Changes Regarding Fandom Eligibility in 2010
Over the course of Yuletide, various guidelines have been put in place mostly to help the mods keep their sanity (such as it is!) and limit some of the work of running the challenge.
This year, there will be new automated tools for limiting nominations to rare/obscure fandoms, based on fiction levels for those fandoms in the AO3 archive, eliminating the need for manual filtering (and definitely relieving the stress levels of yours truly).
This may lead to some skewed results, especially the first year, and may occasionally allow in fandoms that are rare within the archive, but decidedly not outside of it. It may also mean that fandoms that previously would have been eligible, including those let in by the "out less than a year" exception, will be disallowed if they're well-represented on the AO3.
However, if the hugely popular Fantastic Fantasy Felines fandom is eligible this year because there isn't much of it in the AO3, and it causes a stampede of FFF fans to join AO3 so they can participate, then the presence of FFF on the archive will go up, and the next year, it probably won't be eligible -- and the matching process will still work to tilt assignments towards rarer fandoms.
The automated determination of obscurity/rarity will be on a fandom-specific level, rather than a franchise/universe/collective/meta tag level. What this means for the large franchise fandoms is that if you are a fan of a smaller component part of the franchise (like the Gallifrey audio serials in Doctor Who fandom, or the Birds of Prey in the Batman fandom), you are welcome to go ahead and nominate it! We only ask that you only nominate fandoms you truly think are rarely represented in fiction, and not do so as a way to finagle a request for a not-rare fandom through the back door (ie, don't nominate Birds of Prey because you want a Batman story...)
This year, there will be new automated tools for limiting nominations to rare/obscure fandoms, based on fiction levels for those fandoms in the AO3 archive, eliminating the need for manual filtering (and definitely relieving the stress levels of yours truly).
This may lead to some skewed results, especially the first year, and may occasionally allow in fandoms that are rare within the archive, but decidedly not outside of it. It may also mean that fandoms that previously would have been eligible, including those let in by the "out less than a year" exception, will be disallowed if they're well-represented on the AO3.
However, if the hugely popular Fantastic Fantasy Felines fandom is eligible this year because there isn't much of it in the AO3, and it causes a stampede of FFF fans to join AO3 so they can participate, then the presence of FFF on the archive will go up, and the next year, it probably won't be eligible -- and the matching process will still work to tilt assignments towards rarer fandoms.
The automated determination of obscurity/rarity will be on a fandom-specific level, rather than a franchise/universe/collective/meta tag level. What this means for the large franchise fandoms is that if you are a fan of a smaller component part of the franchise (like the Gallifrey audio serials in Doctor Who fandom, or the Birds of Prey in the Batman fandom), you are welcome to go ahead and nominate it! We only ask that you only nominate fandoms you truly think are rarely represented in fiction, and not do so as a way to finagle a request for a not-rare fandom through the back door (ie, don't nominate Birds of Prey because you want a Batman story...)