femslashex | 2013 Wrap Up Post

Entry tags:

wrap up

2013 Wrap Up Post

I hope you've all been enjoying your GIANT PILE OF FEMSLASH. I know I have. I still have ten tabs open, but hope to have read all of my fandoms over the next couple of days.

If you haven't already done so, I outright beg you to read and comment on stories written for you. Even if you defaulted, your author still wants to hear from you.

A couple people complained of an odd technical error wherein AO3 didn't show fest fic in your works section or in any of the archive tags. It's discussed here, the short version being that if you re-saved your work, without making any changes, it'd show up.

The long version is that several of us put in support tickets with AO3, and got this as a reply:

The delay you saw was likely due to the fact that we save (cache) work listing pages so they don’t have to be generated from scratch every time someone wants to look at them. This means that changes won’t show up until the cache is refreshed, which may take some time.

Now I've NEVER seen a lag that long on a fest. In interests of gathering more AO3 information, I'd like you to check see if your stories are showing up in fandom, pairing, character or freeform tags, and let me know if they aren't.

Also, did anyone get author alerts on subscriptions they have? You should have gotten one for whoever you had tracked at the time the archive went live. I know someone who had me tracked didn't get one. Anyone else who did?

So, bit of a bumpy ride this year from our end, though hopefully not too much of that showed up on the side of the participants. We want to take a minute to talk about proposed changes for next year and get your input on them.

Before I start, because it was something of a shake down cruise this year, we're offering amnesty to late defaulters. You will be allowed to participate next year, and we'll mention it again at the time. Call this a pre-series game, if that's more your fandom then nautical references. After that, the default rules stick.

Now, what worked and what didn't (in order that the problem occurred).

Modly Participation: I was the face of the fest this year, which obscured all the work

samuraiter did behind the scenes. Next year, you'll probably be seeing a more equal representation of mods.

Timing (within fest): We didn't have enough time for tag wrangling, assignments or last minute pinch hits. Therefore, the time between nominations and sign ups, and between sign ups and assignments going out will be expanded to three full days. The time between assignments being due and the archive opening will be expanded to six days. We'll also try to have the archive open on a Friday, so that people have the chance to read their stories sooner.

Timing (of fest): We felt like six weeks was lots of time to write, and feel like giving more time would still end up with everyone scrambling to get their fic in at the last minute, so wasn't planning to change that. However, time of year is open to negotiation. Did reveals in early November work for you? Would you like it earlier? Sign ups will be earlier regardless, see above about timing.

Tag Wrangling: The time to ask for tags to be wrangled differently is before sign ups open. That said, we did have a few later requests that we'll try to accommodate next year. Tolkein fandom will be broken into Sil, Hobbit and LotR, and we can just figure out who goes where at the time. We'll try to keep on top of Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire better next year.

Minimum Requirements for Requests/Offers: The manual modly checking whether people had enough offers and requests to qualify led to some problems. Five people got shut out, and while the numbers were triple checked and I'm absolutely confident they were accurate, it led to some hard feelings. No one likes getting shut out, and we didn't especially enjoy doing it. Constantly checking to make sure everyone had enough to qualify was also a major time sink on our part. Three potential solutions:

1) Go back to the original rules that required a minimum of two pairings in all fandoms, with three fandoms required. Can't say I'm a huge fan of this one, but thought I'd put it out there.

2) Do what we did this year, but allow an extra day after close of sign ups to try track down people who didn't make the minimum and give them a chance to change their offers. This shifts the responsibility from the participants to the mods, re everyone getting their sign ups right, and is even more of a time sink. Plus if people aren't online in that day, they'd still get shut out.

3) Allow a minimum of one pairing across the board, but up the minimum required fandoms to four or five (probably five). This might make matching a little harder, and it would be more difficult for people who are only into a few fandoms.

Mods are leaning pretty hard towards Option 3 right now, but let us know what you think.

Rules for Background Pairings: We will probably add a rule that background parings are allowed, but the focus on the story must be on the requested pairing(s), not on something else, even if it's canon.

Pinch Hitting: Mostly this system worked pretty well. Next year, pinch hitters may expect a few more direct check in e-mails from the mods. Someone blew a couple deadlines this year, and we didn't figure it out until it was far, far too late. Any other pinch hit related feedback?

Anon Period: We didn't have one this year, and we're not convinced we need one, but did anyone really, really miss it?

I think that's it. However, if you have feedback on a topic not mentioned here, we'd like that too. I've turned on anon commenting on the Dreamwidth post, and hope that mostly people will comment there, keeping the discussion in one place. If that doesn't work for you, we'll be checking the mod e-mail for the next week or so, and commenting on all platforms is turned on. Constructive criticism pertaining to any area of the fest is welcome. Slinging abuse or making comments about the mods' personal lives will get deleted.

I huge thank you to everyone who has already offered feedback and advise, and everyone who answered our PMed/e-mailed requests for help.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Re: AO3 bugs
I definitely did not get notifications about people I have subscribed to. My work is showing up in the various tags though.

Re: Timing
I'd actually prefer a due & reveal date at the end of October instead of the beginning of November -- fiddling with my fic for this fest kind of derailed the start of my NaNoWriMo!

Re: Minimum Requirements
I'm good with any of these options, because I am both a multi-shipper and a multi-fandom writer. So whatever you choose will please me!

Re: Anon Period
I was SO HAPPY when I realized there wasn't an anon period in this fest! Please continue this practice!!! :)

No other feedback -- I had a blast, everything went smoothly (other than the lack of notifications), and I'm terribly grateful to you mods for running this!

I'll get back to them about the lack of notifications. I know a lot of people rely on them to find fic. We got notifications when rarepair went live.

Moving forward to run from mid-August to late October is definitely possible. I would have done that this year, had time permitted.

I'm glad you had a good time! Thank you for participating, and offering feedback.

I didn't get any notifications from authors I'd subscribed to, and still haven't. My fics are showing up in the tags now, but I noticed on the reveal day that they didn't then.

I liked having a window of opportunity to put in your name for a pinch hit, rather than it all being first come first served. It makes it more fair to people in different time zones and gives you some time to consider. I also agree it would be helpful to have more time between the due date and the reveal. It would have been fine with me if the mods had emailed to check on how my pinch hit was coming along; I actually considered emailing to reassure you that I would be finished soon, but I didn't know if that was something you wanted or if it would just be an annoyance.

Thanks for your hard work on the fest. I hope it runs again next year. :)

I'll send a note to AO3 about the notifications.

Cribbed the pinch hit system from another fest, and it worked pretty well. I will say, however, that we mostly only had one person put in for the things. I really appreciate the pinch hits that you did. Made the fest work.

I'm glad I could do it! It helped that the last-minute one included a fandom I know extremely well and could easily come up with something.

In regards to matching and AO3, I think it's fine if people check the box saying they'll write any pairing. But with offers, I think it would be easier to match people if there wasn't a check box for people to request any pairing. That's my guess on what was wrong with AO3 matching--the computer couldn't match empty request fields with pairing and "any" offers.

If you wanted me to pick an option you mentioned, though, I'd pick #2.

And I also like the mods checking entries before they go live to make sure background pairings aren't put in the forefront of exchange fics. People don't go into exchanges requesting A/B only to get a lot more of A/C or B/C instead.

But I really like how things went this year. In my opinion, this exchange ran better than the femslash[year] fests it replaced.

We didn't have a technical problem matching in terms of what the AO3 servers could do. Our problem was with people qualifying or not.

We are still considering #2, so thank you for your input there.

I hear you on checking stories. We're somewhat on the honour system in regards to what people submit, as reading everything and knowing all the fandoms enough to get the subtleties would be the most massive time sink in history. However, in face of a complaint, or if we happen to spot something unacceptable, we may either ask the submitter to change it, or arrange for a pinch hit.

I have a great deal of respect for anyone who can run a fest for six or seven years in a row. If anything has changed over that time, it's ease of access to matching software.

Timing: I LOVED the timing for this. It was perfect; I didn't feel pressured or stressed when I was writing.

Anon Period: Loved that there was no anon period. Best thing ever!

Thanks, anon. Do you mean the timing for the fest in terms of where it fell in the year? Or the timing in terms of allotted writing period?

Anon period remaining gone by popular demand.

We will probably add a rule that background parings are allowed, but the focus on the story must be on the requested pairing(s), not on something else, even if it's canon.

I'm curious, was this a problem? It's not a rule I've ever seen come up in fests before, which doesn't mean it's not needed.

And obviously, I didn't participate this year (a time that didn't overlap with Yuletide would be better for me, but if I know it's coming next year I'll be able to plan better to participate) -- but I want to restate my support for NOT having an anon period. I feel like it's turned into a default for AO3 exchanges and yet there's not much benefit to it in a multifandom exchange.

Well, I had 14 people ask me about it, and one fic that... fell pretty far from being about the requested pairing, but for various behind the scenes reasons I didn't intervene with.

Hopefully you'll have time next year. We plan to do outlandish things like advertise in advance and shit. Tentatively looking at running it Mid-August through end of October, if that affects your plans.

I don't think the anon period adds much to this kind of exchange, but I thought I'd ask.

I enjoyed participating in this fest and didn't experience any problems. I thought the timing of the fest was good, could even be a little earlier next year, perhaps, to avoid overlap with the end of year seasonal fests.

My one issue with the way the fest worked was the requirement to pick two pairings in most of the requested fandoms. This seemed to work against fandoms with only one possible pairing (films or books with few characters, for example). It's also hard for fans who are not multi-shippers to participate. There were fandoms I would have liked to request but couldn't because there weren't enough requestable pairings, and I had to request pairings I wasn't all that keen on to satisfy the two pairing requirement.

I don't know how the matching works, exactly, but would it really be that much more difficult to match if people had to request say six different pairings across a minimum of three fandoms?

Not a Mod for this challenge, but a mod on rarewomen. The issue I've seen with 1 person/pairing per fandom is lack of matches. Say two people offer and request in fandom Q. Person A only wants to read/write Pairing X. Person B only wants to read/write Pairing Y. So, even though X and Y are both in fandom Q... neither of these sign ups can result in a match. If this happens on multiple fandoms that people have signed up for, the opportunities for matching are VASTLY lowered. So, now Person C, who has offered "Any" on a ton of multi-ship pairings is being tagged by the computer as being able to write for Person A, Person B, and half the fest... but Person A and Person B who have only offered one pairing/fandom don't match on anyone.

Does that help at all? I think matching would only reasonably work if at least half of the fandoms signed up for had requests/offers for more than one pairing.

That does make sense, but the two pairing requirement does cause problems for the fandoms with only one pairing, or where the only viable second pairing would be a really cracky pairing involving very minor characters, for example.

We will probably movie it forward a smidge next year, maybe running from mid-August to late October.

I hear you on one-pairing fandoms. The current set up does make it difficult for OTPers.

Unfortunately, the idea of having to ask for six pairings somehow distributed over three fandoms would work even less well then the last set up did. The archive simply wouldn't understand it, and it would involve manual checking with bonus math. Unless I'm misunderstanding the system (possible), it wouldn't work well.

I suppose it could be rerouted to eliminate fandoms all together, and sign up purely on pairing, come to think of it. Though that would eliminate the ability to offer/request "any." Something to think about.

I think sign-ups/ matching based on pairing rather than fandom is the ideal solution! This is what we're matching on, really, after all. It's not as if there's a gen option, we have to be able to write a pairing, so it might work better if it's clear that that's what people are signing up for.

People offering 'any' isn't all that helpful when there's only two or three pairings in a fandom anyway, and people who really want to offer 'any' can always sign up for lots.

I will look into the logistics of that, and we'll seriously consider it for next year. No promises.

I really love the idea of this fest and did enjoy participating, but the minimum requirements issue was definitely a big obstacle for me. I had to really scramble to find fandoms I could reasonably offer to write for ("reasonably" as in I was familiar with the source material, even if I had to go back and refresh my memory), and then ended up getting matched with someone based on one of the fandoms I didn't know quite so well.

I still enjoyed writing the fic, but I'm not as happy with the quality of my work as I would have liked to be. Solution #3 would actually make things harder for me because I'd have to include even more fandoms with which I had only a passing familiarity, if I was able to participate at all.

I'm really a one-fandom-at-a-time type of person at heart though, so maybe the answer is just for me not to participate. I really hope that there's a solution that doesn't come to that.

Yeah. The balance between multishippers v. OTPers, and Fandom Butterflies v. One Fandomers is always tricky to accommodate. Option 2 is apparently nice middle ground, but it's pretty labour intensive for us, unfortunately.

I hope that you will be able to participate, however it turns out. More femslashers the better!

Timing: I liked the timing, but have no objection to being moved a week or two earlier next year.

Minimum Requirements: I would prefer 1 or 3. Basically, as long as AO3 will catch a sign up that doesn't match the rules. I can see it happening otherwise that someone could offer "any" for a bunch of fandoms and then be disqualified when they weren't aware that only one ship was nominated for said fandoms.

I was pretty happy with things and look forward to next year.

Might more two to three weeks earlier next year, depending on how we feel about dealing with all this on Halloween.

We would very much perfer something that the archive would do automatically. However, we don't want to shut people out. We promise to figure it out before the fest starts next year!

Thanks for running a great fest this year! For my part I felt that it went very smoothly.

The issue with having an across-the-board 1 pairing limit is matching, right? So, would it work if we tried another option where we kept the rules from this year but no one actually checked on them unless someone didn't match? In other words, if someone doesn't match and is discovered to have not requested enough pairings, they won't get a pinch hit but will be booted instead. Maybe this seems too unfair, but it might be a worthwhile compromise because it puts the burden of checking on the participants and the servers rather than on the mods.

Glad to hear it! Thank you for participating.

It it's part matching, and it's part if we increase required fandoms to help with the matching, then that would shut out people who only have a few fandoms. As it stands, you need six pairings, with one-pairing it'd be four or five.

I see what you mean about letting people sort it out on their own, and it's a fair response to my whinging about how much work option two is. However, it really does seem too unfair, at least to me. I know a lot of people really struggled to find three fandoms with two pairings, and some didn't participate at all because of it. Having 20 people (which is what we e-mailed this year) blithely sail through really rubs me the wrong way.

It's possible I need to learn to relax. However, I'd rather have an across the board one-pairing minimum and just encourage people to ask for/offer more.

I had no issues, enjoyed the fest, and think mods did a great job.

Future options for the 1 pairing/1 fandom issue -- I think if you announce the revision date/alert emails for problem sign-ups up front and give people the opportunity to tell you that they may be AFK during that period (i.e. please wait for me to get back from vacation, or check my sign up ahead of time). I definitely prefer #2.

LOVED the no-anon period.

I think, in that they'd be holding up assignment going out until they got back to us, that the AFK option wouldn't be viable. They'd have to get it right the first time, or revise in that one day, or not participate. However, a well advertised one day to respond is a very good idea. We may do that.

No-anon period is staying!

Thank you for your feedback.

I like the third option for minimum requests/offers, and really wouldn't want a two pairing minimum across the board.

Option One is what got us into this in the first place. Figured I'd leave it open in any case.

(This is diaphenia on Ao3)

First off, I had a wonderful time! You guys did such a good job with this, and everyone I interacted with was helpful and friendly. I got (and left) some lovely comments, and I had a ball! Thanks for putting this together!

I assumed there was an anon period when I signed up. It's not a big deal, but I wasn't super clear on that point.

I liked the amount of time we had to write. I took about four weeks to write my story, and I still had time for a short treat. I'd have written more, but most of the people who requested my fandoms didn't write letters, so. If the fest went earlier, that'd be fine, but later would mean I'd feel nervous about this and Yuletide and I'd probably choose Yuletide.

Personally, I'd be fine with offering more fandoms in exchange for being able to offer one pairing per fandom (while I mostly am fine with multishipping, I also wanted to offer several fandoms that really only have one pair to ship. In a few cases, I would've offered "any" except I hate writing OCs, and in one— HIMYM— there's really only one ship, except someone went and nominated a pairing that essentially is two OCs, since they both have basically no screentime and were a doppelganger joke, which prevented me from offering it, argh).

We hadn't indicated an anon period on the schedule, but I guess we should have been more clear.

I don't think the fest would go later, it may well go earlier. No sense running into yuletide, in any case.

Offering any in a fandom with only one pairing counted as offering one pairing, so it wouldn't have done you much good regardless.

We're still figuring out what we want to do, and we appreciate your input.

I agree that the event should probably be moved to earlier in the year next year (like the late august-october window that was mentioned) because stressing over the fic for this totally sunk my NaNo. I tried hard to get my fic for this done BEFORE NaNo started but I was having some difficulties so it didn't happen.

Otherwise I had no other problems and enjoyed myself quite a bit! I need deadlines to get fics done and this event was a great excuse for one!

Awww. I'm sorry we sunk your NaNo. I more or less sunk my WriSo over this, and think moving earlier is a good idea. It'd get the thing clear of both NaNo and Yuletide, plus all those other holiday exchanges.

Glad you had a good time!

Thank you so much for running this fest! I had a great time writing.

I don't mind whether the fest is at this time or a bit earlier, but usually I would be more likely to be able to pinch hit if it was a few weeks earlier. (This wouldn't have been the case this year anyway, but normally it would.)

Six weeks was the perfect amount of time to write.

I would prefer to have more required fandoms than a higher number of pairings per fandom, but I'm into a lot of fandoms, so it would be easy for me and I understand that's not the case for everyone.

Please no anon period!

I'm glad you had a good time, and thanks for all the feedback.

It probably will be a little earlier next year.

We're certainly thinking about Option 3, or some variation of option 2, most likely not option 1.

No anon period!

Overall, I thought the exchange ran really smoothly! Modding and organization in the top quintile for exchanges I've done. (I'll be the one person to say I do appreciate an anon period and at first thought there was one, but that's not a problem with modding, only a personal preference over which I unfortunately cut the unanimous agreement above. :P)

re: minimums, I'd vote for 2 with large-sized bold font everywhere for the 2+ pairings in each of 3+ fandoms requirement and not feeling too guilty about dropping participants who don't respond to reminders should they not parse that statement. I'm not entirely convinced that someone who doesn't read the minimum requirements for a signup, doesn't ask for clarification should they not understand them, and doesn't edit their signup in response to a note needs to be catered to. Perhaps a co-mod or volunteer whose sole job is to check signups?

I just tried to think of a way you could have your own personal anon period, but it got pretty convoluted pretty fast, lol.

I think, based on experience here and elsewhere, that I could personally tattoo the requirements to every participant's left foot, and some people would still submit the wrong thing. It was stated in the rules and on the sign up form, and discussed at length several times here and elsewhere, and I'm not sure that bolding more things would help. This year we split the checking, then went over each other's results, which worked pretty well as a mechanism, but didn't solve the people having the wrong thing issue. And still led to people being mad at us. The extra day after would help, for sure, but the draw of a system where the archive literally will not let you sign up for the wrong thing is pretty high.

Edited 2013-11-20 17:56 (UTC)

a bit late to the party...but i'll throw in my $.02 anyway.

1) thank you for modding the exchange! i'm so happy it happened. :D

2) timing: earlier would be better for me. even a few weeks to a month or more. just anything that puts more of a buffer between this fest and yuletide and the many other obligations that start to happen around november and december.

3) i think option 3 is a good compromise. as someone who does sometimes only ship one pair per fandom or likes fandoms with only one couple, an across the board one pairing minimum would be easier. and i think i could offer more fandoms if i only had to offer one pairing.

plus i'll remind everyone it is still more generous than the old rules where you offered big fandoms and small fandoms and had to be prepared to write *any* pairing and characters in those fandoms. that was a struggle for me.

You're not late! No calls being made until next year, so as long as it's before then...

We're looking at earlier for sure, maybe shifting the whole thing three weeks forward.

Option 3 is very attractive, though it would be harder on people with fewer fandoms.

I had a fantastic time with this exchange and zero issues, aside from the AO3 bugs of not showing up in tags until I edited and not getting notifications. Thanks so much for running this!

I was fine with the timing this year and would also be fine with moving it a bit earlier. Six weeks is a great amount of writing time for me, too; I'm accustomed to banging out exchange fics in four weeks, so I had extra time to write treats!

The suggestion above about making the minimum requirement six pairings across the board really appeals to me, though I'm not sure you can get AO3's matching system to cooperate. If you could do it by pairing instead of by fandom, that might be a neat compromise; it would also eliminate the problem I've seen in some exchanges (though I didn't see it in this one) where people get confused by "Any" and use their letters to ask for pairings that weren't nominated, or offer "Any" when they really meant "Any pairing but the one I'm about to get matched on" (since AO3 seems to have occasional issues getting all the pairings for a fandom to show up in the autocomplete, that's bound to happen to someone). Might make sign-ups look really messy, though.

Haven't heard back form AO3 about the author alert thing. I expect they're swammed from this time of year.

Six weeks seems to work for everyone, so we'll probably keep that.

I don't really know if we could make the across the board thing work, but we'll look into it. It could work well, or it could confuse the HELL out of everyone, ourselves included.

Loved the exchange and will totally be doing it again next year. I'm fine with how it was run this year and the corresponding rules, and I have no strong opinion on an anon period so whatever you decide to do is more than fine by me.

Only commenting anon to avoid drama because the only downside was my recipient's complete lack of a response on their gift, which was a bummer, but what can you do? Still partly hoping real life has been really busy for them (hopefully in a good way of course) but not exactly gonna hold my breath.

Thanks for your hard work and effort in running this and I look forward to next year! :)

Glad the fest mostly went well for you.

I'm sorry your recipient hasn't commented. I wish that we could mandate that people would, but I don't think it'd end up working well. Hopefully you get other feedback, at least.

Different anon whose recipient also hasn't commented,

Would it really not work well to just say, "If you participated in the past but never responded to your gift, you can't participate again"? It would be no less harsh than the default deadline.

Hi, different anon.

I have certainly thought about that. I'm not sure it's a standard of behaviour we're willing to enforce though. The default deadline is to keep the fest running at all, in that late defaults make it a scramble for everyone to get a story, which is the promise of the fest. The promise of the fest is not, currently, "everyone gets a story and a comment." I don't know that it is in any annual fest. The idea feels, idk, pushy. To me anyway.

I say this as someone who has posted stories and not gotten recip comments, so I do feel where you're coming from.

I'll talk it over with the other mod, and decide by next round.

I don't have a lot of comments to offer, since I sort of jumped in here at the last minute as a pinch hitter, having missed out on signups. However, I'd really like to participate next year, but it'd be a bit problematic for me since my exams are right around now (middle to late November) and I'd prefer not to be doing last minute writing and polishing when I've got exams to study for. (That doesn't mean I won't - I wrote a pinch hit, after all - but I'd prefer to minimise the pre-exams stress I'll inevitably suffer from.)

Yeah. We'll probably set it a bit earlier next year, to dodge NaNo, Holiday Exchanges and the worst of exam season. I hope you'll be able to participate!

I'm a little late to this party, but I wanted to comment to say that I enjoyed pinch hitting tremendously, and I'm looking forward to next year. :)

A few notes:

- I was quite pleased with the lack of anon period.

- The pinch hit system was really nice--I felt like I had more of a chance of getting one, and that made me more likely to try!

- I did have issues with my story showing up--I figured I'd somehow broken the tags, so I went in to edit the story, redid the tags, and reposted, which fixed it. It's interesting to see that redoing the tags wasn't necessary (that just the edit-and-repost was sufficient), but the issue itself was kind of odd. Not a huge problem, but odd.

Anyway, I wanted to say again that I really enjoyed participating and I want to thank the mods for making it possible. :)

I'm glad you enjoyed the fest. We're very grateful to all the pinch hitters, who make the fest work.

The glitch was very odd, but hopefully a one-time thing.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

2013 Wrap Up Post

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

Not a Mod

Re: Not a Mod

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject