2024 Wrap Up/Stats!

[fic_in_a_box_mod]

2024 Wrap Up/Stats!

We did it! Thank you so much to all of our mod helpers, discord question answerers, pinch hitters, and of course participants in general. We had so much fun this year and, although we're tired, we look forward to having lots of fun in 2025. We hope you'll join us!

The below post has:

• Stats for 2024, stats for 2023 (we got sick at the end of last round and forgot to give them…), and some neat info comparing stats across all years
• Stuff we want to tell you about the next round
• Stuff we want feedback on from this round

Also a small announcement: in about 24 hours, we'll be flipping some switches on the FIAB newbie discord server to close it down until the next round. All the channels and links will still be visible, we'll just be removing everyone's ability to talk there. We've really enjoyed having the server this round, but we can't commit to modding it in the off season, so look for it to return next year!

Stats

Yay, stats! Below we have a bunch of screenshots and graphs for you displaying 2023 data (because we forgot last year, remember), 2024 data, and some comparisons of data from all 5 rounds. These are all tucked into detail tags because there's a lot of them and we didn't want to make you scroll past if for some reason you're not super interested in our bar graphs and pie charts.

You can also view all this info in spreadsheet form (link) if that's more your thing.

2023 Stats

2024 Stats

Data about all rounds (2020-2024)

Charts about the number of works

Charts about wordcount

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Stuff we want to tell you about the next round

We're planning on starting the 2025 round earlier than usual!

This and previous rounds have started around the second week of August.

Going forward, we think we're going to aim for starting during the third or fourth week of July. (Exact timing TBD, start checking the comm in early July for the schedule.)

What about FFFX?

We'll probably have more overlap with Five Figure Fanwork Exchange (link), but we'll avoid a complete overlap of exchange phases. For example, if FFFX's sign ups are the first and second week of August again, we'd make sure only one of those weeks is also our sign up period.

Why?

As FIAB gets bigger, things get more complex and more complex things take more time on the mod side even when we have help. We like the current length of our creation period, but we'd like to make sure people participating in Swaps continue to have ample time to complete their swapsignments. Plus, we'd like to build a little more time into the schedule for tagset checking and other mod admin things. The writing period itself probably won't end up much longer, maybe a week or so.

Modly efficiencies coming to the 2025 round

Our mod sheet (where we track info on assignments, pinch hits, etc) is currently very mysterious to one half of the mod team. As part of our off-season work, we'll be working on demystifying it and producing some documentation for mod use so that various FIAB admin tasks can move faster. For participants, this will hopefully result in things like pinch hit assignments happening quicker or more frequently. At the very least, it will be possible and hopefully easy to split more tasks! (You might ask: "Why have any important mod tasks ever been split up like this?" and the truth is that we just like different tedious tasks, haha, but we're willing to branch out a little for your benefit.)

Also, related, we'll hopefully be able to improve our work checking process so that it's a little more hurricane-proof–thank you for your patience this year!–and a little more delegated to our new helpers. We will continue using karanguni's scraper bot, which was extremely helpful.

In general, thank you for sticking with us through the growing pains involved in us taking on a larger and more active set of helpers!

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Stuff we want feedback on from this round

We want to know what you think! We won't respond unless we have follow up questions and we might not actually change anything based on feedback, but we do like knowing what people thought about this round of FIAB.

You're welcome to give feedback on things we don't ask about below. We're extra unlikely to change parts of the exchange we feel are currently working, but you might have noticed something going wrong that we missed!

Worldbuilding tags

Guidelines

In this year's nominations guidelines (link) we gave new worldbuilding guidelines! We're pretty sure that these were helpful and well-understood based on the nominations we received, but any part of it was confusing to you, we'd love to know so we can improve for next round.

Evidence posts

Also new this year, we included a section asking for clarification of potentially confusing tags (link), including WB: tags. From the tagmod side of things, we found it really, really helpful to have explanations for WB: tags posted ahead of time, and in many cases this allowed us to approve tags without having to post a request for clarification. We have the following questions which we hope you can answer:

• Is there anything you think could be improved about our explanation for when we would like nominators to post clarifications?
• For those of you who posted a clarification, did it feel better or worse than having to watch the query posts? Did you like or dislike it? Could the process be improved in any way?

Feedback from newbies

You might have noticed by this point that FIAB is complicated! We have a lot of documentation, some of it newly revised this year, and we'd love to know what people who are new to FIAB or new to exchanges in general thought about it. (If you're neither of those things but you've got opinions about our documentation anyway, go ahead! The more the merrier!)

Here are some questions to get you started:

• What were you most confused by?
• What advice would you give to someone who's new to FIAB next round?
• Is there any piece of information you wish had been more clearly highlighted to you, or that you found out/understood too late for it to be helpful/relevant?
• If you used the Newbie Discord, was it helpful? Do you think anything about it could be improved?
• Did you have a good time?