merlin_holidays | The Comprehensive Guide to Sign Ups

Well, hello there!

Come on in and let your mods show you the ways of the shiny new sign up process. Get yourself a cup of tea (or cocoa. Or a pumpkin spice latte) and settle down for the comprehensive sign up guide. It's a good idea to familiarise yourself with the process before the frenzy of sign ups begin. :D

The sign ups are more or less the same as before, except you enter them into AO3. But please read the info on additional tags with special attention as this is an important step for AO3 to be able to make good matches. AO3 uses your sign ups to automate a list of potential matches for each person, rating them by how many things they have in common, and also giving us the chance to change things around if necessary :D

Find the Merlin Holidays collection here: (Link will be added later as the collection is not quite ready for the eyes of the public!)

Clicking sign up will take you to the sign up form. Once you're there, you will find a summarised version of the instructions from this guide. Scroll past them and find "Request 1".

How to Fill in the Request For Your Gift
Under Request 1 you will fill in the things you want to see in your gift.
Fandom: Merlin (TV) and/or Merlin RPF

Characters: This will not affect matching, as matching will happen by pairing, but this can give your gifter a good idea of what kind of characters you'd like to see in your fic! Gifters are not required to include all characters.

Relationships (min 1, max 5): These are the main relationship(s) you'd like to get a gift for. That means your gifter can choose any of them as a main pairing. Please do not tag side-pairings (save them for later). (note: Use the Merlin/Arthur Pendragon (Merlin) tag or AO3 gets confused!)

Additional tags (min 5, max 20): This is one of the important things that AO3 will use to match you guys. That means that we have a couple of things we want you guys to tag:

- "Fanfiction" OR "art" OR both tags (tag both if you do not mind whether you receive art or fic)
- "Canon Era" AND/OR "Alternate Universe - Historical" AND/OR "Alternate Universe - Modern Setting" (choose all of the ones you'd want to receive. At least one must be chosen)

BUT WAIT UP! You can add up to 20 tags here! We highly recommend adding more tags here to describe what you want, so that AO3 can match you up with your best match. If you only tag 3 or 5 things here, we can't really take responsibility for what AO3 chooses to do with you ;)

Edit, 2015: We have upped the minimum to 5 instead of 3 here, so you must also add three additional tags to the two choices you have above.

Here is a quite comprehensive list of possible AO3 tags. Please take a look! The more people use the same wording of tags, the easier it is for AO3 to match. However, you may also go outside the list if you want to :) Edit 2015: We have added a few tags here based on what you guys used last year!

Take a look at my example:

Now pick the rating(s) and category(ies) you'd want to receive! Note that you can click the "any" button at the bottom.

Now leave 3-5 prompts for your gifter, plus lists of likes and dislikes that didn't fit into the tags above. The "additional tags" is what AO3 uses to match you, so it needs some overlap with other sign ups. But in this box, you can add whatever you want your gifter to know! This is also the place to add side-pairings you might enjoy, or further comments on the tags you left. (Example: I said hurt/comfort and prefer that Merlin is the comforter.)

How to Fill in the Gift You're Offering
Scrolling down, you'll get to Offer 1. This is where you fill in what you'd be willing to offer someone else! Basically, the process here is more or less the same!

Fill in fandom you're willing to create, characters, ships (if you're not willing to make them as main ships, don't tag), and additional tags.

Again, you must tag the following:
- "Fanfiction" OR "art" OR both tags (tag both if you do not mind whether your assignment is to write or to art)
- "Canon Era" AND/OR "Alternate Universe - Historical" AND/OR "Alternate Universe - Modern Setting" (choose all of the ones you'd want to create in. At least one must be chosen)

Note: the additional tags is used by AO3 to find out which giftee your gift would fit with the best, so tag a fair few scenarios/kinks you'd like to create. If you tag as much as 20, that's great!

Helpful Examples of Additional Tags

Which rating(s) and category(ies) would you feel comfortable with creating? Anything you tag might be used by AO3 to match you up, so choose carefully.

Do the thing it tells you!

You're done! \o/

As you may see, it's all really quite similar to the previous sign up process. The most important difference is how crucial additional tags are, so please make sure you understand that section.

Please ask if you need help!

Your mods,