#OFMDBigBang2023 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ofmdbigbang · 11 months

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Hello! Excited for this year's BB. I, like many others did not get a chance to participate last year and I'm hoping to this time.

However, I was wondering if the mod team could give a bit of a peek behind the curtain at any lessons learned and changes from last year to this year in event format?

Most of the complaints I heard about the big bang last year were accessibility related issues: That it was established so quickly after the show many missed it, that sign up periods were blink and miss it, advertising was very limited to small circles and only on Tumblr not Twitter or Instagram or many of the larger discord servers that got established later, etc.

Another was that timelines for check-ins for writers were rather inflexible and set to very specific styles of writing goalposts (completed words vs outlines) which were not friendly to ADHD or other types or writing/life-happens-at-irregular-pace authors.

And while posting complete works only to a Big Bang is understandable, a lot of authors felt the rule of posting all chapters at once, rather than dropping chapter by chapter over a release week or weekend, in conjunction with the lack of social media across all platforms to drive attention to the Big Bang and ending up with it competing with multiple other events at the same time resulted in a lot of people's best and longest works being buried, with fewer than average readers finding them.

Finally, much of this seems like it might have been done to make the bang simpler and less work on a mod team, which leads to the questions: Who are our mods? How many do we have coordinating for what was already such a large event on such short notice last year? The RBB was of a similar scale and it has been pretty smooth sailing but I know it has at least half a dozen main-team admins handling the project management, pair up matches, drops, pinch-hitting, the discord server, Tumblr, Twitter account, AO3 collection, and more.

I'm bringing this forward in the spirit of collaborative community and constructive criticism. I love Big Bangs and other large complicated fandom events and their history, and I know how difficult they are to run, especially for a first time in a fandom, and it disappoints me to hear about people having had bad experiences that put them off the idea.

I know some of the issues I mentioned have begun to be addressed already, like the new twitter account and what seem to be longer sign-ups, I just wanted to ask if there were other changes planned for 2023 and if you and the mod team wanted to make any comments.

Thank you!

This response is HUGE (500 word ask = 1.8k of response so enjoy that) so I have put it under the cut to keep it from cluttering up people's dash. We hope you (and our other followers) find it useful!

ASK TEXT IN BOLD, RESPONSE IN PLAINTEXT

Hello! Excited for this year's BB. I, like many others did not get a chance to participate last year and I'm hoping to this time.

However, I was wondering if the mod team could give a bit of a peek behind the curtain at any lessons learned and changes from last year to this year in event format?

First of all, we are thrilled to have you and thank you so much for the work you put into writing us a nearly 500 word ask!

Most of the complaints I heard about the big bang last year were accessibility related issues: That it was established so quickly after the show many missed it, that sign up periods were blink and miss it, advertising was very limited to small circles and only on Tumblr not Twitter or Instagram or many of the larger discord servers that got established later, etc.

So the first thing you gotta know about the BB is that it’s run by a load of Fandom Olds - none of us have ever done fandom on twitter before and, as you said, the fandom was so new it was hard to see where most people were - we were all getting full up on Tumblr with the content, and so had no idea back a year ago what the twitterverse looked like for this (or any) fandom, so it didn’t occur to us to promote on Twitter, or really anywhere else. We have, as you spotted, changed that this year.

We have also put out a longer signup period and are hoping to do more promotion generally of this event so that as many people as possible see it. We were quick to be sure we were on the OFMD Fandom Calendar (organised on Twitter) as well as getting promotions into some of the more established Discord communities. Many of these communities that you describe flat did not exist or were still pretty new and not widely known when we were in the sign ups for the event last year, so we weren’t able to get involved. We advertised in the Brainrot server as that was the biggest community that we knew of at the time (and one of our mods was mod there at the time too), but that and tumblr was all we had access to.

This event is huge compared to many events that this mod team have been part of - one of the mods is in a Bang in another big and well established fandom that has twenty five works in it - we collectively published over 100 in last year’s event, and we anticipate this year being bigger again as the fandom has grown and our promotional abilities have grown as well!

Another was that timelines for check-ins for writers were rather inflexible and set to very specific styles of writing goalposts (completed words vs outlines) which were not friendly to ADHD or other types or writing/life-happens-at-irregular-pace authors.

We would argue that strict deadlines can work for a lot of ADHD people specifically - sometimes the deadline is the only thing that gets you going. The wordcount minimums were explicitly because this is a project that’s about writing longfic - you can submit at the 50% check-in with 3k of prose but another 2k of plan if you want, but the point of the event is to write something long, and the check ins are to help people to manage their time. If they can’t get 5k done in the first half of the bang and don’t talk to us about it, then we can’t be reassured that they’ll hit the minimum wc for the whole event, and that might mean they let down an artist. (fwiw - Some of the mods think that the word count minimum is too small, as a traditional Bang has a 50k minimum, so we have made it more accessible in that way. (Mod Charlie: Look, technically this is a MiniBang, as it’s under 50k and I will die on this hill.))

The other thing to point out on this subject is that Big Bang events aren’t for everyone! There are so many events in this fandom that can work for all kinds of people with all kinds of writing styles - Bingo events, exchanges, prompt weeks, whumptober, mer-may... the list goes on! There’s no way that anyone can take part in every event, but you’ll find the things that work for you and you’ll create based on that. If writing longfic to a deadline doesn’t float your boat, then you can try something else this year, and wait until you’re filled with the urge to write longfic another day. We plan on running these events every year as long as people ask for them, and we hope that there’ll be at least a few people that keep wanting to come back and take part!

All that said, when we ran each check in we asked for a wordcount and also a self-determination of how finished you felt for your fic. We wanted people to feel like they’d done 50% of the work for claims purposes, but some were at 90% at that point, and others were at 40% but spoke to us and we organised with them that they could still take part as they knew they would have more time/opportunity in the second half of the bang to get things done.

Our experience in other bangs is that people who take part in claims with very little done are much more likely to drop out and disappoint an artist, which is why we are very strict about that deadline specifically. People that drop out and let their partner down without talking to the mods are not permitted to take part in the following year’s event, as it can be devastating for the other party. We do have space in the schedule for extensions if people ask for them, they just have to talk to us. If people do have to completely drop out at any stage there’s no penalty as long as they talk to us and their partner about it before they disappear off the face of the planet. After all, we want to run this as an annual event, so people can always come back next year!

And while posting complete works only to a Big Bang is understandable, a lot of authors felt the rule of posting all chapters at once, rather than dropping chapter by chapter over a release week or weekend, in conjunction with the lack of social media across all platforms to drive attention to the Big Bang and ending up with it competing with multiple other events at the same time resulted in a lot of people's best and longest works being buried, with fewer than average readers finding them.

We can’t control competition with other events, unfortunately. Hopefully with better publicising of this event this year, others will avoid starting their own events that will clash with our posting dates (October 22nd until mid-November, most likely).

Dropping the full fic in a single day is a feature of the bang, not a bug. This whole event is designed after the long-established big-bang format that these mods have regularly taken part in for many years, and is all about a big and sudden drop of fic out of the blue. (Not to assign homework to a tumblr ask, but you can read about the history of the Big Bang format on fanlore here) So the sudden drop of fic and generally discouraging people from explicitly promoting their own works is something that we want to keep (after all, it helps those that aren’t BNFs on Twitter or Tumblr and who are still amazing writers get their work seen just as much).

However, something that we generally encourage and will be promoting more this year is that people who are taking part promote the event as a whole as much as possible, read, kudos and comment on each other’s works, and then once everything is posted they can big up their own work as much as they want. Will it have exactly the same effect as posting over time and posting twitter snippets each chapter and whatever else? No, but this does let more people get their work out to a wider audience on average. And while the creativity of the fandom is still insane, the quantity of fic dropping every day has started to drop off, hopefully giving these fics more space to breathe in AO3 and in people’s searches.

Finally, much of this seems like it might have been done to make the bang simpler and less work on a mod team, which leads to the questions: Who are our mods? How many do we have coordinating for what was already such a large event on such short notice last year? The RBB was of a similar scale and it has been pretty smooth sailing but I know it has at least half a dozen main-team admins handling the project management, pair up matches, drops, pinch-hitting, the discord server, Tumblr, Twitter account, AO3 collection, and more.

We have put together (which we meant to do before now but alas, time kept happening) some mod introductions on our Tumblr Page which you can go and have a peek at to see who we are! The event started last year with four people, and grew to six after a shoutout on the Discord for some extra help. This year we’re currently at four mods again.

One of our mods (Hi, Charlie again, RVB Discord Builder, and BB Discord builder) is also on the mod team for the RVB and was able to both share lessons learned from last year’s BB with that team, as well as bring a lot of the insight that those guys had from their Big Bang and Reverse Bang experiences back to this team, so we do have an intimate knowledge of how that was run and how the work was divided between the amazing mod talent that was doing that bang. However, no two mod teams are alike, and so there will still be some differences in approach.

On that note, if you have an organisational brain, love spreadsheets, can repeat the words “We emailed you this information” in your head over and over again without getting cross, and think that you can help out (not just you, nonny, but the collective you that might be reading this post) please feel free to reach out! This is a big project and we are a small team with real lives (ew) and so there are going to be some things that we miss, so some extra keen beans may well be helpful!

I'm bringing this forward in the spirit of collaborative community and constructive criticism. I love Big Bangs and other large complicated fandom events and their history, and I know how difficult they are to run, especially for a first time in a fandom, and it disappoints me to hear about people having had bad experiences that put them off the idea.

We definitely made some mistakes in the last event that we hope to not make again. It was difficult in many ways because the fandom was so new and young that we were watching a lot of the fandom settling-in process happen side-by-side with the event, and it was difficult to know how to best respond to a lot of what was happening. This year we hope that with a more settled fandom, a mod team with a bit more experience, and with more focus and opportunity to talk to you all in more places and answer questions, organise extensions, and generally be a little friendlier everyone will be able to have a better time.

The biggest change we’re looking at making this year is to make the claims process less stressful for artists - giving a longer period for claims and going away from a first-come-first-served method, which really gets the blood pumping but can make things really difficult for those in inconvenient timezones, or people who have other commitments that mean they can’t be there on the dot at whatever time it opens for them. Claiming can be the most stressful and difficult part of a Big Bang process and we want to try and make that less stressful for everyone.

One of the other changes that we’re exploring right now is a ‘mini bang’ type event that opens to people who either don’t make a deadline or have to drop out for other reasons - a collection for people that can’t keep to the schedule but want to be involved with the project. We’ve not ironed out exactly how this might work, so watch this space and we’ll see if we can make it work for this year. We want to emphasise that the point of the event is to post in the Main Collection - we don’t want signups that know they’re not going to make it to 10k or finished art by the October Deadline and just want to post to the mini-bang collection - but we do also know that sometimes real life just eats you alive (especially with posting being just after the new school term starts) and that IRL absolutely must come first, and we hate to see people not being able to stay involved because of stuff they can’t control.

I know some of the issues I mentioned have begun to be addressed already, like the new twitter account and what seem to be longer sign-ups, I just wanted to ask if there were other changes planned for 2023 and if you and the mod team wanted to make any comments.

Most of the changes that we have are to do with how we’re hoping to respond to issues that arise, and our social media presence, which might not come up at all if everyone has a great time. From a mod perspective, the vast majority of the “big” tasks (sign ups, claims, matching, and posting) went very smoothly, so now that we know we’ve got that handled, we can put more focus onto making the event friendlier for participants. We’re going to be putting more information into the emails that we send out so that you have as much information as possible. We’re also putting a bigger emphasis on people joining our Discord Server so that people can talk to us more easily and we can better support people with amazing resources from previous years participants, the opportunity to hook up with an alpha or beta reader, and generally encourage people to take advantage of the amazing community of people that are here to help them write and draw the thing in their head!

Thank you!

At the end of the day, the purpose of the Big Bang and indeed any fandom event is to help people work with and potentially collaborate in a way that they might not otherwise, and enjoy a new way of exploring their favourite creative pastime. There’s nothing stopping anyone from publishing a longfic that they collaborate with an artist on at any time - we’re helping to provide a structure for those that might otherwise be too shy or too divorced from the fandom community to start these collaborations themselves. I know that I made most of my OFMD fandom friends through my Beta Reader for last year’s event and that there are huge communities of writers and artists that I know have come together through events like this, and that’s something that we are insanely pleased about. Fandom is about community and creativity, and we hope that you find the community that supports your creativity the best out there somewhere.

And if you don’t see the event that you want to take part in - make it! The creators of most events just rock up on their social media of choice one day and shout “HEY IM DOING A THING”, and while not every event has 300 people in it, many years of fandom experience in this mod team will tell you that it’s the things you do that only have 12 people in them that can be the most fun and rewarding, even if you create something that only those 12 people read or appreciate. This event is much bigger than any of us could have predicted, and while that’s amazing we know it can be overwhelming, so if it’s not for you then that’s totally fine!

#ask #long post #OFMDBigBang2023 #ofmd big bang

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