Seasons of Drabbles

Now that the most recent round has wrapped up, we have a few topics we'd like feedback on. To give feedback, you can reply to this post, privately email us, or leave a screened comment on the Mod Contact Post.

1) Timing of next round
We're thinking of starting the next round in mid to late October, conscious of not overlapping too much with important trickortreatex dates. Let us know if you feel there are other timing considerations for the fall round.

2) PROPOSAL: A year-long beta post
Many exchanges have an optional beta post where people can offer to beta-read others' work. Is this something you would be interested in using, whether as a writer or a reader? We would probably make a new one annually.

3) Regarding our rule that participants can't opt out of requesting or offering single drabbles
This round, we implemented a new rule that stated that while participants are still welcome to request/offer other drabble types, they can no longer exclude single drabbles from their offers or requests. Overall, we are heavily leaning towards keeping this rule as is in future rounds. Some reasons why: we like that the universal minimum for this exchange is now 100 words, it was easy to implement on the modding side, it changed the signup process on the participant side very little, it allows us to still use drabble type as a matching criterion, and it is anecdotally helpful for defaults/pinch hitting. We've considered a couple other approaches (such as making drabble type an entirely optional freeform) but we believe the current approach works best for us.

However, we'd still like to hear if you felt it had a substantial negative impact on your experience, or if you think another approach would be better.

4) Anything else on your mind?
If you have any other comments or ideas not related to the above, those are also welcome!

Hello everyone, thanks for another great round! We have a couple questions we'd be interested in getting your thoughts on! If you'd prefer to share your feedback privately, you can also leave a comment on the Mod Contact post, where all comments are screened.

1. Age requirement. We do not currently have an age requirement in place. Would you support adopting one? If so, would you like it to be an absolute cutoff (e.g., must be 18+ to participate at all) or conditional (e.g., participants under 18 may not request/write NSFW drabbles)? Please let us know if you have other suggestions, as well.

2. Timing of next round. We'd be curious to know when participants would prefer that the next round take place—the options are September, October, and/or November.

Hi, everyone! Now that the dust has settled, we wanted to solicit your feedback on a few things. We also wanted to mention some planned changes for future rounds, as well as mention which things we do NOT plan to change (we still welcome feedback on these aspects of the exchange but are unlikely to change our minds). If you have feedback on something not mentioned in this post, that's welcome too.


Specific inquiries:

• The next round is set to run sometime between December and February. In practice, January or February is much more likely, though we'd be open to beginning nominations toward the end of December. Each round takes about a month from the beginning of nominations through author reveals. If you have a preference as to when the next round should run, please let us know! If all timings work for you, please let us know that as well! We don't promise to go with the majority opinion, but we'll do our best to choose a schedule that works for the mods and a decent percentage of participants.

• For the first round of this exchange, you could request/offer Any for characters. Since Any is defined differently between requests and offers (Any offers being for any character in the tagset and Any requests being for any character in the canon), this could be a little confusing. In order to make it less confusing, we're considering disallowing Any offers for character tags. Is this a good trade-off, or would it be better to give people a few more rounds to get used to the differences? (Please note we are not planning to change the definition of Any for requests.)

• We're considering letting in Worldbuilding as a character tag. Is this something you'd be interested in? Does your answer on this change if we keep Any offers for characters?

• Did the 48-hour anon period seem long enough? We think a week is much too long for a drabble exchange, but would be open to a 72-hour anon period instead.

Planned changes for upcoming rounds:

• We will be using moderated submissions for future rounds due to its convenience when we're checking basic things like length and completeness. Note that we do not check DNWs or other nitty-gritty stuff unless we have a reason to for that specific fic.

• We were originally planning to use the same tagset for all future rounds, but it's come to our attention that very large tagsets can become unwieldy. We are now planning to create a new tagset at the beginning of each year (every four rounds). Since we started in the fall, the current tagset will remain in place through 2022 (or for five rounds total).

Aspects of the exchange we do not plan to change:

• Character OR matching.

• The existence of the anon period.

• Requesting "Any" character means you are requesting any character in the canon (NOT the tagset).