Turns out what my fundamental issue was was that I was failing entirely to grok the distinction between signups and nominations (because the only exchanges I've managed to figure out how to join before were smaller and only had one phase) and thought nominations were the same as requests, and thus was trying to apply all the rules and guidelines for the exchange as a whole to the nominations form, and of course failing to figure out how to make that work and getting entirely mixed messages about what I was meant to be doing with the tags.
So: nominations are for *adding to* the tagset, and signups involve *selecting from* it? Okay. Okay, I think I see. I now understand some things.
Re: i understand nothing
Turns out what my fundamental issue was was that I was failing entirely to grok the distinction between signups and nominations (because the only exchanges I've managed to figure out how to join before were smaller and only had one phase) and thought nominations were the same as requests, and thus was trying to apply all the rules and guidelines for the exchange as a whole to the nominations form, and of course failing to figure out how to make that work and getting entirely mixed messages about what I was meant to be doing with the tags.
So: nominations are for *adding to* the tagset, and signups involve *selecting from* it? Okay. Okay, I think I see. I now understand some things.