not ponytails or cottontails, no
DuckTales! Woo-hoo!

A shame. but the show's on its decline...they're going to reboot it and say goodbye to G4 anyway.

If you look at the Comic Strip results, it was close; DreamKeepers Prelude actually ended up with more first-preference votes than Housepets! - it just doesn't (yet?) attract such a broad base. The runners-up there also won awards in other categories. It's not the same situation as 2015 or 2016 where Housepets! was leading with ~50-150 first preferences.

I seldom think of Kyell's work, now, and a big part of that is that it's not being put up for the Ursas (although I guess Fred's reviews being on Dogpatch is part of it as well). In fairness, I'm not exactly in the target market for most of it, though I'm sure some readers are. But I don't want to repeat myself. so…

We actually spoke to Rick about this when we had him on our podcast and he's actually said, if people want to win they'll have to beat him. It's not about the aplomb so much I think. It's about the idea that, people like his comic. So they'll vote for it. We can wait to see what happens.

Beyond this the director for "Here's the Plan" is incorrectly placed? "Directed by Fernanda Frick" it says on the page?

why does your profile information contain your home address

go cry to foxler or perri.

Traffic, most likely. Furry fandom doesn't have a top-down structure, and what "furry" means to everyone is so divergent, we're all scattered across websites and social media without a reliable way to communicate to large groups. Flayrah doesn't advertize much (as far as I know) so we've got a small pool of regulars, our content is kind of dry, and that's about it... plus Sonious and I are pretty busy with day-to-day stuff. Dogpatch Press, in comparison, is a much more active, dynamic site with a higher frequency of contributors, plus he's confronting a lot of ongoing issues within the fandom, so it's no surprise that site is fairly popular! They had a voting score of 450 in comparison to Flayrah's 301, so that's quite the gap!

To be honest, I don't think the concept of "furry news" registers with most of the fandom. When I do a Google search for "furry news sites" (without the quotes), there's lots of irrelevant stuff - "Furry Raiders" is 9th on my search results - and neither FurryTimes nor InFurNation shows up in my top 50 hits. :-(

So the first challenge is to get the site to become more well-known, which admittedly is difficult to do in the first place. The second challenge is keeping your audience. Your site has a kind of scattershot approach. Flayrah's more in-depth stuff takes the form of articles, and then the random-link-of-the-day stuff goes into the Newsbytes section. Yours tends to mix it all together.

And with frequent posting! You made something like 139 posts this last April, which works out to about 4.6 posts a day. That's a lot for this fandom! Who's the intended audience? When you have a really wide range of content, individual furry fans who're interested in specific things have to sift through to find things they're interested in. But how do they do that? On my browser, I have to click on "About", then scroll all the way down to the bottom to search, or to view the site by previous months. Most of your articles are in the "Uncategorized" category, and although you've been adding tags, it doesn't feel consistent and there's no list of the tags anywhere. (Also, one of the first things your About page says is that "This is a blog, not a furry news site".)

For easier navigation there either has to be a major visual redesign, or better navigation for tags, or a focus on a narrower part of the fandom. You have a lot of good video links that shows off our fursuiters! (I should also that say Flayrah's navigation is kind of enh as well - the active podcasts could use some updating, as well as the links to related sites at the bottom - We've kept our attention keeping the stuff at the top half of the page working.) But then, even after all that work, the problem is getting the word out and keeping the audience coming back. :-(