Rare Pair Exchange

Behold, your creators! Creators are now revealed, and we have come to the end of Rare Pair Exchange's 2025 round.

You have until the opening of the next round's sign-ups to comment on your gifts to be eligible to participate next year. Please do so!

Thank you all for a great round! We have amazing works in our collection. Please continue browsing and leaving comments even with anonymity lifted! (Maybe consider checking out works from previous years, too!)

The collection is now unmoderated. Treats are welcome!

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Feedback

I have a few things that I'd appreciate feedback on. Please feel free to provide your thoughts on everything or a select few.

1. Rare Pair Exchange currently doesn't have a "home" month. We will clash with exchanges no matter what, but I endeavour not to clash with rarefemslashexchange and raremaleslashex, as we share the same theme.

I'd like to hear from people who participate in both or one if August is a good time of year for Rare Pair Exchange to run. Does it clash? (I don't believe it does.) My goal is to have little to no overlap with those exchanges, but recognise there is a chance we might given delays.

I cannot host this exchange during Battleship or November and December. I am considering moving the exchange to earlier in the year, even if it happens to clash with my other exchange (that's caseficexchange — a shameless little plug).

2. Did the schedule work? I compressed it this year by shortening the nominations, sign-ups, and creation periods as I felt previous rounds were too long for a 1k minimum exchange. I wish to follow this compressed timeline as I felt it worked well.

3. Did you like the extension deadline added to this year's schedule? (I did and will most likely add it again, but would like to hear from participants! I'll be finessing the schedule based on my experience with it and posting pinch hits.)

4. Did Sundays work as a deadline? I live in AEDT/AEST, which means I have to +1 the day (which I'm fine with doing). Sundays EST/EDT meant it was Monday AEST/AEDT. I'm looking to make the deadline either Friday or Sunday. Please let me know your preferences.

5. How do participants feel about being able to request one fandom and one ship, but with no guarantee of receiving a gift?

If we proceed with this, I will be adding to the schedule a deadline for when participants can add additional fandoms/ships to ensure that the workload in finding pinch hitters is manageable for me.

6. I am considering trialling Google form nominations next year. The workload during this phase of the exchange is intense, and I wouldn't have been able to get through the number of nominations without the help of tagmods. I was reviewing/approving nominations during work and I want to avoid doing that next year. (I also don't want tagmods doing that, either!)

If I cannot get a minimum of 5 tagmods next year, I will be pursuing Google nominations as an option. The reason for this is that I continued to get blocked by AO3 for the number of times I was accessing the site, which slowed me down and was understandably very frustrating. By going through Google nominations, the onus of proving the nomination eligibility will be on the nominator and will hopefully cut down some of the time spent working through over 3,900 nominations.

7. I am also considering decreasing the number of fandoms and relationships people can nominate. It's currently set to 10 fandoms with 10 relationships. I'm happy to take suggestions on what number I should decrease this to.

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Please feel free to leave feedback on how you found the round and if you have any further suggestions. I appreciate all feedback, but I will be implementing what works for me as a moderator.

You're welcome to send your feedback to rarepairexmod@gmail.com if you'd prefer it be private.

I will do my best to acknowledge all feedback, but please be patient with me — I intend to take a little break from wearing my mod hat. :)

Thank you again for a great round! See you next year. 🍐

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!