Reveals and Post-Exchange Thoughts

[sailor]

Authors have been revealed! With that, the 2017 edition of Spring Fling is officially in the books.

Thank you so, so incredibly much to everyone who joined us this year. Everyone who participated, beta read, offered to pinch hit, helped spread the word, and read/kudos'd/commented on the works are the real MVPs. Thank you for helping to make Spring Fling such a success. We couldn't have done it without you! ♥

Like last year, we wanted to open up the floor for feedback and discussion. Knowing what worked for participants and what didn't helps us to create an even better Spring Fling experience next time.

Below the cut we have a few ideas we've been rolling around to kick things off:

• Treats being gifted to more than one recipient: How do you feel about this, as participants? If an author reaches out to us for their full request set and sees that multiple people claimed the same prompt, they can list all of them as recipients for the gift. Do you like this? Or would you rather we had a rule where treats must be gifted to only one recipient?



• Swapping out your assignment: During matching, we take a look at the overall spread of prompts being assigned and try to aim for diverse representation in teams/pairings. When a recipient claims more than one of their assigned author's prompts, this is how we choose which one actually gets assigned. Theoretically, an author could ask if their recipient claimed any of their other prompts and potentially swap their assignment. We assign the prompts that we do for a reason, but we could be willing to discuss swaps on a case by case basis if authors were interested. We're open to the idea and wanted to bring it up here as well. What do you all think about this?



• Backing up fics: In both exchanges we've run, fics have been deleted after the fact. It's a real bummer when a gift you enjoyed disappears, so we're entertaining the idea of backing up fics somewhere other than AO3 in case they get deleted. And looking at an archive like cornerflag’s, it’s great to have access to a bunch of fic written by authors whose LJ accounts were purged or they just drifted away from football. It may be something as simple as zipping them and making them available for download. Would anyone be averse to that?

Feel free to comment on those or other aspects of the exchange! We want to hear what you have to say about anything at all.


Also, today kicks off part one of a four part series of Spring Fling recs for the Footy Fic Rec Newsletter! If you aren’t already signed up for the newsletter, check it out to see your fics recced over the next month. :)

Comments

feedback

[(Anonymous)]

hey-o! first of all, thanks for organising this again without any problems (at least on my side as a participant haha)
i loved it and i'm happy i took part again!

to come back to the stuff that was discussed last year: i think it was a great idea to include DNWs, and the possibility to write them down should stay, even if i didn't make use of it personally.
the timing this year was good, too, including the shortened time until author reveal.

about the new questions:
- imo regular gifts should just be for one recipient, but treats having more than one should be totally fine.
- for me as a writer, swapping prompts seems pointless, but if anybody else wants to, i don't see a problem with it either.
- sounds like a great idea! perhaps make it a box that can be ticked on the sign-up form.

i got a gift from the same author as i did last spring fling and while this could have many different reasons (and while i do absolutely adore the fics (seriously, so good)) i figure it's something that you could also check for, if it's possible.

again, thanks for being mods and also thanks at everyone else participating!!

- ascience / lahmly

Re: feedback

[sailor]

thank you for joining us again!! ♥ i'm so glad it was fun for you.

ahahahfdksj yeah, this time i will ACTUALLY REMEMBER to put the dnw section on the prompt claiming form and it'll all go a lot smoother. but i'm glad it worked out and you liked the addition!!

yeah, i can see how archiving of fics should be author opt-in, so the ticky box is a great idea. thank you!

we definitely are cognizant of not repeating assigned authors/recipients if at all possible, so it's something we will continue to keep an eye on next year. sometimes stuff happens and it ends up shaking out that way, but going forward we will do our best to keep mixing things up!

THANK YOU FOR THE FEEDBACK, YOU ARE A GEM ♥ ♥ ♥

Re: feedback

[hellabaloo]

Gonna legit copy Caitlin a lot here, but it needs to be said! Thanks for signing up for the second round!! We're so happy people have been enjoying themselves this time around just as much as they did the first time :D

It's good to hear the changes from last year actually make sense in practice! Things good in theory don't always work out XD As for the proposed changes for next year:

- the multiple recipients for treats thought came to us because we're DEEP into Yuletide culture and gifting a fic to multiple people definitely garners the side-eye, so my initial reaction was hesitant. But the prompts are so different in Spring Fling and you know for certain that two or more people requested a specific prompt, rather than a fic that just happens to fit two different letters. We're not opposed to allowing it, but I always like to be transparent about how we intend to run things so better ask than not!

- The swapping assigned prompts might just have to be a "check in the with the mods" sort of situation. In two years, we've only had one author who just couldn't wrangle their assigned prompt, so it might be a case of us thinking about this too much XD

- I guess I was conceiving of the archiving as more as a default option authors could opt-out of rather than an optional, opt-in feature, but I totally understand why authors may feel uncomfortable about it being set up that way. And a ticky box on the sign-up form would be such a good/easy-to-implement idea!

WE WEREN'T LYING WE LOVE FEEDBACK THANK YOUUUUUUUU :*

[saltstreets]

Hiii lovelies! First off, you're both angels of the highest order and thank you for another year if this exchange! I really enjoy the reverse format.

-I don't mind the idea of treats being gifted to more than one person, and if it results in more people getting multiple gifts, that's always a nice experience!

-Also no problem with case-by-case swapping. Giving authors a little bit more lee-way is always nice -as I said, I think the reverse format is a lot of fun, but it does lock you in to one prompt (even if you have freedom to take that prompt where you will) and so the option to swap prompts for the same recip might help with that.

-+1 to Frauke above with the opt-in backing up! I'm old-fashioned and love a good classic comm, so having archive where all the old fics could be accessed independent of AO3 really appeals to me. Maybe make an option so that people can have this backup remain anonymous, if they want to delete their fic off AO3? (Also it may be that the people deleting don't know about orphaning fic, which is a good way of detaching your name from something but leaving it up for people to enjoy)

-One thing that I would prefer we go back on is the shorter time between the collection opening and author reveals. I like a nice long anon period! :D It felt too quick this year.

As always you own my heart, soul, et cetera.
xoxo Sabs

[hellabaloo]

HELLO YOU ♥

- More gifts for more people is always a good thing, which definitely a point in favor of keeping multiple recipients for treats!

- Yeah, giving authors some flexibility on their assignment is what we'd hope to achieve by allowing authors to swap assignments. Frauke brings up a good point- for a lot of authors, it doesn't make that much of a difference because their prompts are largely similar. But for others, we do purposefully assign the prompt that's been requested most or features a rarepair that might only have one prompt offer. I don't think we'd go so far as to give author's a choice of assignment right off the bat (it's not fair to the participants that can't swap assignments), but we wouldn't like ban an author for swapping an assignment for another of their prompts either.

- ME TOO. I like the idea about having an option for people to include their fics anonymously! That might help people that have reservations about not having direct control over their fics anymore.

- We did a full week the first time around and this time it was not even 72 hours I think. I definitely couldn't read everything before reveals (which I like to try to do), so I'd be down for trying a 4-5 day anon period next time.

You are a delight to have as a participant, so we always love having you join us :D