Behind the scenes... Matching

May 17, 2015 11:35

I've been matching Holmestice from the very first round and have matched all but one round. In my professional life I play with information organization all day so it was actually kind of fun for me and the things I learned organizing Holmestice's matches I applied to my professional work and vice versa.



The entire back-end of matching is organized around spreadsheets. As I've developed my simple coding skills professionally I've played around a little bit with trying to automate the matching process, but there are two big barriers to that: 1) we apply very little standardization to data collection thus creating many unique values; and 2) estimated time spent coding a solution, plus having to manually deal with everything that didn't match well because of barrier #1 was far greater than simply manually matching things myself. AO3 offers a great matching solution on their back end that is very attractive to me, but would require us to force standardization in the requests and offers in order to make it useful and of course would mean that we would have to run Holmestice over there.

So how does it actually work?

The only major change in sign ups that was ever made was between round 1 and round 2. Everyone signs up. After signups close it takes me a day or two to copy everything from the sign ups into our spreadsheets. I create a sheet for offers, a sheet for requests with columns for basic information like names, signup posts, and emails. Then it's separated into type, fandoms, pairings, categories, kinks, and special requests for the offers, and type, fandoms, pairings, categories, and kinks for the wants.

Here's a sample of what "Offers" looks like:



Here's a sample of what "Wants" looks like:



Then comes the Matching Spreadsheet of Doom and my bestest and most trusty friend, ctrl+f. No, seriously, when I say matching is done manually that's what I mean. I use cell colors, text colors, and ctrl+f to find common words and phrases to help me determine who might be a good match based on a certain items in the request.

Like so:



Since information organization is my thing though, let me explain a bit more how it ACTUALLY works.

I identify the following for all sign ups: anyone NOT requesting or offering BBC, Holmes/Watson, and/or fic. People who fall into these categories are matched first. This is partly because I don't want to be left holding an artwork, Elementary, Adler/Watson request when all I have are 6 BBC, John/Sherlock, fic offers left to match. But partly this is how I ensure Holmestice is as diverse as possible.

Holmestice is known for its diversity, not just the fact that all fandoms are invited to play in the great Holmes sandbox, but that all fandoms are encouraged to play. When it comes to matching it'd be easy enough to match everyone on ACD or BBC, and Holmes/Watson. No really, probably 95% of all sign ups include those two "main" fandoms and that pairing. But we want Holmestice to be diverse, so it's important to me that if you offer or request something other than ACD, BBC, and Holmes/Watson that you're matched on it. Which is why I'm sure quite a few of you have been left scratching your heads at your matches at some point or another. Because if you offer a rare pair or fandom, chances are I've seen it and matched you and then messaged my co-mod and said, "maybe this year we'll finally get our Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century fic!!!!". (p.s. sanguinity made a crossover with Elementary and k_e_p wrote one last round). Surprisingly, matching these accounts for roughly 50% percent of the matches. You may not have realized this though because often if someone requests ACD Watson/Lestrade, they've also requested BBC Holmes/Watson. I'm just hoping they create the former, not the latter.

By now, because I'm manually matching (and copying and pasting rows on spreadsheets) I've read most of the offers and requests multiple times, and matching can actually go pretty smoothly and quickly until we get down to the last few. I match first on fandom and then pairing, then I read the stuff written in the categories and make sure that there are at least a few in common. Kinks are used to suss out the appropriateness of the matches based on the previous three items. I try to match people who request no kinks with people who don't offer many. Special requests are there to help me in case there's something I need to pay attention to. Often it's to make sure that if someone offers to create fic, but in their special request say they really want to make a vid, that I match them with someone who requests a vid instead of just going with the fic match. Sometimes I can fulfill these, and sometimes I can't, but I do try my best.

If we standardized the categories, fandoms, and pairings requested and tweaked the kink section a bit, I could potentially run the sign ups through some code and have it spit back matches for me, but I actually sort of enjoy my matching part of Holmestice. It's fun few days.

The very last step is to go check my big spreadsheet titled "past Holmestice matches". I usually check only a couple of rounds back to make sure I haven't matched you with someone you've previously created for. It usually happens though and I try to catch those and fix them before matches go out. I also do make bad matches and sometimes I don't catch those before they go out. And sometimes people simply don't like their matches. But I like to think that all in all I do a fairly good job!


Up next... statistics.

!behind the scenes, !admin post

Previous post Next post
Up