Help with the AO3 exchange form?

[sholio]

Okay, I confess: certain aspects of the AO3 form for setting up a fic exchange are baffling me utterly.

There are two specific things I am having trouble figuring out, and would really appreciate advice from anyone who's run or helped run an exchange on AO3.

- Several of the exchanges I've participated in lately have used an optional tag field to allow people to check "fic" or "art". As far as I can tell, this is the only way to do matching in an exchange that includes both. But I can't figure out how to add these fields.

- It's possible to have one request that includes multiple pairings, or have each pairing as its own request. Anyone have advice on the best way to set this up for matching purposes? Especially since this is a single-fandom exchange and therefore theoretically less complicated, I could easily just have one request per signup, allowing people to enter however many pairings they want (up to the maximum). OR I could have each pairing as its own request and allow 6 or 8 or whatever I decide to make the maximum. Pros? Cons? "One request, multiple pairings" seems like the most straightforward, but "multiple requests, one pairing each" allows people to easily enter their optional details for each pairing, as those are probably going to be different.

For the last one, I'd also be interested in hearing from anyone who's participated in several exchanges as far as which version you found easiest to use.

I also haven't decided what my minimum/maximums are going to be. Matching is going to be done on the basis of pairing/relationship. Right now I'm thinking:

Requests: minimum 1, maximum 8
Offers: minimum 2, maximum 8

Allowing people to offer as little as one pairing might be a TERRIBLE idea, but I also don't think there are going to be that many people who are that OTP-ish about really rare pairings (that is, I would expect that people who really only want ONE are going to come from the bigger pairings, though I might be tragically mistaken). Anyway, I could also bump it up to two.

Opinions very welcome!

Comments

[muccamukk]

For the first question, you add a free form tag, one called "Fanfic" one called "Fanart."

For the second, one pairing seems low to me, especially since you have a gen option.

[sholio]

Yeah, thinking about it, I should probably bump that up to more than one.

What's baffling me is, HOW do you add a freeform tag? A specific one, I mean. I can find the check boxes to allow them, but I can't find anywhere that allows you to define your own. Or do you add that at a later step, when you start establishing the tag set after the form is already set up?

[muccamukk]

Oh! Sorry. Yes. You set it up in the challenge that you have to request one, and can request any, but to actually add them, you do it with the tagset.

[sholio]

Aha! I should have realized that. I hadn't realized that the tags would propagate to the form in quite that way, I guess; I thought it was something you had to define at the outset. But that's a relief, because that aspect was really confusing me!

[muccamukk]

I still find the back end of exchanges really confusing. I always open a bit early and run a test sign up through just in case I've got the ruddy settings wrong. Again.

At least you're doing a single fandom exchange, so tag wrangling will be less like a game of whackamole.

[sholio]

Ha, yeah. I figure this is probably a fairly simple exchange to test the waters with, since it's a small fandom with a small pool of characters, and there's only one fandom involved.

... oh, I have one more question! For the tagset, do I need to define a name for it in the initial signup form, or can I leave that part blank and change it later when I actually have tags?

[muccamukk]

I keep meaning to do a guide for tag wrangling multi-fandom fests, but on the other hand, if I procrastinate long enough, someone else will.

You can leave it blank.

[sholio]

Thank you! :) I really appreciate the help; I'm finding the whole process soooo confusing (and I'm sure tag wrangling isn't going to be any less so). But I can totally understand why doing a guide is not a high priority; it seems like it would be a major undertaking.