DOINK! Final Fantasy Exchange

Time's up! Regular DOINK! 2014 sign-ups are closed. However, you can still sign up to be a beta volunteer until Sunday, April 13, 2014 at 23:00 UTC.

Starting now, we'll be chasing up any issues, working on clarifications, and matching as fast as we can. Everyone is guaranteed their matches at the latest by Wednesday, April 16, 2014 at 23:00 UTC, although we're hopeful that we'll get them to you sooner! To make things easier on us, it would be great if everyone added ff.exchange@gmail.com to their address books. This helps your assignment not go to spam.

Everyone sharpen those knives and charge those lanterns; here we go!

Our site is back up and running! If you have any difficulties getting in, just refresh the page and start again. We apologize once again for any inconvenience the site downtime may have caused.

Three more days to sign up!

A Multimedia Gift Exchange for All Final Fantasy Fandoms

Rules | FAQ | Signup!

It's half over! This year's schedule and signup info are right over here, and this year's exchange signups will be closed Friday, April 4, 2014 at 23:00 UTC.

Click that to see the time in your area, so that you don't miss it. If you're still wondering whether or not to sign up, just take a look at some awesome fanwork from previous years in the DOINK! 2013 collection, the DOINK! 2012 collection, the Chocobo Down 2011 collection, and the Moogle Fluff 2012 collection, as well as our DeviantArt group. Final Fantasy fans are awesome!

If you're stuck staring at that prompt box and want some ideas or a little help, we have a handy guide to Writing Good Prompts we invite you to use!

Whether or not you've signed up to participate in the exchange, here are some other things you can still do to spread DOINK! love:

• Keep playing in the 2014 Kiss Battle! It's closed to points for Chocobo Races, but anyone can still leave prompts or fill prompts, or maybe use it as brainstorming for your own prompts. :D


• Sign up as a beta volunteer until Sunday, April 13, 2014 at 23:00 UTC.


• Join the pinch list e-mail list. The pinch hit list is always open. Add or remove yourself as needed.


• Help us advertise, especially to smaller fandoms and rare-fandom friends! We have bright shiny banners for you to use, and all of the rules and information can be found on our homepage.


• Join us in the DOINK! Chat Room. It's open to all participants, so feel free to drop in!

If you have any questions or need to get an AO3 account, please email the mods and we can help make it all happen. Otherwise, we hope to see your amazing prompts in our inbox soon! Happy sign-ups, everyone!

Sign-ups are Open!



As always, you can sign up as a participant, a beta, or both!

Regular sign-ups will be open until Friday, April 4, 2014, 23:00 UTC.

Beta Sign-ups will be open until Sunday, April 13, 2014, 23:00 UTC.

Here's the full DOINK! 2014 schedule — check that you have the time for creation and uploading before signing up!

Signups and Schedule

( DOINK! 2014 Schedule )

Important Sign-up Notes

• All forms ask for a passcode as part of your sign-up information. This can be any short code or phrase and acts like a password, allowing you to go back and make edits — and letting us make sure it really is you! Please be sure to use something easy to remember and keep in mind moderators can see your passcodes.



• Please do not use your back button to navigate the forms or make edits. Each form has a confirmation screen at the end with an option to return to a previous point to make changes; please use this instead of the back/forward browser buttons. Take advantage of the confirmation page — it's the best place to catch problems.



• You will be sent a confirmation email for all sign-ups — remember that this email provides you with directions for fixing mistakes or making changes!

Guidelines for Signing Up as a Regular Participant

For anyone who has not participated before, or anyone who needs a refresher, there are directions and help text throughout the form, and you're always welcome to ask questions!

Our most consistent feedback in exit polls is scrawny prompts, so don't be afraid to give your gifter some guidance, scenarios, and themes. Just don't box them in with too many specifics. :) Check out our guide, Writing Good Prompts.

Guidelines for Signing Up as a Beta Volunteer

( How betas work - a crash course! )

Advertising

We're definitely looking to get the word out about the exchange and we would love if you could help us. This year we've tried to make it a little easier for you to tell your friends so you can convince them to create with us, because you know whatever they make will be awesome. We've whipped up some banners for you to use if you would like a quick and easy way to help us get the word out. More awesome people = more awesome fanwork = more awesome time!

These banners are themed around our triumphant 2013 Chocobo Races winners, Team Shiva!

( DOINK! banners )



Now Let's Go!

Regular Participant Signup

Beta Volunteer Signup



Feel free to join us in the DOINK! chat room!

Go forth! Create some awesome prompts for us to drool over in our moderator box seats.

Hello, everyone!

Regular signups and beta volunteer sign-ups for DOINK! 2014 will open Wednesday, March 26, 2014 at 23:00 UTC. Click that link to learn what time that is where you live and come prepared!

The Shiny Sign-up Form: Prompts and Content Preferences

In 2011, we made some changes to our signup forms to make them friendlier to folks of all preferences. Those forms are the same this year, so if you're interested in a run down on the way the forms work or would like some guidance, please check out our post about content preferences.

Just like last year, the success of this set up depends on two items:

1. Be respectful. We're all fans alike here; discuss your own preferences in a way that doesn't comment on or pass judgment on those of others.


2. DOINK! is a gift exchange. If you're very particular in what you like, or very limited in the kinds of things you're comfortable offering, please think carefully before entering. We'll do our absolute best to match people, but if a gift slightly outside your expectations would ruin the exchange, or if receiving prompts that don't match your comfort zone exactly would be very discouraging for you, then a gift exchange might not be the best place to play — you might have a better time with one of our prompt-meme activities, or as a pinch hitter where you can pick and choose what prompts to pick up. Nothing wrong with being particular! It's just not suited to every sort of activity =) There will be tons of ways to participate in the coming months!

Say hello to your new DOINK! moderators!

Although DOINK! is a small fandom exchange it's still a lot of hands on work: answering questions, helping out our participants, providing updates and reminders, and doing the behind the scenes busywork that keeps the exchanges and the Chocobo Races chugging along. Last year, we asked vrazdova/fashion-jerk and owlmoose/lifeofkj to help us organize ourselves on tumblr, a popular fannish destination, and they stepped up gladly. We're happy to finally add them to the moderating team proper. If you see them around, feel free to say hello!

2014: Fandom Variety Requirement Redux

Last year, the biggest change we made we a fandom variety requirement. We asked participants how it worked for them last year in our exit poll, and discussed internally, and decided that we're going to keep it for 2014 based on the majority of positive feedback. We'll likely poll on it again this year to have another year of data on which to decide whether to make it a permanent change. You can read about this in the explanatory post we created last year.

Our one additional note this year is to ask folks to be careful in this regard if you decide to use Dissidia as your one different canon. The idea is to offer sufficient variety to both make matching easier and keep gifting more fun! So for example, if you sign up with three prompts from a single universe and then a Dissidia prompt again focusing on characters from the same universe, that bypasses the spirit of the variety requirement.The signup form won't stop you signing up if Dissidia is one of your two universes (it does prevent you from continuing if you have less than two universes). So fans with one universe (or a favorite universe) plus Dissidia are totally welcome to keep playing! We will evaluate signups that fall into this situation case by case and will contact you if we need to. Simply remember to be kind to your potential gifter, and you should be just fine!

Policy Changes: Two-step reveal!

Over the years, we've debated doing a two-step reveal of fanworks that reveal the work first, but leave the creator anonymous for a short period of time. We've looked into some other exchanges and how they handle it for research and paired that with our 2013 Exit Poll data which was mostly neutral trending toward positive. We've decided to give it a try for the 2014 round and see what develops.

Our goal is to reveal all fanwork collections, and then 48 hours later, reveal creators. We chose 48 hours because we're a fairly small exchange. We're definitely aware that due to our size, a longer period of time between work and author reveals would be detrimental to the fans who want to interact in comments. We'll definitely be polling on this change at the end of the round to see how it fared, and will assess the feedback post-round.

This means if you decide to sign up this year, you'll need to be hush-hush two days after the reveals. We appreciate all participants who help us try out new ways of operating and improving the exchange, so thanks in advance!

Chocobo Down

We're accepting Chocobo Down until signups open. There's still time to submit work created for the 2013 Chocobo Races to the Chocobo Down 2013 collection! You won't get points for the Races (congratulations again, Team Shiva!), but you can still submit your work to the collection.

You can also submit work created for any DOINK! activity to our deviantArt group.

Tumblr!

Over the last year, we've been building our presence on tumblr at doink-finalfantasyexchange, managed by lifeofkj and fashion-jerk. Our presence on tumblr required a change to the sign up form.

We continue to be aware that there are certain customs in terms of posting and reblogging. In the hopes of being respectful and inclusive and awesome on Tumblr, we'll again be asking for two things on the sign-up form this year, with regards to work produced in the 2014 round of DOINK!:

1. Your Tumblr username. This is optional! But if you'd like to share your Tumblr with us, we'd like to have that in our records!


2. How you'd like us to treat your work on Tumblr. You'll have three choices on the form.
   • "Please post my exchange work on the DOINK! Tumblr"
     This means we will post your work (if fanart) or a link to your work (if fanfiction) using our account, credited to you, for others to reblog.
   
   
   • "Please reblog my 2014 DOINK! work from my Tumblr"
     This means we will check your Tumblr once the 2014 round has been revealed, and reblog your DOINK! work from your account with our Tumblr. (This means you have to give us your Tumblr username so that we know where to look! Please also see additional note on this option below.)
   
   
   • "Please don't do anything with my work on your Tumblr account"
     This means we won't post or reblog your 2014 DOINK! work at all.

Reblogging Tumblr Content

It is important to us that we uphold the promise to reblog your own tumblr content if this is what you indicate on your sign-up form. Our experience last year proved, however, that due to the fast-paced, content-heavy nature of tumblr, finding the right post with your username alone was somewhat of a challenge! Therefore we are requesting this year that you help us out with one simple extra step: please send us a link to the post! This way we are guaranteed not to miss it, and we can put it in our queue right away. There are a couple ways you can do this:

• Send a link to your post via fanmail. This is available to anyone who has been following our tumblr for at least 48 hours. Click the little envelope icon that appears at the top right corner on our blog. But there is no pressure to follow us! Because you can also...


• Send a link to your post via the submit feature. This is available to all tumblr users. We won’t post your submission as-is, but follow the link you provide so that we can reblog it. It's as simple as that!

Tumblr doesn't allow links to be sent via the "ask" feature, which is why we kindly request you use one of the above options. But as always, if you have any questions or concerns for the tumblr mods, our ask box is always open!

Internets! Full of Tonberrys!

As you can see, DOINK! is all over the place! We have so many accounts, we decided to round them up and share them so everyone can know where to find us:

ff_exchange on Dreamwidth
ff_exchange on Livejournal
ff_exchange on AO3
doink-ffex on deviantArt
doink-finalfantasyexchange on tumblr
doink on Pinboard

And, of course, our website, ffex.org, where you'll find signups (once they open), rules, FAQ, unfilled prompts, and everything else you need to make your awesome DOINK! experience happen! Additionally, once the round is underway, you'll also be able to join us in our campfire chat room.

Additional Notes

If you need an AO3 account, just send us an e-mail and we'll get one out to you ASAP, but the queue is moving pretty fast these days, thanks to the awesome OTW volunteers.

If you're not sure about signing up as a regular participant, you can always sign up to be a pinch-hitter. You can sign up any time — pinch hit sign-ups never close!

Tell your friends! If you would like to help spread the word about the upcoming sign-ups, please do — we'll soon be posting banners you can use to help advertise as well.