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

[morbane]

Good luck with running this exchange! And thank you to the previous mods for handing it over to ensure its continuity - it's a large event that many enjoy and I'm glad it still has its place in the calendar.

The eternal tag set was obviously an experiment, and if it isn't one that suits you, fair enough. However, depending on your reason for not keeping it, I wonder if you'd be interested in a compromise: keeping last year's tag set, but allowing further nominations (both character and relationship - using the Character field, probably with "G:" or similar at the start of the relationship tags) to a new tag set at the same time. Then link both to the sign-up form. [edit: I'm echoing two commenters above me, sorry for duplicating! Hopefully being more specific is still helpful.]

The benefits I see are:
-you don't have to do much messing with the previous tag set (which is of a large enough size to be a pain to edit), but you don't lose the nominations, which people have made plans around
-the large quantities of tags in that tag set may keep a slight gen weighting to this year's requests, which some people have mentioned as a plus; many exchanges that match on ships are heavily weighted TOWARDS ships
-if you like that, you could keep up a rolling tag set system in future: 2021 uses 2021's new tag set + the eternal tag set; 2022 uses 2022's new tag set plus 2021's tag set. That possibly solves one problem with the eternal tag set, which is a set that grows bigger and bigger and bigger - and locks fandom groupings into place in certain ways - while bloating with things that may represent the interests of people who have long lost interest in the exchange.

Again, this is all based on speculation about what your goals are here, so I apologize if this is not helpful. I also rarely sign up to ToT so of course I would not expect it to run to suit me.

[pumpkinkingmod]

Thank you for the well-wishes, and for the suggestions! I appreciate how much thought you've put into this. However, I'm sticking with the simpler solution of running a normal round of nominations in a single tag set. Hopefully the increased nomination limits will help participants get the fandoms they want to request in.

You're correct that the size of the eternal tag set is a concern. I looked up some numbers while I was making this decision, and if anyone else is curious:

Eternal Tag Set: 2263 fandoms; 16708 characters
Chocobox Round 6: 1928 fandoms; 14367 ships
Chocobox Round 5: 1657 fandoms; 12693 ships