yuletide_coal | The rest of the exchange year...

Is it a “done” thing to nominate things you’re interested in writing without planning to request them? I can’t seem to tell if that’s in the spirit of Yuletide or only contributing to tag bloat.

Not officially, no. When I've seen this come up in ffa, to me the consensus seems to be that it's okay to do it *very* sparingly.

It's fine.

There are tons of people who participate on Yuletide with little to no idea how the tag set comes into existence. Unless it's something unbelievably obscure, you're most likely helping them out by nominating stuff.

Not really.

How many nominations are you talking?

Shit I barely remember back to the misty dawn of yuletide when I didn't nominate like 20 things every year. And I usually only sign up once, so... They sure aren't just for the things I'm requesting.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Nom what you want OP. No one will know or care.

That was before AO3 got even shittier, tho. ChocolateBox noms this year were so big they nearly broke it so even the mod couldn't access the tagset.

Was that because everyone was trying to outdo themselves with 6 million snowflakey original works nominations, though?

Yuletide has always had a massive tagset, but notably has neither orig works or crossovers. It usually does okay. (I mean, relatively okay, there's a reason for the lengthy clean up period after noms close.)

Gr8 b8 m8

Tagset search has the following:

Yuletide 2017: Fandoms: 3216 Characters: 13074
Chocolate Box 2018: Fandoms: 1341 Relationships: 14866

So Yuletide had a lot more fandoms, but they're not far apart in overall size.

I'm not sure how true this is, but I also heard that Chocolate Box nominations happening during the week of Yuletide reveals and various school breaks, aka a very big week for Archive demand, was part of the problem.

15 thousand relationships wtf.

For less than a third of the participants yuletide gets. I wonder how many were actually requested and written.

CB 2018 - 1139 works
Yuletide 2017 (including Madness) - just over 2500

The official stance is that the less nominations to sort through the better. But there's no real opportunity who nominated what, so...

People do. I side-eye people who whine about not having enough nomination slots because of all the things they may want to write but not to request themselves. When the time comes to write for your recipient, it's not about what you want. This rant brought to you by a Yuletide acquaintance who used to sock up and fill the tagset with her favorite old shows, not because she had any intention of requesting them, but because she had stories written and wanted other people to request them so she could gift her unposted fics to strangers for treats. She also bragged about posting picklefic for her own assignment at deadline and doing all her writing during Dead Week every year. Not everyone who plays the system sucks, but some people suck hard. Be circumspect if you do go against the rules, and don't brag to your friends how you're putting on over on the mods.

It is a bit about what you want. You need to offer and to match. The latter depends on what other people are requesting, but there do need to be things in the tagset you're comfortable writing first.

People who do this ought to make sure they also nominate things that others might want to request so they don't whine during and after signups that there's nothing they can write.

I always nominate with a priority on what I feel like writing and offer what I feel like writing and I've never been unmatchable.

The rest of the exchange year...

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