Gonna get out of your comments after this because, while I do hate this choice I know it probably can't be fun for you for your post to be the Dreamwidth equivalent of the [Everyone Disliked That] meme, but I just want to add my explicit request for you to reconsider this next year. If you've been invested in this as a participant for years you probably also know that, generally, people who have wanted to write and request shipfic have not had a problem doing so. I'd guess that the number of people who sat it out because it wasn't Guaranteed(tm) is about the same as the number of people you're going to lose because of this change, and while I'm aware you can't please everyone, I just don't see the point of flipping this around, especially since it sounds like you reached out to the shipoween mods about adding ships before they decided not to run it this year.

I know that in exchange circles we can get very 'so make your own!' about things, but ... people did. They made Shipoween. And it kinda feels like the people who don't want ship matching are now being told 'nothing's different [which isn't true] and if you don't like it you can make your own' and like ... we already had that, you just took it away. It feels ... not great.

(Also, speaking of feelings and re: something you said upthread - how abrupt this is. It feels abrupt because it is, when you're making this decision 2-3 days before noms open. I genuinely cannot fathom why you needed to change this this round, rather than running something that worked well both with and without Shipoween running in parallel, and asked for input if the Shipoween mods decided to permanently end that.)