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.

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!

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?

This year is going to be a short wrapup from the mod end!

Please let us know if you have any feedback or requests! This post is the best place to discuss things you feel might need adjusted (or things you absolutely want to stay the same) since it's where we check for feedback. There are a few things I asked for specific feedback about, but please feel free to post about anything!

Schedule Changes

• Next year the editing period will be 4 weeks again.
• Initial Pinch Hits won't be going out until after swaps are done next year (just to make swaps slightly easier on us!)

Medium Changes

• The Template ruleset (the one where you make a blank template of a thing and give it to someone as a specific gift to them) is going to be going away. While it has been requested, it's not one that gets filled and mostly just causes confusion with the two template related things that do get done (works in the writing ruleset that get credit if you make a template for them, and community templates!)
• Adding a typographic design ruleset: We had some questions about typographic art, e.g. for propaganda posters that are graphically designed but don't contain drawings. This will be a separate ruleset from art but otherwise should have basically the same rules. There will be a ruleset from the start but mediums that you want to create or request in this style will need to be nominated. If none are nominated then we'll remove the ruleset.
• "In-Universe Ship Manifesto (the transit kind)" will be corrected to say "manifest" instead of "manifesto".
• Length and Medium tags will be adjusted so they have the same opt in/opt-in hyphenation.

Medium Changes - Feedback Needed

• Cross Stitch and Knitting Patterns:
  • Counting stitches: I'm going to make y'all do this next year
  • Background colors: I'm going to make it a rule that background colors (e.g. the colors that would usually be white canvas for cross stitch) won't count towards credit. I will need to phrase it in such a way that it does not exclude for example the main color of emblems, so if anyone has an idea of a clear way to phrase that please let me know! If what I mean isn't clear I will try to explain better!
  • The other alternative to the above is to add a wordcount cap per piece. If that would work better for you guys, let me know!
  • Otherwise, how did the 5 words per stitch wordcount work for everyone?

Navigation: Rules/General Info | AO3 Collection | Collaboration Post | Posting Guidelines | Medium Guidelines | Screened Contact Post | Mod Contact: ficinaboxmod@gmail.com

This exchange went amazing well, which is really a testament to everyone participating <3 That said, there's things I know we can improve on for next year, and I'm sure there's plenty of things that I'm not even aware of which need improved on!

We don't plan on making any big changes (the format is staying the same, the billion mediums are staying, matching will stay the same, ect) but if there are any little changes you want, or anything here you want to give input on, now is the time!

Things we will definitely be changing

The Medium Page

• The mediums page needs to be a lot easier for people to digest and understand! What we're planning to do is come up with very basic guidelines which most of the mediums will follow (we don't need every art form listed separately if most of them have the same minimum of 1 finished drawn image), and then we'll have a page where we go into specifics for things like Logic Puzzles which really need their own specific breakdown.
• We're also hoping to have a page set up with details about each and examples and stuff (not on DW), but we'll see how that actually shakes out. We are looking at it though!

Mediums/Medium Equivalents

The following equivalents will definitely be changing:

• The Theater mediums will be specified as scripts in the tag
• Audio Not!fic will be separated into Oral Not!fic and Audio of a Not!fic
• Shakespearean style script: This will be by poetry rules
• Board/Card game: These need to be split into reskins and new games

Non-Fic Matching

• In order to get around the lack of medium matching, we offered to hand match artists/podifccers/vidders/puzzle makers/ect. so that they could be guaranteed to get a recipient who wanted the medium they wanted to work in!
• We're going to have a google form that people can use to request this next time, just to make it a little more comfortable than having to email us! Emailing will still be an option if you prefer that to google forms.

Pinch Hitter Requests

• Next year a treat for these will count towards your assignment minimum

Requests Search

• I meant to have a fancy search sheet (in addition to the requests sheets we did have) but with everything going on I didn't have time to make it! I want to get this done for next year.

Nominations

• Everyone will be required to submit their nominations in the correct format or they will be rejected. Up until the last day of nominations we'll give you 24hrs to correct them, but we will not ever correct them for you.
• The main method of nominating will be a google form so that we can display instructions on the actual nominations page (unless we find an even nicer way before then; then it'll be whatever that is.) If your reaction to that was a horrified recoil, don't worry, you'll still be able to nominate normally on AO3.

Things we want input on but will be changing unless there's good arguments against it

Defaulting before the Deadline

• I want to change the rules slightly so that defaulting before the initial deadline (e.g. October 18th this round) won't prevent you from going out for PH. My general thinking for this is that it will hopefully spread some of the post-deadline PHs out a bit, because people will know there aren't any consequences for lightening their load a bit before the date that their 10k would have been due anyways.

Mediums/Medium Equivalents

• Some complicated mediums which were on the edge of 'not in the scope of the exchange' and not created this time will be removed (Animatics, Translation notes, ect). This doesn't mean they cannot be nominated and discussed again next year! They just won't be part of the initial tagset.

Things we need input on or we probably won't be changing

Mediums/Medium Equivalents

• If there are any mediums that are confusing, too broad to be useful, not actually reflective of what the medium is, ect, we need to know about it!
• If there were any medium equivalents which were way too low, we also need to know about those! Please keep in mind that equivalents must be set so that they work with the average effort versions of that medium without being too far out of range of the most simplistic. The equivalents also need to be both objective and very quick and easy to equate. We cannot and will not even try to judge for quality or effort, so the equivalents need to be things like word count, seconds, number of images, ect.
• If there were any medium equivalents which you looked at and went "The person who set this clearly isn't familiar with this medium", chances are I set it and you're right. Please let me know how to fix it!
• In-Universe Documents: We're thinking this one needs to have a way to give credit for people who use complicated CSS. The easiest way to do this would be to give a flat wordcount credit (probably 500) if a creator lets us know in the author's note that they custom made the CSS for the document. No credit would be given otherwise since there are so many existing workskins.
• Board or Card Game: My instinct is that new games (and possibly reskins) need to be a higher base equivalent, but I'm not familiar with either of these enough to know how (or if) they need to be changed. New games should probably stay at 2k to take into account very simplistic sets of rules, but we could maybe adjust it into tiers
• For the mediums that can be completed multiple ways, did they work how they did (with one tag and multiple equivalents options) or would it be better to split them with an umbrella tag and specific options under that umbrella tag? E.g. Bestiary is currently one tag which can be written, drawn, or a mix.