Firstly, I am increasingly convinced that allowing repeated fandoms will help improve the quality of matching, which is my main goal in making everything so complicated. (I am very much hoping for people to get the worldbuilding of their heart/enjoy creating the sort of request that in other exchanges they would usually have a low probability of matching to.) I had picked up the idea that it would mess things up to do that, but it seems I must have been wrong about that. So that's pretty much definitely going to happen, which in turn makes a lot of the rest of this easier.
Your second bullet point very much encapsulates what I had in my head as being the point of having a specific "I really don't mind if what you make focuses on things other than characters" tag for a worldbuilding exchange. I was initially envisaging not matching on characters at all (or in practice, using the character field for the worldbuilding tags and only matching on them), but looking through the thread on FFA back in August there were quite a few people who were interested in worldbuilding, but only if they could also sign up for characters as well. It's the desire to accommodate both those people and people who might want to request/create the sort of things you give examples of that led me to this way of doing it. (In my head, it's almost an overlapping set of sub-exchanges that people opt in and out of by tailoring their sign up.)
I think, between OR matching and advising people on how to use their DNWs, most variants on what people might want to do can be covered by "No Characters" having the "go wild" meaning of your sixth bullet point in practice (people who genuinely do *only* want works with absolutely no characters in can sign up using that tag alone and then DNW characters). I would hope that in most cases people who don't like the characters in the tag set would add the ones they do, but I've had the "damn, I missed noms" feeling enough times to know that that doesn't always happen.
Shortly before sign ups, I think it will be worth creating a separate "how No Characters is supposed to work" post, with sections addressing it from the point of view of both requesting and offering (and what to do if you see it in your assignment when you weren't expecting it). Would it be possible to run it by you in advance?
Re: This got long! I hope some of it's useful.
Firstly, I am increasingly convinced that allowing repeated fandoms will help improve the quality of matching, which is my main goal in making everything so complicated. (I am very much hoping for people to get the worldbuilding of their heart/enjoy creating the sort of request that in other exchanges they would usually have a low probability of matching to.) I had picked up the idea that it would mess things up to do that, but it seems I must have been wrong about that. So that's pretty much definitely going to happen, which in turn makes a lot of the rest of this easier.
Your second bullet point very much encapsulates what I had in my head as being the point of having a specific "I really don't mind if what you make focuses on things other than characters" tag for a worldbuilding exchange. I was initially envisaging not matching on characters at all (or in practice, using the character field for the worldbuilding tags and only matching on them), but looking through the thread on FFA back in August there were quite a few people who were interested in worldbuilding, but only if they could also sign up for characters as well. It's the desire to accommodate both those people and people who might want to request/create the sort of things you give examples of that led me to this way of doing it. (In my head, it's almost an overlapping set of sub-exchanges that people opt in and out of by tailoring their sign up.)
I think, between OR matching and advising people on how to use their DNWs, most variants on what people might want to do can be covered by "No Characters" having the "go wild" meaning of your sixth bullet point in practice (people who genuinely do *only* want works with absolutely no characters in can sign up using that tag alone and then DNW characters). I would hope that in most cases people who don't like the characters in the tag set would add the ones they do, but I've had the "damn, I missed noms" feeling enough times to know that that doesn't always happen.
Shortly before sign ups, I think it will be worth creating a separate "how No Characters is supposed to work" post, with sections addressing it from the point of view of both requesting and offering (and what to do if you see it in your assignment when you weren't expecting it). Would it be possible to run it by you in advance?