Spreadsheet info and correction requests

[chacusha]

This is now the permanent spreadsheet correction post. I will try to note in this post if anything on the spreadsheet side has changed.

To help with finding requests in your fandoms, I've made a spreadsheet (two spreadsheets, actually: one for searching and one with the original data) that lists out all of the fandoms each participant has requested in the past.


Info on how the fandom list extraction process works

As much as possible, I try to use an automated process to extract updated fandom lists for people who have signed up. Some notes on the capabilities of this extraction system:

• The process ignores all EADBirthdayBash requests. This is because this exchange seems to be somewhat chaotic and to introduce unusual not-actually-a-fandom names into the fandom lists. To avoid portentially causing confusion by including these "fandoms" in searches, my script ignores all exchanges with "EADBirthdayBash" in the name.


• I automatically filter out events that have an "Exchange Closes Around" date in the future (past the date that LTB ends). This might potentially cause issues, so let me know if you notice any oddities here.


• User-specific date-filtering: I am able to easily accommodate sign-ups that say something along the lines of "I am not interested in requests older than 2019" or whatever -- if an event either ends with a four-digit year earlier than the specified date or has an "Exchange Closes Around" date before that year, then I will filter it out. It is a possibility this may miss some events that have neither, or possibly filter out an exchange that shouldn't be filtered out, so let me know if you notice any issues with your fandom list. Also note that I am unable to do any date filtering other than this "ignore requests older than [year]" type of filtering (e.g. I can't filter over date ranges, or ignore requests NEWER than [year], etc.).


• User-specific Bulletproof filtering: Bulletproof is proably the exchange that is most frequently mentioned as requests that should be ignored (and relatedly but not quite the same, many people also indicate not being interested in "Creator's Choice of Fandom" type requests), so I have also implemented a way to flag for a user that I should ignore their Bulletproof requests.


• In general, however, it is otherwise difficult for me to ignore specific exchanges -- that functionality currently doesn't scale easily. So if you have mentioned in your sign-up that you're not interested in the requests you made in a certain event or events, and it didn't fall into one of the above categories, and not ignoring those event(s) would change your fandom list, it is likely this detail is NOT currently reflected in the spreadsheet. In this case, if you would like to remove a fandom from your list, please submit a spreadsheet correction request.


• I have also been able to semi-automate removal of individual fandoms. I have to manually add the user/fandom pair that needs to be removed, but once I specify that, that removal should be applied for that user in all future rounds automatically. I have currently tried to add all fandoms that people mentioned in their sign-up as not being interested in, or which they asked me to remove last time, to the "remove list", but I may have overlooked some things (in particular, some fandoms might appear under multiple names, which I might have missed, or some fandoms might be umbrella fandoms such as MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe), where some requests might be for sub-fandoms of that umbrella fandom, which I could have missed), or been too aggressive in removing things. If you have any corrections to make to your fandom list, let me know and it should be pretty low-effort to fix!

Spreadsheet corrections

Please comment here if you notice any issues with your data in the spreadsheet, such as:

• Your username is spelled wrong.
• The links associated with your sign-up go to the wrong place or are broken.
• The list of fandoms associated with your username just looks totally wrong.
• The list of fandoms associated with your username is largely correct but you would like to add or remove some fandoms from the list.

If adding/removing fandoms, please give me a list with one fandom on each line.

Please note that extracting all the fandoms someone has ever requested is easy/trivial for me to do, but manually cleaning up fandom names to remove nearby variations is difficult and time-consuming, so I have not done this and it may not be practical for me to do much fandom name clean-up. When searching, I recommend using the text entry search to hit as many variations on a fandom name as possible and get around the issue of fandom name variations. However, if you think there is a severe issue with the fandom names that affects searching, feel free to bring it up here.

Comments

[facethestrange]

Oooh, I wasn't going to sign up for this event anymore because everything about my fannish interests changed so much, but now that I learned that you can filter out old requests, I'd love to filter out everything before 2025 and the fandom One Piece (Live Action TV 2023). (I know that makes my requests not particularly ~old~, but at least I can continue to sign up. :D) Thanks! ♡♡♡