Signups update

[pocketmouse]

OK, so I'm going to try to do the exchange entirely on the AO3 this year, but there are frankly a lot of things about the signup form that just don't work that well for me and I don't really trust it, so when we get to the actual signup stage, I highly recommend saving all your requests and offers in case the whole thing explodes.

Changes that will have to be made to the exchange in order to cram it into AO3's form below the cut. Massive wall of text ahead!

* No more unlimited requests or offers. The max on AO3 is 10; so now the max for the challenge will be a firm 8, without the option to be matched a second time for another 8 prompts.

* Any field filled by tags (characters, relationships, etc) also have a limit, of 20 (Yes, I know there's any, but there's no way to nominate, say, every MCU main character except Thor).

* Fandoms: in order to make sure everyone is requesting at least 3 unique fandoms to maximize chances of matching, you can't create more than one request for a fandom. So no more being able to request Hermione/Luna/Cho and Hermione/Harry/Ron but exclude Harry/Ron/Luna without excluding a character entirely. I don't think I can do that with this setup. ETA: Never mind, this has been clarified and is no longer an issue. So you WILL be able to make multiple requests for a fandom - you still have to request at least 3 different fandoms, but this will allow people to create multiple requests and should make it possible to either fit in all the relationship tags by increasing the number over the 20-tag limit on a request, or by separating out the characters to keep unwanted pairings from becoming a possibility.

* Because matching is done based on tags, you have to use exact language, which doesn't leave room for saying 'This 5-person group or any subset.' And with big poly groups, you can't put all the permutations in because there won't be room (and you probably wouldn't want to, you'd be there all day!). I am going to attempt to get around this by treating this sort of like how signups have worked in the past: you offer/request a list of characters that you would like to see any combination of three or more. Then in the 'optional tags' section, you can put a specific relationship tag (I am not sure if these are limited to tagset only tags?), so that if you list 8 characters, but really like one specific group of four, you can request it, but if no one else offered all four of those characters, you'll still match with the person who offered three of them. Does that make sense? Large numbers and all permutations is one of the big iffy things about the AO3 matching system.

* Crossovers - I'm not sure the best way to do them in this format, and I don't think that many people asked for them, so I might simplify by cutting this entirely. Or I can also allow fandoms in the 'optional tags' field as a potential but not required match.

* Tagsets - if we do it on AO3 we would have to also make room for a nominations period, which would cut down on either signup time or creating time. Right now the schedule is for sign-ups to go from Oct 10 - Nov 1, with assignments due Jan 6. I know the biggest conflict for a lot of people is obviously going to be Yuletide, which is why we have that nice two weeks afterwards before things are due. So the most obvious place to cut into the schedule is the sign-up period. If nominations run Oct 10-25, and signups still close Nov 1, will that work? Or I can push signups closing to Nov 8, and assignments going out a week as well, but I don't want to cut into writing time too much. Thoughts?

* Tagsets also mean establishing a policy of what megafandoms get grouped together versus what are separate. I would say, for ease of tagset creation, that people nominate megafandoms only, and then characters from any subfandom get assigned to that megafandom. So you nominate Doctor Who for fandom, and for characters you nominate Jack Harkness, the Eighth Doctor, and Andy Davidson. If anyone is planning on offering or requesting any fandoms where separate canons would make this not work, please let me know, and we'll see if we can make specific rules for specific fandoms instead, but I'd like to keep this as broad as possible, since it's already quite complicated.

* Requests: There's an option to make requests visible from the get-go. Do people want this option turned on? It theoretically helps for people who want to do madness-style treats near the end, but that didn't exactly pan out last year.

I think that's everything, but those are, I think, the biggest things.

ETA: Please read the ETA inside the cut. Also, generally, as far as relationship vs characters go, I will probably ask that people nominate both and request both, if at all possible. Because based on the experience of the past two years, I am not expecting the AO3 form to work, and I would like to have the characters to fall back on if everything has to be done manually.

Comments

[evilmuffins]

Why can't we just nominate relationships, rather than individual characters? That way if someone wants Hermione/Luna/Cho and Hermione/Harry/Ron, then they just request those and not any ship they have no interest in. it works fine for Femslash Exchange. Or Maybe I'm misunderstanding your post...

I'm sure someone else can come along and explain this better than me though.

[evilmuffins]

Here's the Femslash tag set http://archiveofourown.org/tag_sets/834. See, If someone wants HP, and Luna/Cho, that's all the add to their request, and they can just ignore the other HP ships by just not adding them.

Just allow people to make many ship nominations per fandom, so everyone can request what they want.

Like I said though, sorry if I misunderstood the problem.

[pocketmouse]

This isn't a nominations issue, it's a request/offer form issue. You can only request so many pairings, though. The form doesn't have room for someone who has nominated 5 characters to nominate every combination of those characters as threesomes and foursomes as well as the fivesome. And the form won't match the relationship Harry/Ron/Hermione/Luna/Cho to Hermione/Ron/Luna, even though it's a valid match according to the exchange. But if you nominate each character individually, in one entry, then it just has to match three character tags out of your five. And then you can basically say elsewhere 'my favorite is Ron/Luna/Hermione,' but it's optional info to the matching algorithm.

Does that make sense?

[lynndyre]

ETA: No, ignore my earlier comment, I think the other commenter is right. Just allow people to nominate and match on relationships, leave the character field out of it entirely?

[(Anonymous)]

Seconding this. I feel like there's no need to make things so complicated, using AO3 for ship-based exchanges is really, really easy and straightforward.

[(Anonymous)]

I think in your desire to make things less restrictive, you're doing the opposite. Just let people nominate relationships and not characters please.

[sirvalkyrie]

+1

If you are going it as any three characters as a group I'm more likely to offer and request fewer characters to avoid combos I don't want to do.

[pocketmouse]

Exactly. When submissions are done by hand, you can request as many as you want, because I can manually check and adjust all of them in a way I can't with automated matching. So I have to put restrictions on the automated form, and it's throwing up all these additional problems that I don't think people were expecting.

[(Anonymous)]

I think you're missing the point. If you let people nominate only relationships then there will be no issues with people requesting and offering what they want. There can't be that many people who would want to request more than ten fandoms or twenty relationships per fandom. If there are, let them signup with a second account.

[pocketmouse]

This isn't conjecture. This is based on the number of characters requested in past years. The majority of requests made in past years wouldn't have been able to fit in the AO3 form if I matched on the relationship field.

[sirvalkyrie]

Which is why it makes more sense to nominate ships directly instead of individual characters. You are making this far more complicated than it needs to be.

-If you want to allow more ships and want to include medium than use the character field for medium, allow optional tags, and set AO3 to only count relationships. Now you have infinite relationship requests and offers.

-Crossovers have been done by AO3 shipping exchanges for a long time. Just nominate it with the fandom "Crossovers" or something like that and when you nominate but the fandom for each character in parenthesis

-AO3 matching can be modified by hand. Once it has finished generating matches you can change it all you want to

[pocketmouse]

Can you clarify what you mean for crossovers? Like, can you give me an example?

[(Anonymous)]

I think what they mean is that lots of recent exchanges have done this by having "Crossover - Fandom" as a a fandom tag that all crossover ships were nominated in. Recently FemslashEX did it that way, but I know other exchanges did as well and it worked fine.

Look at the Tag set under No Media: http://archiveofourown.org/tag_sets/834

[sirvalkyrie]

Here is my tagset for ShipSwap. If you look under "no media" you will find the crossovers.

http://archiveofourown.org/tag_sets/566

[pocketmouse]

My point is that if I move to the AO3 like people want, there is no way to do it without becoming more restrictive. If people nominate on relationships, they can only get those specific relationships that they nominate, and there is literally not room in the form for all the relationships for large poly couples, and I don't want to favor someone who only wants triads over someone who has 9 characters and wants them and any subcombination.

If relationships are listed as an optional category and you fill that in, then the automated system will still try and match you based on specific relationships, but still has the characters to fall back on if no one offers the specific relationship you want. So if you have 7 characters and any subcombination is fine, then you can put the seven characters in the character request, and the relationship tags in the 'optional' field. But if matching is only done based on relationships, then there are a lot of potential matches that won't get made.

[(Anonymous)]

If people want any combination of relationships with 9 different people then they can just nominate them. Maybe make a poll and ask people if they care if it's more restrictive. Since people are pushing for AO3 and are familiar with it's limitations, I can't imagine that many people would.

Personally I wouldn't signup with both characters and relationships.

[wildandfreehearts]

...there is literally not room in the form for all the relationships for large poly couples, and I don't want to favor someone who only wants triads over someone who has 9 characters...

I get this! The AO3 allows up to 100 characters/spaces per AO3 tag. Could it be possible to tell people with larger poly ships to use first names only for tags?

[pocketmouse]

The issue is not with the length of the tag. The issue is that you can only put 20 tags in. So someone who is requesting A/B/C/D/E/F/G cannot fit all the variations of A/B/C/D/E/F, A/C/D/E/F/G, B/C/D/F, etc etc into 20 tags.

[wildandfreehearts]

Ooooh! Okay, gotcha! Hm. That definitely is an issue. I hope you figure out a way that's okay for you, mod. Sending you luck. :3

[lynndyre]

I genuinely think the reason lots of people have been asking for the move, and for the relationship-based matching, is because we *don't want* to match on any combination of 7. We want to match just on the ships we like, not on any possible combination.

Please, listen to what people are saying? It's really simple, if you just let go of character matching.

[pocketmouse]

Yes, and that now will be fixed. If this works how I think it will now, then matching will be done based on relationships, but I need the characters in the exchange for my peace of mind.

[(Anonymous)]

Requesting characters ≠ requesting relationships. I have no interest in requesting characters for a poly exchange. I want to request relationships.

[pocketmouse]

You will be requesting relationships and matching on them.

[wildandfreehearts]

+2

I have a lot of ships I would like to read or write, but I'd feel much more restricted if I had to give a list of character tags, instead of tags for the relationships themselves.

This is my problem with character matching: I might like relationship A/B/C and I might like A/B/D, but if I didn't like A/B/C/D and absolutely every possible permutation of it, then I'd have to ax someone out (either C or D). Which... kind of sucks if I like both those ships.

If we could just list the ships we like it would be easier. AO3 allows up to 20 relationship tags per fandom I believe? That should probably be more than enough for anyone.

TL;DR - I think relationship tags would work better. But that's just my two cents. I'm still going to do this exchange anyway. :)

[(Anonymous)]

+3

With character matching, I can only request or offer one threesome even if there are several ships I like, because otherwise I'd open myself to all those other ships I'm not interested in.

Going by character is so needlessly restrictive. :(

[samuraiter]

*ponders*

If AO3 proves to be too unwieldy, is it still possible to match the old-fashioned way? (Others have volunteered to help, I see from the other thread, but do not hesitate to ask me, as well. femslashex runs similarly, and I can bring a little experience to bear.)

[pocketmouse]

I currently do matching the old-fashioned way, and if I'm going to match the old fashioned way, there's no reason to do signups through AO3 either, because it's just going to be needlessly restrictive and not save any time.

[(Anonymous)]

Please listen what people is suggesting, from what I'm reading around keeping the character field instead of drop it and match on nominated relationships is likely to get not enough participants to run the exchange, and it would be such a shame.

[(Anonymous)]

This has always been one of my favorite exchanges, but imo the push to go to AO3 was to make it simpler instead of more complicated. Sorry, but given that you seem incapable of listening to your participants, I'll be bowing out this year.

[pocketmouse]

I'm sorry anon! I am trying, I just honestly can't visualize how the things people are replying with will help make it less complicated. But the ETA is to indicate that matching will be done based on relationships.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm a different person who's confused because you say in your eta that you want people to nominate and request both characters and relationships.

[dirty_diana]

So this is genuinely an attempt to be helpful in case it sounds otherwise - can I suggest that you just do the signups the way you're more comfortable with? You're clearly unhappy about using the AO3 and if the people who requested it aren't going to see it set up the way they were hoping, then everybody's unhappy and it's pretty pointless all around.

[pocketmouse]

My brain got stuck in basically an entirely different part of the setup process than what other people were talking about. Once I reset my brain I figured it out and I hope everything's OK now, but frankly modding this always drains my spoon count, and when that get happens I get stuck in a rut, which is what happened here. All I want is to not limit peoples' options, and when I look at the AO3 form, all I see are limits. But I think I've figured it out now.

[(Anonymous)]

Does the ETA mean I can let the character slot blank?

[pocketmouse]

Yes, see the new post!