Updates for 2018!

[thedevilchicken]

Hello, AUEx! thedevilchicken here. You may know me as the suspiciously silent partner in last year's inaugural Alternate Universe Exchange, but silent no more!

I have a couple of announcements to make, and a question to ask.


Announcement the first:

Last year's much less silent mods, crantz and morbane, will be stepping down - that means I'll be running things this year. Huge thanks for your hard work last year, both of you! Nothing caught fire and we have you to thank for that.

I might be looking for a co-mod a bit closer to the time, but for now it's just me.


Announcement the second:

The intention is that AUEx will run again this year, with amended rules.

The major change is AUs won't be tied to specific fandoms - they'll be nominated as freeform tags, independent of fandoms, meaning they can be used when requesting/offering any fandom in the tagset.

Basically: AUs only need to be nominated once in total, not once per fandom. That doesn't mean you can no longer request specific points of canon-divergence, etc. however!

I'll also be allowing crossovers and canon AUs this year, and abolishing last year's megafandom groupings. Hopefully this will make things more straightforward for everyone.


Question:

Would there be any interest in bringing AUex forward this year? It would help my schedule to run this sooner rather than later!

I'm more than happy to take suggestions for dates.

Dates will be roughly the same as last year to avoid clashes with major exchanges.


If anyone has any suggestions/questions, please feel free to leave/ask them here!

Comments

[prettysophist]

Sooner is good :)

[shopfront]

I would love to see it run sooner! Last years schedule ran right through the start of my busiest time of year, so the sooner the better for me personally but it being any earlier at all would still be fantastic.

[silveradept]

Sooner works fine for me.

[ultra_fic]

I have to admit that the timing of last years exchange worked out really well for me, but if you do decide to go sooner with it, I'd probably still sign up :)

[sirvalkyrie]

I'll participate whenever it runs.

Since you are abolishing megafandom groupings how much are you merging/splitting fandoms? It's a question that comes up in almost every exchange and there are good reasons for both merging and splitting depending on the focus of the exchange and the needs of the participants.

[thedevilchicken]

The massive catch-all fandoms didn't work well for me last year, so I'm hoping to narrow things down a bit and be a bit less arbitrary.

I'd like to keep the tagset free of All Media Types for clarity's sake but other than that, ideally, I'd like to let people decide for themselves. However, I realise a degree of uniformity of approach would help.

I'll be asking for input on merges/splits a bit closer to the time - any thoughts appreciated!

[maidenjedi]

Would love to participate, and an early exchange works. February for nominations, maybe?

[desertvixen]

Sooner is good, later is good - look, whenever you have it I'm signing up!

I could help mod as well, although I have never done it.

[meatball42.livejournal.com]

I do like the idea of having AU nominations separate from fandom noms just so you don't have to, say, nominate Coffeeshop AU, Time travel, and Regency six times each. But it does seem like it'd lead to a massive and potentially confusing tagset if all the fandom-specific tags are all mixed together, like I'll be going through looking for my 'Sam Wilson can talk to birds' and I'll be scrolling through every 'Blizzard is an android' and 'Pete Wentz is a catperson' from every single other fandom, you know? Do you have any idea how that's going to be manageable?

[thedevilchicken]

They'll all be mixed in together. There isn't a perfect way of doing this - this way is just (arguably) better than having to nominate "Coffeeshop AU" six times and should hopefully make the exchange more open.

I'm toying with the idea of having fandom-specific AUs nominated in the format "(Fandom Name) Specific AU Scenario" for the purposes of better alphabetisation, and non-fandom-specific AUs as "AU Scenario".

e.g. "(Fall Out Boy) Pete Wentz is a catperson" vs "Coffeeshop AU".

[meatball42.livejournal.com]

I really like that idea, just because- checking my tags from last year- many of them were fandom specific and I think a lot would fall through the cracks if there wasn't some additional navigation tool.