Trick or Treat 2021 Welcome and Update

[pumpkinkingmod]

Hello, ghosts and goblins! It's time for another spooky season of Trick or Treat. I'd like to briefly introduce myself as the new Pumpkin King—Hello, I'm the new Pumpkin King! Thank you very much to the previous rulers who have made this event so much fun over the years.

The 2021 rules and FAQ post is here. The schedule remains as usual:

Sept 1 – Nominations Open
Sept 8 – Nominations Close
Sept 11 – Sign-Ups Open
Sept 18 – Sign-Ups Close
October 24 – Assignments Due
October 31 – Gift Reveals
November 7 – Creator Reveals

There is one significant update for the 2021 round of Trick or Treat; I've decided to add relationship nominations and matching as an option. If you love the traditional Trick or Treat character matching set-up, you can continue to nominate, request, and offer characters as usual! Relationship tags will just be an extra option for participants interested in that.

Due to these changes, I won’t be using an eternal tag set this year.

Let me know if you have any questions, and I'm excited for the tricks and treats to come!

Edit: Just a note that I'm slowing down on comment replies here but will get to questions as I can. The above changes are confirmed for the 2021 round. No decisions have been made about the 2022 round.

Comments

[verecunda]

Thank you for stepping in to run this exchange! It's become one of the highlights of my Hallowe'en these last few years. :)

I'm glad you decided to do away with the eternal tagset - it always seemed a bit unwieldy to me, and made it hard to gauge what the "current" nominations were, if that makes sense. Increasing the nomination slots to 10 seems like a good compromise, though, so thank you for that.

I have no strong opinion either way about the addition of ship-matching (the draw of this exchange for me has always been in the Trick/Treat option), but given the amount of pushback you've received, I agree it would probably have been better to give some advance notice of your intention, so that the community could offer their feedback then. There has, too, been some recent conflict on the exchange circuit (I'm thinking particularly of the most recent round of Multifandom Drabble), and I think it's made a lot of people quite gun-shy of mods making snap decisions like this.

If you're committed to the changes for this round at least, might I suggest opening the floor after it's over, to see whether the community want them to carry over into future rounds? I would also suggest that in future, broaching such major changes with participants beforehand also seems like the best idea.

With all that said, thank you for taking the time to run this exchange, and I'm looking forward to taking part again!

[pumpkinkingmod]

Thanks, I'm glad the tag set change works for you!

I'll definitely be happy to get feedback from participants during and after this round.