Duplicates in signups

[chocolateboxmod]

It's been brought to my attention that the form allows you to request multiples of a fandom. Please do not do this, as matching will be difficult in this exchange as it is given the number of variables involved and it is against the rules of the exchange.

If you have duplicated or triplicated a fandom in your signup, please ensure that all fandoms are unique for your requests, and all fandoms are unique for your offers. If you have not done this by the time signups close, you will be contacted and given 12 hours to make the necessary changes. If you fail to do so in that time, your signup will be deleted.

I apologize for the inconvenience!

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

If I request 3+ unique fandoms, why would it be a problem if I made two separate requests for some of them? E.g.,

1. Fandom1 (art): pairing1, pairing2, pairing3
2. Fandom2 (art): pairing1, pairing2
3. Fandom3 (art): pairing1, pairing2, pairing3

That signup meets the minimum requirements. Why would it make it harder (rather than easier) to match if I additionally made a fourth request:

4. Fandom3 (fic): pairing4, pairing5, pairing6, pairing7

I nominated with the assumption that I'd be able to request fic for some relationships in one fandom and art for other relationships in the same fandom, which I've been able to do in other AO3 exchanges. I've never run an exchange on AO3, so it's not immediately obvious to me how it makes matching harder.

[chocolateboxmod]

It's a problem because I would have to check every signup to make sure that it satisfies the minimum requirements, contact every participant whose signup does not match the requirements, wait for them to respond, edit/delete their signups as necessary, and then rerun matching. This is a lot of work,and while it is achievable in smaller exchanges, Chocolate Box is one of the larger exchanges (last year we had 400 people, for example). Forcing signups to be unique is one of the things I have to do in order to make this exchange able to be run at all.

[(Anonymous)]

Ah, OK. I thought it was a matching problem, and couldn't figure out what that would be.

It would be nice if AO3 could check that signups meet minimum requirements, but from the rest of their exchange interface I guess I'm not too surprised that they don't. :(