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Wrapup Post
Dec. 2nd, 2021 05:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fic_in_a_box_modWrapup Post
This year went really great and resulted in a ton of great things, with 546 works in the collection! Here are some basic stats of how this year shook out:
As we wrap things up, I wanted to take a look back on things we've changed, things that were new this year, and things we might want to change for next year.
I asked for feedback about some things in particular that I especially want to hear y'alls opinions on, but please feel free to post your thoughts and feedback about everything!
Requests and Offers
- One fandom minimum for offers worked great, so we'll be keeping that!
- The adjustments we made to request minimums (the official minimum was three fandoms with distinct lore to be guaranteed a gift, but you could sign up with less) also worked pretty well! Only a few people were affected by this and none of them were left without their minimum owed gifts! So we'll be keeping this for next year as well.
Nominations
- Relationships: The new relationship nomination method (gsheets with instructions, or AO3 if you were super solid that you could hit all of the guidelines perfectly) worked *great* on our end and will definitely be back next year. Everything went smoothly for us and worked exactly how we were hoping it would!
- Fandom Transfer: This year I only let you transfer things from the 2020 tagset by full fandoms. Next year I'm going to make the batch load lists accessible to y'all and let you do partial fandom transfers, though you'll still be able to just give me the fandom name instead if you'd like the whole thing transferred! This will let OW and Crossover people participate in fandom transfer and shouldn't add any extra work on my end. I'll also be fixing fandom tags that need fixing as we transfer this time, since I ended up doing that with some this year anyways!
- Worldbuilding: This seemed to work really well from a mod perspective, but I'd definitely like feedback on how it worked writing and receiving it and what adjustments you think might be necessary. We definitely had to change up some of our expectations on the fly, but we expected some of that. Next year we'll have a better idea of how broad we want these tags to be and also how to express that in guidelines.
Swaps
- I loved this and we're keeping it.
- Participants will able to offer to take on extra (e.g. over 10k) swaps. This was technically an option this year but it was applied late and we were kind of chaotic about it.
- We'll also be more clear with options for capping out your swaps in various ways (e.g. if you want a maximum of 2 assignments). I'll be messing with the spreadsheet to see how much I can get it to do nicely and that will inform a lot of how much extra details we can take in, but the ideal is to get everyone the swaps they want!
- Please let us know how this worked out for you, things you want changed, and things you don't want changed!
Defaults and Earn-backs
- This year we changed it so that defaulter PHs would still be posted up until the deadline. We were hoping this would make people feel more comfortable defaulting early but in practice it didn't appear to affect anything. It also didn't hurt anything! I'm ambivalent about keeping it so if you have opinions either way please let us know!
- We had a lot of no-shows this year, which I think might be because with swaps a lot more people than last year had assignments that were assigned over email only and thus had no convenient Default button to hit. To fix this, I'm going to make a Default button (probably in google forms) where all you'll have to do is input your AO3 name, your recip, and if you're fully or partially defaulting (and how much if partial).
- We expanded the earn-back options this year to include fills for PHer requests and community templates, and ended up with some of both being posted! So we will most definitely be keeping those earn-back options for next year.
Extensions
- Extensions should work the same way and on the sameish schedule next year!
- For next year we'll be adding a rule that if you no-show on an extension (No contact, no defaulting, nothing submitted for that recip by your deadline) in 2022 then you won't be able to get an extension in 2023. This won't affect anything other than extensions and will only apply to the following year.
Pinch Hit Pre-offers
- I think this worked really great, but it definitely needs some fine tuning! My ideal for these is that people will be able to get dibs on PHs they might want but wouldn't usually be able to get (especially people in different timezones, since I'm always posting PHs around midnight eastern) without feeling any pressure to pick up something just because they had dibs.
- You were able to edit your pre-offer through the exchange, but I didn't make this clear enough. I need to make this more clear for next year and also make it clear people can contact us for a comment link if dreamwidth isn't letting them see their pre-offer.
- There need to be clear options so pre-offerers can set limits on what they want to be sent as a pre-offer, beyond just which recips they want. A short and probably incomplete list of optional fields that definite need to be added: Limits based on both/either assignment number or assigned amount, whether you want to be offered more of a PH you already have part of or not, recip specific exceptions, and if there's a cutoff date after which you don't want to be offered PHs or a date range you don't want to be offered PHs within.
- Pre-offers will still be able to be posted the same as they were this year without any of that, and conversely if someone isn't offered a PH due to their limits but sees the PH on the post and wants it anyways then of course they can still claim it!
- If there is anything that you would have liked to be able to specify in these, please let us know!
Mediums - General
- From the mod end the rulesets (click here) seemed to work really well! We'll definitely be keeping the same basic idea for next year, though some things might be rearranged and fine tuned a bit.
- Nomination of mediums being on dreamwidth seemed to work well this year so we'll be keeping that!
- In general if any mediums didn't quite fit their categorization, were confusing, or were too ambiguous to be useful we definitely want to hear about it!
- I still want to get a big document setup with detailed explanations/examples of all the mediums, but that'll be a next year project. I may post something in 2022 to get some crowdsourced help with this.
Mediums - Specific
- How did the changes to document style writing mediums (allowing a finished css/html or graphical template containing a document to count as 1k + wordcount for the first use of that template) work out this year for people who created them, received/requested them, or want to do either in the future?
- We didn't end up with any physical media nominations this year, so that'll still be a test for next year. The big question for these is how to find a good line between the effort the creator is putting in (often massive amounts!) and what the recip is receiving (a picture or series of pictures of what was made), so if you're thinking about it for next year keep that in mind. While it's possible a creator and recip might privately arrange to mail the gift, we don't want that to be an expectation/requirement.
- While we didn't have any physical media *nominations*, cocktail recipes/recipe's will have a physical media option added next year so that if someone makes their recipe and takes a photo of the finished product it counts the same way that illustrations do in that category. (This was officially not the case this year but unofficially was the case, there were mod spreadsheet shenanigans to keep everything fair to everyone involved and thankfully swaps gave us some wiggle room to do so!)
Reading Lists And Recs
- (I somehow *forgot* about this at first, adding late!)
- I had a lot of fun getting these up! It took me a bit longer than expected to get them set up, but I'll be ready for next year to get started a few days earlier (not too early though, I want to give time for people to read their gifts first!)
Schedule
- The basic changes to the schedule (more time in the editing period, two weeks of anon) should be staying the same!
- We're aware that we cut it pretty close to HA this year. FIAB doesn't have much wiggle room due to real life schedule things, but we will be keeping HA in mind when we schedule for next year. There won't be any solid decisions made on how or when to adjust until we know what HA is looking at for next year.
