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)

[karahashi]

wow i agree with literally everything in this post and you articulated it so well, thank you <3
(the only thing about Google forms for a master is that the ships tended to get very complicated when people would give options + with the platonic/romantic option....)

(frozen comment)

[kazuyas]

ahhhh, i'm glad, considering it is after midnight and i've been awake for close to 14 hours on five hours sleep lol

re: your comments—you could still notate the & / when putting the ship in, and dictate that characters be ordered alphabetically so they're all grouped together properly. and since this would just be for fills and not prompts you just put in the pairing that you ended up writing, rather than all the options the prompter listed. does that make sense?

(honest to god i'm debating whipping up a sample right now just to see/show what it would look like)

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[karahashi]

A thousand times yes to alphabetical order and what you said makes sense (I'd been thinking from a prompting perspective because ideally I still sort of want prompts/fills in the same sheet...and I think I kind of almost have a proposal for categorization there ready but it's still a bit complex?). One more potential source of error is that character names can be romanised differently - I'm particularly talking about the 'o' vs 'ou' thing. But I suppose this could be where proofreading comes in, and that takes far less time.

A checkbox option for romantic, platonic and poly might also be an option and would allow for better filtering! ...I'm totally itching to try and make a prototype too, haha.

(also ahh get some sleep!)

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[kazuyas]

i wonder if there's a way to have google put the results of two separate forms in the same document, just on diff sheets... hmmm. and yeah romanization would be rough but i think for the MOST part we all romanize names the same way? i could be wrong but that's just my impression of seeing prompts and and fills.

but yeah there's a good amt of potential that i think would be easy for both mods and regular users to keep up.

(frozen comment)

[karahashi]

Had a brief look and Forms does support scripting! Sheets supports scripting and macros afaik. I don't really know how to use Forms+scripts so I have this but not much idea how best to work with it tbh: [link]

I uh, went ahead and played around a bit just with a spreadsheet to get a feel for a masterlist-y tactic - sheets is of course slower than Excel at calculating things which could be a problem as the doc gets heavier but the two of them import/export fine. I know that all the objectives are theoretically possible? It would be nice to combine the two concepts since Forms needs less upkeep and the masterlist thingy hopefully avoids missing any data, but...[link]

I think the romanisation issues are more pronounced with certain fandoms -- as a tennis participant there are a LOT of characters for whom the o vs ou and even shu vs syu vs syuu vs shuu etc names aren't consistently romanised at all. But then again, since that's usually with smaller fandoms, it'd probably be easy to do a quick touch up here and there.

Also I apologise for just dumping this on you! More putting it down for reference - feel free to ignore. There's definitely a lot of potential - it's just a matter of having the time to hash it out properly.

(frozen comment)

[kazuyas]

omg no apologies this is so cool and exactly what i was thinking!! (i love stuff like this, makes me happy)

(frozen comment)

[platina]

One way to lessen the load on the spreadsheet would just be to have a different one for each BR.

(frozen comment)

[kazuyas]

+ 1, didn't even think of that, and it makes a lot of sense, esp if you wanna use this system for prompts