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?

Comments

[sheron]

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.)

This is excellent news! The archive reveals being during the Thanksgiving in US makes it so difficult because of all the hoopla and coming up on the Christmas/New Year holidays. Having the event run and reveal earlier should be much more doable :D

[intherainex]

What were you most confused by? Swaps were pretty confusing at first but I don't think it was because of a lack of documentation or explanation so much as they're just kind of complicated and make more sense once you're able to see/fill out the form and get your swaps.
What advice would you give to someone who's new to FIAB next round? Trust the process! Haha
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? Hmm, not that I can think of right now.
If you used the Newbie Discord, was it helpful? Do you think anything about it could be improved? I thought it was super helpful! There were times people asked a question and I was like "oh yeah I don't know about that either" but wouldn't have thought to ask myself.
Did you have a good time? A fantastic time, thank you so much for organizing!!

[taken_aback_by_tuesdays]

As you consider going earlier on the calendar, I'd love it if nominations at least partially took place after battleship was done. This year battleship was entirely in July, ending on July 22, but I don't know when the planned start is next year.

[hekateras]

I had a lot of thoughts as a first-time participant! ^^

What were you most confused by?
Probably all the different mediums. I went very multimedia and the lines between various similar formats were a bit unclear to me, as well as what some mediums entail. Some were self-explanatory, but some were things that I'd never heard of before or only had a fuzzy idea about, so it took a bit of work to figure out what to expect if I requested that medium and eventually I just gave up and requested things that sounded cool without actually having an idea what I'd be getting. (It worked out, though!) And now it belatedly occurs to me that I could have looked at the DW tag for some of those mediums to find the corresponding past reading list posts. Maybe the medium ruleset page could link to those DW tags alongside the word equivalent info?

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?
From the DW and official resources I didn't realise that making multimedia works is always allowed by default, i.e. you're always allowed to combine different medium opt-ins in the same work. IDK how I missed it but it was a gamechanger. (Checking again now, I would have expected it to be in the Assignments / Medium/length opt-ins section of the FAQ, but I don't see anything about it.) Thankfully I found out about this in time from mod emails.

I also would have liked to know in advance that medium opt-ins that are only in the letter are just as valid as the ones in the sign-up.

If you used the Newbie Discord, was it helpful? Do you think anything about it could be improved?
I mainly found it helpful for the event questions channel and the medium clarifications threads. (Although, for the medium clarification questions I had later in the creation period, I felt it would be too de-anoning to ask about how to create X or Y medium I was unsure about.) It was also great to have a channel just for checking schedule-related things.
I would love the server to have a channel only for recs (with discussion elsewhere/e.g. in general)! As a suggestion, this channel could also be set up via web hooks to automatically detect/link to new posts in the recs page on DW.

Specific feedback - IF mediums
What do you think about streamlining the IF mediums? I think that it's important to separate between text-only and text with visual components, and also AO3-hosted or hosted elsewhere. But I don't see why Twine, Ink, and the generic "choice-based IF not hosted on AO3" can't be collapsed into one medium (does it really matter which tool was used to make it? Genuine question as I've now made AO3 and Twine IFs, but am not familiar with Ink. But right now it feels a lot like having separate categories for art made in Photoshop and art made in Procreate.) Also, I nominated Visual Novel as a unique medium, and in hindsight this bugs me because it's absolutely IF, but IF is nowhere in the name, so people searching to request IF can and did easily miss it. Also, I think the ruleset I suggested for it is a mess and doesn't work at all, it's needlessly complicated and too restrictive to count it as "scenes" given the wide variety of ways visuals can be used in IF. Plus, Twine lets you make multimedia IFs with visuals and audio too! I did not know this at the time.

So, what do you think of

Writing - Interactive Fiction - AO3-style Choose Your Own Adventure
Writing - Interactive Fiction - Choice-based IF not hosted on AO3
Illustrated Text - Interactive Fiction - AO3-style Choose Your Own Adventure
Illustrated Text - Interactive Fiction - Choice-based IF not hosted on AO3

as the new IF mediums? And then the wordcount can just be counted the same way as for regular illustrated text. It would be so much simpler and be a lot more flexible.

What advice would you give to someone who's new to FIAB next round?
Don't be afraid to ask dumb questions! A lot of them.

Did you have a good time?
YEAH! =D Thank you mods!

[snickfic]

I'm excited for an extra week of writing time! And thanks for sharing the stats. <3