Yuletide 2014 sign-up tutorial
Hey folk, here is a thingy I have made:
It is a sign-up tutorial for Yuletide 2014. ETA: You can now select English sub-titles from the Settings when watching this video.
I am afraid that because I have never made a screencast tutorial before, and do not have a great set-up, the audio quality is not brilliant. However, Moriann has kindly provided a transcript! These are now available as sub-titles within the video, or you can read the follow-along text:
Hello, this is a tutorial for sign-up to Yuletide in 2014.
First, you'll need to log in at the Archive of Our Own.
If you don't already have an account here, you can get an invite.
These're issued pretty quickly.
But if it's late in the sign-up process, you can also ask the mods for an account invitation code.
However, I do have an account, so I'll use that.
Now I'm signed in, and I'm back on the page for Yuletide for this year.
That's archiveofourown.org/collections/Yuletide2014 and I'm at the Profile page, which has /profile addded to the end.
Since I'm signed in, I can see the sign-up form in the left menu.
The first part of the sign-up form that I'll fill out is the Requests.
I have five requests to fill out, but you can request as few as 3 fandoms, or as many as six.
We'll go through my requests and I'll explain what I'm doing as I go.
So I'll type the first fandom.
You'll notice that autocompletes.
Most fandoms and characters will autocomplete from the Yuletide tag set.
Sometimes they won't. In that case it's a good idea to check the tag set.
I've got that here: it's at archiveofourown.org/tag_sets/479.
You can also find the tag set linked in the Yuletide 2014 profile page.
I'm going to check that 'Kisa the Cat' is where it should be, in Books & Literature.
It is, with three characters.
Now I'd be happy with a story about any of those three characters, so instead of filling in any of these three in the character field, I'm going to leave it blank.
That means that if someone offers 'Kisa the Cat', they can match to me whatever character combination they offer, and they can write any of those characters for me: one, two or three of them.
I've already written a Dear Author letter, so I'm going to put the link in the field.
Dear Author letters are completely optional.
They're kind of a fun tradition in Yuletide, but you can also give your prompts just as easily by putting it in this box and nowhere else.
I like letters cause I like rambling on about my canons.
Don't feel the pressure to write one, if you haven't before or you don't like rambling on about your canons.
What I do -- and again, this is just how I do prompts, there are heaps of good ways to do them -- is I like to have a paragraph in my letter for each of my canons that sums up the core of what I want in a story.
So, if that was the only thing my author'd read, that'd be okay.
One thing, I'll just mention about 'Any' characters.
They don't mean, 'Any that appear in canon'.
So you saw I had three characters nominated for 'Kisa the Cat'.
There's also a giant in the story, but if I wrote a prompt here that seemed entirely, 'Tell me a story about the giant, I don't want to read about anyone else', that'd be considered kinda not cool.
'Any' means, 'Any in the tag set'.
So, I'm happy with that request for now.
I will go on to my second request.
Now, notice that there are several options here.
If I accidentally click the one I don't mean, then I can easily click the little 'x' to get rid of it again.
Now, for this fandom, I want specific characters.
In the tag set are: Aurora, Maleficent and Phillip.
I went for Aurora and Maleficent.
What this means: having chosen them, is that if someone offered Maleficent and Phillip in this canon, they couldn't match to me.
I mean, they can come along later and write me a treat, but they cannot be assigned to me as my writer.
And I'm going to put in the same letter link.
And I'm going to go back to my letter and grab that paragraph that I use.
Okay, and my third request.
I'll just make a note that the order in which I enter my requests has absolutely no effect on matching.
The system can't tell if you give any priorities to one canon over another, so we kinda prefer that you don't.
After all, your author could be matched on any of these and it's not a great feeling to come to your author's prompts [sic: recipient's prompts] and realise that what they might be writing for you [sic: what you might be writing for them] is the thing you [sic: they] wanted least.
Again, I'm happy with any of the characters in the tag set in my story.
You might wonder why I don't just list them.
The reason is that if I put them all there, anyone who offered 'Chalice' would have to have offered every single one of these characters, or to have offered 'Any', in order to match with me.
Again, by specifying 0 characters, I could be matched to someone who's offered just Mirasol & Talisman or just Talisman & Liapnir, or just Clearseer & Talisman.
Any combination at all.
And I'm happy with it.
I think any story about any one, or two, or three, or four of these characters would be cool.
Now, I've filled out the minimal number of requests.
Personally, I'd like two more options, but if you just have three requests you want, you could continue to Offers from here.
Here I only want one character.
That means that someone has to offer her in order to match me in this canon.
And I'm going to add a fifth request.
And the thing you notice about this particular canon is that there were no characters nominated for it in the tag set at all.
So I can't specify any, when I'm asking for them, and you can't specify any when you offer them.
But that's okay, I just want you to explore the song.
I'll just take a note: I've been using the autocomplete meters to fill in my fandoms and characters, but if the autocomplete isn't working for you for some reason, you can also click on the list.
That's opening for me in a new tab and it's got the fandoms bunched up alphabetically, so in this case I'll be looking for 'I Feel Possessed', which will be down under Howl, it looks like.
Here we go.
And so that's a quick way you can check the spelling of a canon, but as you see, the characters aren't listed here, so it's also useful to just have the tag set handy.
But at least this way, I know that I'm spelling this fandom the way it is in the tag set, which is very important for matching.
Okay, Offers!
Now, I've filled in my own requests so far.
For the purposes of anonymity, I'm going to pick offers completely at random.
You can be assured that I am not actually offering them.
I have absolutely no idea what 'Black Jack' is, but according to the autocomplete there are five characters in it, so I will offer two of them.
Just be wary though, because when the autocomplete does miss out a character and you offer 'Any', you could actually be offering a character you did not even know was there.
So I'll just double check.
Yup, five characters. Okay, good to be sure.
We're going to ignore the 'Optional Tags' field for now.
The only way to use it in Yuletide sign-up is for a bucket list, which is kind of a 'Yuletide Offers: Advanced Mode'.
The key thing to remember at the moment, is that you can't use this field to put in something like 'Angst' or 'Tentacles' just because you're hoping to write those, because the matching isn't going to run on that, and the mods may not even see it.
It can be used this way in other exchanges; we don't use it for Yuletide.
I'll just enter random letters again.
And here I can click 'Any Character'.
Right now, I don't even know which characters are nominated for 'Hornblower', so I'll check that.
There are five characters nominated in 'Hornblower (TV)'.
That means that by offering 'Any', I could be asked to write any combination of those.
The only thing that isn't possible is to have to write all five of them, because people have a maximum of requesting four characters per fandom.
And let's throw in something.
It is not, by the way, a good idea, to offer 'Any' for a fandom you do not know.
Now, I've made my sixth offer a 'Bucket List', so here's how we set it up.
So what I do next is start typing fandoms in the Optional Tags field.
Now, I have to be careful here, because if I start typing, I'm getting all of the Archive's tags, not just the 2014 Yuletide Tag Set tags.
So here's a good time to go right back to the tag set or to open up the list of fandoms and copy fandoms I want to include directly from there.
They're put in by commas.
You can keep going.
Add pretty much as many as you'd like.
The only thing to remember is that for any canon you put in a bucket list like this, you are promising to write 'Any character'.
So check the character list before you put a fandom in your bucket list.
Now that I've successfully created a sign-up form, I'm going to break it in a couple of ways, so that you'd know what's happening when you get a few of error messages.
Here's one thing I've noticed: at the moment, because of some tweaking, I have exactly four offers, and I'm going to choose to add another offer.
Then I'm going to change my mind, I don't actually want to offer five canons, so I'm going to click remove.
It won't let me.
I know that's wrong, because we've set the minimum number of offers at four.
So I shouldn't have to fill out a fifth offer.
But if I go down to the bottom of the form again and press 'Update', the Archive will accept my form with just the four, if I haven't filled out offer 5.
So if you run across that problem, don't worry.
Four is the minimum number of offers.
Here are some other obvious ways of breaking your Yuletide form.
You'll notice that most of the plain text fields allow lots of input, not just the autocomplete tags.
So I have thrown a character who does not belong in 'Kisa the Cat' into 'Kisa the Cat'.
I get some errors.
'There were some problems with the submission. Please correct the mistakes below.'
That's your standard message.
And 'We couldn't save this challenge sign-up because the character tags in your request are not allowed in this challenge: Boop!'
And it shows me the message where it applies to the right request.
Well Boop!'s probably not a character in the whole tag set, how about a character who is?
Here I've thrown my 'Dragonriders of Pern' character into the Kisa canon, just to see what happens.
It accepts that, however that's not really going to help me match with my 'Kisa the Cat' canon.
This also shows the importance of looking in the tag set and copying the spelling used for the characters within each fandom.
If you use a character as he or she is spelled in one fandom in a different fandom, you might not be matchable, so please check which disambiguation tags are being used for each one.
Let's look at breaking the form in a couple of slightly more ordinary ways.
I'm going to add a character in my author letter link, and then I'm going to go down to my offers.
This will give me an error message because my request URL isn't a valid URL.
I'll just change that back.
Hmm, it tried to make it one but it failed.
Further down, I'm looking for the red message.
I have character tags but also 'Any' tag, which conflict.
I'll get rid of 'Any'.
Ah-ha! I've created another error.
I've created an error by choosing only one character in a fandom for my offers.
I can do that in my requests, but for offers I need a minimum of two characters.
I'll change it back to 'Any'.
That's also the way I would offer characters in a fandom where only one character is nominated.
Just click 'Any'.
You'll notice I've filled in a bucket offer here with one fandom, no characters filled in, 'Any Characters' clicked, and several fandoms listed one by one.
Those are separated by commas.
If I type several fandoms in a row with nothing to separate them, it probably won't make the form error out, but I won't have any possibility of matching on them.
Another way of breaking the bucket list that the form will accept, is putting characters here.
Don't specify characters in your bucket list.
And look at how badly I've broken my bucket list, it's great.
So I'll take out that incorrect tag and I will take out those characters.
Here's one last way of breaking any of your request and offers.
Don't use semi-colons or asterists.
Those characters will not be accepted as part of a label.
Sorry, if they belong in your characters, we're gonna have to work around that.
Similarly, commas are used only to separate things out, so you're going to need to enter your character of fandom labels without using commas.
In this case, since they're already nominated for the Yuletide tag set, just copy the way they appear in the tag set.
I think I've cleared out all the current errors in my offers and requests.
Great, it's happy.
So I'll show you two more things.
One is that you can edit each of your prompts individually.
That works for both requests and offers.
It's particularly useful if you just want to switch your bucket offer around.
It'll give you only that prompt in the window.
Okay, here's one more thing we can't do with the Yuletide form at the moment.
I've asked for 'Drangonriders of Pern' above and I've only asked for Oklina here.
It might make sense to ask for 'Dragonriders of Pern' again with a different character, who appears in a different time than Oklina.
Because I can technically ask for them together, but it's less likely a signle author will offer both at once.
And if I ask for both together my author has to offer both in order to match with me.
However, we haven't set up the form to allow people to request the same fandom multiple times, for various reasons.
So that too, will throw up an error message.
I will get rid of this again.
And lastly, you can access your sign-up from more than just the Yuletide collection's page.
You can also go to your personal section of the AO3 and click on 'My Sign-ups' where you'll see you Yuletide 2014 sign up at the very top of the list.
Thank you for listening, if you have any questions, please post comments.
Enjoy Yuletide!
There may be SLIGHT changes to the text that you see in the sign-up form, compared to the text in the video, but these are minor tweaks; let them not alarm you.
Click to viewIt is a sign-up tutorial for Yuletide 2014. ETA: You can now select English sub-titles from the Settings when watching this video.
I am afraid that because I have never made a screencast tutorial before, and do not have a great set-up, the audio quality is not brilliant. However, Moriann has kindly provided a transcript! These are now available as sub-titles within the video, or you can read the follow-along text:
Hello, this is a tutorial for sign-up to Yuletide in 2014.
First, you'll need to log in at the Archive of Our Own.
If you don't already have an account here, you can get an invite.
These're issued pretty quickly.
But if it's late in the sign-up process, you can also ask the mods for an account invitation code.
However, I do have an account, so I'll use that.
Now I'm signed in, and I'm back on the page for Yuletide for this year.
That's archiveofourown.org/collections/Yuletide2014 and I'm at the Profile page, which has /profile addded to the end.
Since I'm signed in, I can see the sign-up form in the left menu.
The first part of the sign-up form that I'll fill out is the Requests.
I have five requests to fill out, but you can request as few as 3 fandoms, or as many as six.
We'll go through my requests and I'll explain what I'm doing as I go.
So I'll type the first fandom.
You'll notice that autocompletes.
Most fandoms and characters will autocomplete from the Yuletide tag set.
Sometimes they won't. In that case it's a good idea to check the tag set.
I've got that here: it's at archiveofourown.org/tag_sets/479.
You can also find the tag set linked in the Yuletide 2014 profile page.
I'm going to check that 'Kisa the Cat' is where it should be, in Books & Literature.
It is, with three characters.
Now I'd be happy with a story about any of those three characters, so instead of filling in any of these three in the character field, I'm going to leave it blank.
That means that if someone offers 'Kisa the Cat', they can match to me whatever character combination they offer, and they can write any of those characters for me: one, two or three of them.
I've already written a Dear Author letter, so I'm going to put the link in the field.
Dear Author letters are completely optional.
They're kind of a fun tradition in Yuletide, but you can also give your prompts just as easily by putting it in this box and nowhere else.
I like letters cause I like rambling on about my canons.
Don't feel the pressure to write one, if you haven't before or you don't like rambling on about your canons.
What I do -- and again, this is just how I do prompts, there are heaps of good ways to do them -- is I like to have a paragraph in my letter for each of my canons that sums up the core of what I want in a story.
So, if that was the only thing my author'd read, that'd be okay.
One thing, I'll just mention about 'Any' characters.
They don't mean, 'Any that appear in canon'.
So you saw I had three characters nominated for 'Kisa the Cat'.
There's also a giant in the story, but if I wrote a prompt here that seemed entirely, 'Tell me a story about the giant, I don't want to read about anyone else', that'd be considered kinda not cool.
'Any' means, 'Any in the tag set'.
So, I'm happy with that request for now.
I will go on to my second request.
Now, notice that there are several options here.
If I accidentally click the one I don't mean, then I can easily click the little 'x' to get rid of it again.
Now, for this fandom, I want specific characters.
In the tag set are: Aurora, Maleficent and Phillip.
I went for Aurora and Maleficent.
What this means: having chosen them, is that if someone offered Maleficent and Phillip in this canon, they couldn't match to me.
I mean, they can come along later and write me a treat, but they cannot be assigned to me as my writer.
And I'm going to put in the same letter link.
And I'm going to go back to my letter and grab that paragraph that I use.
Okay, and my third request.
I'll just make a note that the order in which I enter my requests has absolutely no effect on matching.
The system can't tell if you give any priorities to one canon over another, so we kinda prefer that you don't.
After all, your author could be matched on any of these and it's not a great feeling to come to your author's prompts [sic: recipient's prompts] and realise that what they might be writing for you [sic: what you might be writing for them] is the thing you [sic: they] wanted least.
Again, I'm happy with any of the characters in the tag set in my story.
You might wonder why I don't just list them.
The reason is that if I put them all there, anyone who offered 'Chalice' would have to have offered every single one of these characters, or to have offered 'Any', in order to match with me.
Again, by specifying 0 characters, I could be matched to someone who's offered just Mirasol & Talisman or just Talisman & Liapnir, or just Clearseer & Talisman.
Any combination at all.
And I'm happy with it.
I think any story about any one, or two, or three, or four of these characters would be cool.
Now, I've filled out the minimal number of requests.
Personally, I'd like two more options, but if you just have three requests you want, you could continue to Offers from here.
Here I only want one character.
That means that someone has to offer her in order to match me in this canon.
And I'm going to add a fifth request.
And the thing you notice about this particular canon is that there were no characters nominated for it in the tag set at all.
So I can't specify any, when I'm asking for them, and you can't specify any when you offer them.
But that's okay, I just want you to explore the song.
I'll just take a note: I've been using the autocomplete meters to fill in my fandoms and characters, but if the autocomplete isn't working for you for some reason, you can also click on the list.
That's opening for me in a new tab and it's got the fandoms bunched up alphabetically, so in this case I'll be looking for 'I Feel Possessed', which will be down under Howl, it looks like.
Here we go.
And so that's a quick way you can check the spelling of a canon, but as you see, the characters aren't listed here, so it's also useful to just have the tag set handy.
But at least this way, I know that I'm spelling this fandom the way it is in the tag set, which is very important for matching.
Okay, Offers!
Now, I've filled in my own requests so far.
For the purposes of anonymity, I'm going to pick offers completely at random.
You can be assured that I am not actually offering them.
I have absolutely no idea what 'Black Jack' is, but according to the autocomplete there are five characters in it, so I will offer two of them.
Just be wary though, because when the autocomplete does miss out a character and you offer 'Any', you could actually be offering a character you did not even know was there.
So I'll just double check.
Yup, five characters. Okay, good to be sure.
We're going to ignore the 'Optional Tags' field for now.
The only way to use it in Yuletide sign-up is for a bucket list, which is kind of a 'Yuletide Offers: Advanced Mode'.
The key thing to remember at the moment, is that you can't use this field to put in something like 'Angst' or 'Tentacles' just because you're hoping to write those, because the matching isn't going to run on that, and the mods may not even see it.
It can be used this way in other exchanges; we don't use it for Yuletide.
I'll just enter random letters again.
And here I can click 'Any Character'.
Right now, I don't even know which characters are nominated for 'Hornblower', so I'll check that.
There are five characters nominated in 'Hornblower (TV)'.
That means that by offering 'Any', I could be asked to write any combination of those.
The only thing that isn't possible is to have to write all five of them, because people have a maximum of requesting four characters per fandom.
And let's throw in something.
It is not, by the way, a good idea, to offer 'Any' for a fandom you do not know.
Now, I've made my sixth offer a 'Bucket List', so here's how we set it up.
So what I do next is start typing fandoms in the Optional Tags field.
Now, I have to be careful here, because if I start typing, I'm getting all of the Archive's tags, not just the 2014 Yuletide Tag Set tags.
So here's a good time to go right back to the tag set or to open up the list of fandoms and copy fandoms I want to include directly from there.
They're put in by commas.
You can keep going.
Add pretty much as many as you'd like.
The only thing to remember is that for any canon you put in a bucket list like this, you are promising to write 'Any character'.
So check the character list before you put a fandom in your bucket list.
Now that I've successfully created a sign-up form, I'm going to break it in a couple of ways, so that you'd know what's happening when you get a few of error messages.
Here's one thing I've noticed: at the moment, because of some tweaking, I have exactly four offers, and I'm going to choose to add another offer.
Then I'm going to change my mind, I don't actually want to offer five canons, so I'm going to click remove.
It won't let me.
I know that's wrong, because we've set the minimum number of offers at four.
So I shouldn't have to fill out a fifth offer.
But if I go down to the bottom of the form again and press 'Update', the Archive will accept my form with just the four, if I haven't filled out offer 5.
So if you run across that problem, don't worry.
Four is the minimum number of offers.
Here are some other obvious ways of breaking your Yuletide form.
You'll notice that most of the plain text fields allow lots of input, not just the autocomplete tags.
So I have thrown a character who does not belong in 'Kisa the Cat' into 'Kisa the Cat'.
I get some errors.
'There were some problems with the submission. Please correct the mistakes below.'
That's your standard message.
And 'We couldn't save this challenge sign-up because the character tags in your request are not allowed in this challenge: Boop!'
And it shows me the message where it applies to the right request.
Well Boop!'s probably not a character in the whole tag set, how about a character who is?
Here I've thrown my 'Dragonriders of Pern' character into the Kisa canon, just to see what happens.
It accepts that, however that's not really going to help me match with my 'Kisa the Cat' canon.
This also shows the importance of looking in the tag set and copying the spelling used for the characters within each fandom.
If you use a character as he or she is spelled in one fandom in a different fandom, you might not be matchable, so please check which disambiguation tags are being used for each one.
Let's look at breaking the form in a couple of slightly more ordinary ways.
I'm going to add a character in my author letter link, and then I'm going to go down to my offers.
This will give me an error message because my request URL isn't a valid URL.
I'll just change that back.
Hmm, it tried to make it one but it failed.
Further down, I'm looking for the red message.
I have character tags but also 'Any' tag, which conflict.
I'll get rid of 'Any'.
Ah-ha! I've created another error.
I've created an error by choosing only one character in a fandom for my offers.
I can do that in my requests, but for offers I need a minimum of two characters.
I'll change it back to 'Any'.
That's also the way I would offer characters in a fandom where only one character is nominated.
Just click 'Any'.
You'll notice I've filled in a bucket offer here with one fandom, no characters filled in, 'Any Characters' clicked, and several fandoms listed one by one.
Those are separated by commas.
If I type several fandoms in a row with nothing to separate them, it probably won't make the form error out, but I won't have any possibility of matching on them.
Another way of breaking the bucket list that the form will accept, is putting characters here.
Don't specify characters in your bucket list.
And look at how badly I've broken my bucket list, it's great.
So I'll take out that incorrect tag and I will take out those characters.
Here's one last way of breaking any of your request and offers.
Don't use semi-colons or asterists.
Those characters will not be accepted as part of a label.
Sorry, if they belong in your characters, we're gonna have to work around that.
Similarly, commas are used only to separate things out, so you're going to need to enter your character of fandom labels without using commas.
In this case, since they're already nominated for the Yuletide tag set, just copy the way they appear in the tag set.
I think I've cleared out all the current errors in my offers and requests.
Great, it's happy.
So I'll show you two more things.
One is that you can edit each of your prompts individually.
That works for both requests and offers.
It's particularly useful if you just want to switch your bucket offer around.
It'll give you only that prompt in the window.
Okay, here's one more thing we can't do with the Yuletide form at the moment.
I've asked for 'Drangonriders of Pern' above and I've only asked for Oklina here.
It might make sense to ask for 'Dragonriders of Pern' again with a different character, who appears in a different time than Oklina.
Because I can technically ask for them together, but it's less likely a signle author will offer both at once.
And if I ask for both together my author has to offer both in order to match with me.
However, we haven't set up the form to allow people to request the same fandom multiple times, for various reasons.
So that too, will throw up an error message.
I will get rid of this again.
And lastly, you can access your sign-up from more than just the Yuletide collection's page.
You can also go to your personal section of the AO3 and click on 'My Sign-ups' where you'll see you Yuletide 2014 sign up at the very top of the list.
Thank you for listening, if you have any questions, please post comments.
Enjoy Yuletide!
There may be SLIGHT changes to the text that you see in the sign-up form, compared to the text in the video, but these are minor tweaks; let them not alarm you.