question for the readership at large

[angevin2]

Do any of you guys have experience running ficathons through AO3?

Comments

[justice_turtle]

I don't, but there are extensive FAQs here and several tutorials linked here. If that helps any. :-)

[angevin2]

Thank you! I found the FAQ, but I hadn't seen the tutorial. That's extremely helpful. What I wanted to know was how the matching worked, and this is pretty detailed on that score.

[justice_turtle]

You're welcome! :-)

[executrix]

I haven't, but I'd really suggest making your life easier and having a challenge instead of a ficathon.

[angevin2]

But it's already been a ficathon for five years!

[gileonnen]

If it were a challenge, I probably wouldn't participate. I didn't participate in my own ficathon when it became a challenge, and this year I didn't even run it at all. This is because I cannot do intrinsic motivation. >_>

[angevin2]

It's not going to be a challenge! It's such a small ficathon that, as you note, that wouldn't really work, plus I like it fine the way it is. I'm just thinking about moving the actual posting to AO3 (info posts and links to fics will still happen on thisengland) to make the organizational stuff easier.

[joan_waterhouse]

I'm co-mod for merlin_holidays and merlin_muses both of which were at least partially run on AO3 this year. merlin_holidays (an anon exchange fest) posted fic only on ao3 and let artist decide how they wanted to host their works; merlin_muses (anon prompt fest) posts fics on LJ and ao3.

So if you have any questions, just ask away. :)

[angevin2]

The one thing that's confusing me is the fandom/character tags, so the questions I have are:

1. How does it work if the ficathon is devoted to multiple fandoms that are already pre-set -- that is, if there are several different works that are included but AO3 counts them as separate fandoms, you can just set them as the only things people can request, right?

2. How do you handle character requests for a small fandom? Is it possible to do ficathons without requiring them?

[joan_waterhouse]

Ah, ic. Well, we sort of chickened out of all this and only posted the stories to ao3. That is, the whole prompting and claiming processes was done on LJ still. We just set up a moderated collection on ao3 that participants had to post to by the deadline.

1. That's how I understand it too.
2. I'm afraid I have no idea. :/

But I found the ao3 support staff to be very helpful and friendly (one of their updates had broken a crucial feature right when posting had started and after we emailed they recognised the urgency and sorted it out really quickly). I'm sure they'll set up any additional fandom or character tags you require.

If you want to do a trial run and need someone to be the trial participant I'd be happy to help.

[angevin2]

I had not even thought of that possibility. Now I will have to think on it some more!

(I can't even imagine how AO3 would do matchups on single-fandom ficathons...)