SASO 2016: Talkback

[referees]

This post is closed; thank you for your feedback. If you would like to provide constructive criticism, please contact the mods directly. All further replies to this entry are screened.

The mods still plan to reply to the topics listed at the bottom of the post.

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This is not the final wrap-up results/etc. post—that's coming in a couple of days. But while the mods tabulate final scores and create prize graphics, now's a good time to look back and reflect on your SASO 2016 experience.

Please leave comments giving us feedback on the event this year! What did you like? What did you dislike or find frustrating? What can we improve for next year, and how can we improve it? What was your favorite part of the event? Least favorite? Would you participate next year or not? Why? If you could mention your team when making your comment, we'd appreciate it.

If you would prefer to submit your comments in private, you can e-mail us at anime.espn@gmail.com or send us a Dreamwidth PM. We would prefer it if you'd put "Talkback" in the subject line.

Here's what the mod team plans to improve for next year:

• Voting program reliability. We'd like to apologize again for all of the server dowtnime, and definitely plan to make it much more stable for next year. The voting system in general, though, will remain the same.


• Bonus round program reliability. We think we got most of the kinks out during this year, but want to keep it stable for next year too.


• Dreamwidth capability for NSFW cross-posting. We didn't have time to implement it this year, but next year it should be ready to go.


• Clarifying the rules, especially on what "popular culture media" is acceptable to include in SASO work.

We also wanted to thank you again for being patient with us this year. We had a lot of technical hiccups, and you were all so kind while our heroic codermods worked out the kinks. We really appreciated your support.

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Mod Replies: (updated 12:55PM EDT 8/28/16)

Please note that inclusion of a topic on this list indicates that we're going to address it, not that we've made any decisions on judging/implementing or not implementing it.

Voting:

The preliminary vote system

Triggers in a participant's assigned vote pool

Juried panel (having the mods decide which entries were the best)

Voting mechanics

Bonus Rounds:

Promptless rounds

One day break between bonus rounds

Bonus round prompt and fill tracking/filtering

Recs round work count

Image size limit

Remix round

Remix/rec round timing

Rec round

Quality control (both prompts and fills)

What is allowed as a fill (tags and ratings)

Unscreening bonus rounds

Fairness to small teams

Comment screening

Main Rounds:

The anonymity policy

Professionalism:

Twitter tone

What information gets posted where

Considering a dreamwidth announcement community

Mod participation in the event

Comments

(frozen comment)

[catlarks]

I do understand why it was implemented that way, no worries. And fwiw when I say "higher" I am mostly referring to the meta data AO3 requires in posting fics. Posting to AO3 involves a whole lot of fields that just take more TIME and THOUGHT than linking a NSFW piece of art or cosplay. (I take for granted that DW posting will likely require a specific format from users, but my fingers are crossed that it'll be very plug-and-play, do these exact things and you're set, versus AO3's subjectivity.)

At the last time I'd heard, tumblr had no RSS feed option, which is 90% of why I'd prefer another option for announcements. It is still very much my opinion that if the mods were to choose between DW and tumblr for announcements, DW is the superior option, but if the mods do the research and teach the userbase how to set up RSS email updates, I will say that this does meet my needs.

(the "competition" part of my post was honestly more in the hopes that the rest of the userbase will read it, imo the mods only can and should do so much to moderate the participants' competitive drives; this is something we gotta handle ourselves.)

I think a word count would also be a fair solution to the recs problem of "two sentences is way too flexible (and difficult to judge with a program)." I suggest hard caps because it's really, really easy to enforce, but if codermods are up to writing something that works with word count... That would go a long way toward ruling out fluffy, substance-less recs.

(tbh it's just not what I would have suggested because what's "most fair" is if only the rec blurbs themselves are counted for words, because there's a huge difference in words between "tags: none" and "tags: [a thirty word list with qualifiers]" and I assume this would be An Enormous Pain to code for. So... Good luck, sweet coder mod.)