2023 Feedback Post

[rarepairmod]

Thank you again to everyone who participated in our first round of Rare Pair Exchange! We would love your feedback on your experience this round for us to consider for round two in 2024.

We've flagged a few things ourselves that we'd appreciate receiving any feedback on:

• Schedule: We set the 2023 schedule based on moderator availability. We are considering moving the schedule by a month, with nominations occurring in June. (Please note any feedback on the schedule will be taken on board, but ultimately, we will finalise a schedule that works best for the moderators.)



• Creation period: We've allocated a month for the creation period and would like to keep this for round two, but we welcome feedback from participants. Was this too long?



• Recursive fic/art: We would appreciate hearing your thoughts on dis/allowing recursive fic and art in the exchange. We initially refused to include recursive works in the exchange as we felt it was being used as a loophole to allow big non-rare ships to be nominated, which went against our theme of rare pairs.
  
  We would consider allowing recursive works to be nominated as long as the ship being nominated is a rare pair outside of the context of the recursive work. We feel this is fair and in line with our theme—rare pairs. (That means juggernauts will not be accepted in any form, i.e. genderswap.)
  
  If we allow recursive fic and art to be nominated, we will make a post during round two for nominators to leave a permission link. We will reject nominations that do not have a permission link provided by the nominator. (Checking nomination eligibility is a lot of work on the moderator side, so we will request this as a mandatory component of nominations to ease our workload and allow us to work through approvals as quickly as possible.)



• Tagging treats as 'Treats': We are considering asking that all treat gifts be tagged as 'treat' when submitted for ease of checking works on the moderator side.



• Disallowing "Gen" works: We had a few works tagged as "Gen" in the exchange, which we feel goes against the spirit of a shipping exchange. We are considering tightening this rule and disallowing any works categorised as "Gen" on AO3.
  
  We are also considering disallowing any works to have the requested pairing tagged with "&" alongside a "/" tag. The exchange is for "/" tagged works, not "&". There were several instances where works were tagged with both "Tom/Jerry" and "Tom & Jerry".

If you'd prefer to leave feedback privately, please email us at rarepairexmod@gmail.com and we will take note of it for next year. As for this post, anon is on, but screening is not.

While we may not reply to comments, please be reassured that we are noting them to discuss next year.

Thank you again for a great first round!