verbal lollygagging

Wild but true: Festivids starts in just about a month! We're still working out the exact dates around the fall holidays, but nominations will open in early September.

To make Festivids run smoothly, we're looking for a few kinds of assistance this year:

Gift Vid Checkers Once the Festivids collection is open and people begin posting vids, a vid checker screens gift vids, making sure that incoming vids are complete, fit an assignment or treat, and follow Festivids tag requirements.

The biggest part of this volunteer job is just watching incoming vids, checking that a vid for Recipient Y is indeed for one of Recipient Y's requested fandoms, confirming that the vid post contains appropriate content notes, and emailing the vidder if something isn't quite right. We keep track of this on a spreadsheet of assignments and pinch hits due to varying deadlines. This is usually intermittent up until early January, with most vids coming in around the deadline or the week before the collection opens.

To volunteer, you need to be able to screen or at least scroll through vids with varying content and physical triggers.

Pluses: get to see many vids in advance! Minuses: have to see many vids in advance.

If you're interested in being a Vid Checker, you can comment here, message us on discord, or email [email protected].

Nominations Screeners As usual, we're looking for assistance screening nominations. Nominations screeners check the fandom details (runtime, title, disambiguation issues, etc) and rarity of every nominated fandom. Screeners don't have to do all the parts of the check for each fandom; volunteers often pick up just one part of it, such as checking fandom names, whether fandoms are safety fandoms, creating youtube playlists of possible vids to check rarity, or quickly screening the playlists to confirm that the things on the playlists are vid-like. Some nominations screeners who check rarity spend a lot of time searching youtube, but you can participate without working with youtube at all! That said, we will teach you how to search youtube if you want to learn.

Right now, we're working our way through 265 (!) fandoms that were disqualified last year, which means opening a past playlist, removing things over ten years old, then searching again to see if the fandom is still non-rare. We'll start doing new fandom screening when nominations open in September.

To help out, join the Festivids discord server and visit #nominations-screening-welcome to get access to the offseason channel or the main nominations screening channels.

Icon/Banner Makers Apparently many challenges on the AO3 now have banners on the collections? Festivids doesn't have one, and maybe we should! Also, the collection icon on the AO3 says "Festivid Mod," which is somewhat confusing.

If you love making banners or icons, we'd appreciate help getting the collection up to date!

If you're interested in creating some images for Festivids, you can comment here, message us on discord, or email [email protected].

And if you want to make icons for participants, you can just post them to the Festivids community/discord/wherever you'd like.

Secondary Challenge Runners Some exchanges have sub-challenges: challenges that run simultaneously with the main exchange, but are intended to encourage certain kinds of fanworks. For example, Yuletide participants run mini challenges intended to encourage darkfic, short treats, fic about women, fic about trans characters, and so on—the list of mini challenges is very long! If you want to do something like this, you don't have to coordinate with us (though we're happy to chat if you want information), but we wanted to make it clear that it's allowed!

We've also heard some feedback that there aren't as many comments on the AO3 these days, and some challenges run commenting sprints or do commenting bingo to encourage more feedback. We don't have the energy to do this ourselves, but we'd be excited to see someone take it on!