Round (D)one - Thanks and Feedback

[modzilla]

Finish Line! Thank You!

Creators are now revealed at the fffx 2020-21 collection. You are welcome to share what you wrote or drew far and wide.

I want to thank everyone for taking a chance on an exchange with unusually high requirements for works, on an unknown mod, and on various of my more experimental ideas. I am especially grateful to pinch hitters, to treaters, to people who consumed canons thinking about treating or pinch hitting, to betas, to commenters, and to the other Triple Crown moderators for conceiving of similar events that could complement and support each other. Three people took on pinch hits before assignments went out. My friend made me such a gorgeous icon. Just LOOK at that Godzilla with a clipboard. You're all stars.

Although I was wibblesome at the time of reveals, I think fffx generally worked and would like to run this again. So I'd be grateful to hear your feedback.

Feedback

Art
I am glad we included comics and would be happy to do that in future, so this can be the Five Figure Fanwork Exchange indefinitely. I would be happy to hear from artists about whether the minimums/requirements worked or could be tweaked.

Schedule
The 2020 schedule was:
Nominations start: 14 July 2020
Sign-ups start: 24 July
Sign-ups close: 7 August
Assignments out by: 14 August
Assignment Swap Week: 14-20 September
Check-in Week: 16-22 November
Assignments due: 30 January 2021
Works revealed: 27 February - delayed to 12 March
Creators revealed: 13 March - delayed to 26 March

How did it work for you? Should 2021-22 be similar? Should the check-in be at a different point relative to the overall schedule?

Assignment swaps
I liked having this option. Checking my notes, eight people asked to swap their assignments. Does anyone have any feedback on this aspect?

Letter deadlines / Mandatory optional details
I know it causes a lot of stress in exchanges when people are waiting on indefinitely incomplete/locked letters. I'm not sure if my threat of deleting letters that were incomplete past a certain point was helpful for this situation. I deleted three people's letter links.

Other
?? DNWs? Pinch hitter prompt promotion? Handling of nominations? I might give slightly fewer nominations next year but only SLIGHTLY. There were a lot. But I want people to be able to request and offer what they want, and matching wasn't a problem, only sorting.

Triple Crown

In the next day or so, I will provide the Triple Crown Committee with a final list of people who have participated in this exchange in such a way as to qualify for Triple Crown prizes. (See triplecrownofexchanges for cool stuff!) That will not include anyone whose work is orphaned or anon or anyone who has not commented on their gifts. So if your work is anonymous (the TCC have other ways around that too, you can talk to them rather than me) or you have reservations about commenting on your gift(s), you're welcome to get in touch with me at mod.modzilla@gmail.com.

More Triple Crown

Editing to add the reminder that prize claiming for Triple Crown starts on April 2! Enjoy the fruits of your labors, magnificent completionists. triplecrownofexchanges

Much love.

Comments

[modzilla]

Hello! Sorry for dropping the ball on this.

Yes - you're right that the technical process on swapping assignments is no different from defaulting and claiming a different pinch hit. Though for me and I think some others, there can feel a difference between pressing the default button yourself and instructing the mod to do it for you. Anyway!

Since you mod things yourself, you've encountered the need to double-assign people at the start of an exchange, right? Where you're left with some people without creators, and some people without recipients, and then the first group get assigned to a temporary account and sent to pinch hit, and for the second group, you pick recipients for them, which means that their recipients actually end up with two creators.

(And once assignments are sent, those double assignments hang around all exchange. If a recipient has two assigned creators and one defaults, the system doesn't go "yeah, but one person's still creating for them, they're covered" - it just shows the defaulted assignment in the Defaulted tab. And similarly, you can't generate new assignments outside of purging & regenerating them all.)

But, back to matching phase - sometimes, when the matching algorithm runs, you may notice that it's possible to massage matches so that there are fewer pinch hits and fewer double-assigned recipients than the algorithm would give you.

This exchange instead goes the other way and, after matching is run, artificially manipulates the matches so as to create four separate assignments for every recipient. If you want to know how to do it yourself, it's time-consuming but I have a document I can tidy up.

But anyway, what this means is that all through the exchange, there's a "bank" of assignments held by the mod account. Say someone's already creating for you, and someone rocks up to my mod account saying "My assignment isn't working out, I want to create for Shadaras instead." Because the mod account is holding onto a hoard of extra assignments, I can easily assign that person to create for you, just as if you'd originally had two creators and the first had defaulted. On a technical level, that's exactly what happened, except, basically, you started out with four creators and three of them were the mod.

I'm not sure if that answers your question or a lot of questions you didn't ask /o\ but I hope it helps!