SSR Confidential matching - behind the scenes

[sholio]

I was going to leave tomorrow but it's now pushed back to Tuesday, which is AWESOME because instead of spending today hastily packing and doing all the errands I haven't done yet, I can do my errands in a leisurely way, chill, hang out online, and write fanfic.

I was also remembering that I'd meant to post about my SSR Confidential matching process, after the reveals were out so I didn't risk giving away anyone's assignment. It's been a REALLY long time since I ran an exchange (actually I can't remember off the top of my head if I've modded an exchange like this before -- ficathons and prompt communities, yes; straight-across exchanges, possibly not). So I was pretty much operating from scratch on how to do this.

I tried running AO3's automatic matching algorithm, but most of the results were terrible -- I mean, they technically matched, but most of them matched only on one character, and all the ones I spot-checked were not going to work well (people being matched to writers who hated their favorite character/OTP, and that kind of thing). So I decided to hand-match all of them. I'm not entirely sure if anyone else does it the way I did it, but it worked really well for me.

I downloaded all the requests, put them in a text file, and printed them out. I did it twice, on different-colored paper, so I had each person's full sign-up on two different colors of paper (for requests and offers). Then I cut them apart and ended up with a bunch of slips of paper that looked like this:



(These are already partially paired off, at left. I just paper-clipped the assignments together.)

As I went through the requests, I realized that broadly, they all fell into one of three general categories, which I thought of as the Jack group, the Angie group, and the Howard/Jarvis/female-character group. That is, nearly everyone who wanted Jack ALSO wanted Peggy, Daniel, and ships involving those characters, so they were all pretty good matches with each other. Most of the people requesting Dottie, Whitney, the Jarvises and Howard wanted at least three of those four. The Angie people basically just wanted Angie or Angie/Peggy. If I broke up the players into those three divisions, they were almost all compatible within each subgroup.

So I divided the requests and offers into those three groups, and first of all went through doing the best possible matches. There were a handful of people in each group who were SUPER compatible -- they wanted almost all the same things, or they had the same rarepairs, or someone was offering to write exactly what another person wanted to receive. So I did those first, to make sure as many people as possible would get the best of all possible matches.

Then I separated out the people who only had non-fic requests or non-fic offers, because doing the remaining people was going to be like a jigsaw puzzle anyway, and I didn't want to have different media types to further confuse things. So I matched those ones next.

Then I went through and matched the remaining people. Some of them got good matches anyway; others ended up matching on only one or two characters. In the end, I had a number of different stacks that were labeled like this:



I did actually end up having to switch some people around when I went and entered all of the new assignments into the AO3 panel, because in one case (ironically involving me) I had accidentally done a direct assignments swap (I was writing for them, and they were also writing for me) and I didn't want that. I think I also had someone who was assigned to write for someone whose request TECHNICALLY didn't match -- from the way their requests/offers were written, I think it would have worked fine (it was basically a case of, they requested X and Y, and offered X/Y, and I assigned them to someone who requested Y), but AO3 wouldn't take the match. So I did some shuffling. Since I was writing in the exchange myself, I was also able to use myself as a wildcard; I was willing to write basically anything, and also to accept a less-than-optimal writer match. In the end I did end up giving my writer a difficult assignment, since we only matched on one character and none of our ships, but they did a great job with it. :D

Basically it worked great and I'll probably be doing the same thing next year. I also had several people mention how much they loved their assignments, which, yay! \o/ I tried very hard to make sure everyone had an assignment they would enjoy.

Comments

[veleda_k]

This was super interesting! Thanks for sharing. It's really intriguing how people ended grouping themselves like that. I'm having an interesting time musing on it.

[sholio]

I was really fascinated by it! Especially since not all of the correlating characters and ships were obvious. I mean, some of them make total sense (that most people who like Dottie also like Whitney, for example), but there was an EXTREMELY high level of correlation between, say, Dottie/Peggy people and people who were also interested in the Stark-Jarvis triad -- while, correspondingly, most people who were into those characters were not into the SSR characters. It was just very interesting to me. :D

[brightknightie]

This is very similar to what I do for FKFicFest! Except that I use different-colored highlighters for the 2 copies, instead of different-colored papers. :-)

And of course I don't usually get multiple submissions that overlap. ;-) Oh, FKdom, how your dear factioned, fractioned diversity persists... ;-)

(I can't imagine that the AO3 engine, as it currently exists, could ever produce better quality matches than hand-matching, although it is much, much more efficient and scalable!)

Thank you very much for sharing.

[sholio]

Ahhhh, colored highlighters, that's a good idea! :D It's interesting to know what other people's methods are!

FK fandom is definitely set on hard mode when it comes to matching people ...

[alatefeline]

You rock! Awesome creative-organizational skills, showing why this is a thing that requires thought and nuance!

[sholio]

Thank you very much! :D

[st_aurafina]

This is super fascinating, thank you for posting it. I'm one who loved their assignment, I felt like we were really well matched. Go you!

[sholio]

Thank you! <3 I think you were one of the people who originally mentioned that you'd really liked your assignment, and that made me very happy. I did try to get good matches for people!

[sheron]

I already told you mine was a great match for what I wanted to write, so thanks again. I do think it's really interesting how nicely split the fandom is into the three groups. You can use just one of the prompts to figure out a lot about what kind of fic the person might enjoy being gifted, and which side-characters they might be interested in, etc.

[sholio]

Thank you! <3 Yeah, I was a little surprised the groups broke down as neatly as they did. I think it's possible that if I'd had more people who were seriously OTP-ish about Peggy/Daniel, there might have been a fourth group, but as it was, everyone who wanted Peggy/Daniel (or nearly all of them, anyway) also seemed to be into Jack and Jack-related pairings.

[roseveare]

Hee! I ended up doing hand matching for Troubled Tales, a Haven exchange, last year, for the same reason. Lots and lots of bits of paper. The AO3 matcher came through for the mini-exchange I did this year just fine, though, so it seems a hit and miss sort of tool.

[sholio]

Lots of bits of paper, indeed. I guess it makes sense that the computer would sometimes get good matches and sometimes not, depending on the overall makeup of the field of players, but it's interesting to know that sometimes it does a better job than other times.

[selenak]

You did great work - I loved the story I got, and could have written several for my prompts (since one of the alternatives was Peggy & Jarvis). It was just a lovely ficathon all around.

[sholio]

Thank you! <3 <3 I'm really delighted it was a good experience.

[gwyn]

You are so cute! :-D

[sholio]

Thanks, I think. XD

[nenya_kanadka]

That is kind of amazing. :D :D