Creator Reveals + Feedback Post

[battleshipmod]

Creators of our over 1000 works are revealed! RIP to AO3's mailserver and your inboxes.

Thank you so much, everyone who made this one of the best Battleship rounds ever! The mods had fun and we hope all the participants did too. Take a goggle at this year's stats—truly incredible.

To keep the good times going, Soulstoned is making bingo cards with under-used tags from this year. Complete a bingo (by posting treats for Battleship 2023 requests to the Battleship 2023 collection) before Battleship 2024 nominations begin and win a tag claim! Email battleshipexchange@gmail.com or DM Soulstoned on Discord for info on how to request a bingo card.

If you were on Team Tower, you can claim a tag for next year. If you were not on a team and you posted two or more works to the main collection, you can claim a tag for next year. If you completed two or more treats during the anon period, you can claim a tag for next year. If you get a bingo, you can claim a tag for next year. These claims stack! Please claim your tags here.

We would love your feedback on any and every aspect of Battleship 2023, and your ideas for 2024. Please comment here with your thoughts, even if you already made suggestions in Discord—having everything in one place will make it much easier for us to look through it all and make decisions about what to inflict on Team Crystal and Team Volcano next year. If you want to give feedback privately, email battleshipexchange@gmail.com.

As a final treat, here are all the treasures given to both teams and the treasure hunters. See you next year!

Comments

[soulstoned]

When I discovered that someone was a minor, I deleted their requests, removed them from the discord, and contacted the person who had already written for them directly. There was already a rule in place that players have to be 18+ (the participant re-reading the rules saw it and reached out to me) but I do plan to make it more obvious going forward. All mods were aware of who it was and we were keeping an eye open for any additional gifts that came in for them. If we do surveys before assigning teams next year, a question asking participants if they are over 18 will be part of it.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes please! That would be really reassuring. I appreciate hearing how swiftly and what steps were taken to remove the person were.

I just wish it was a little.. more communicated to the server?

Like yeah, the mods knew who it was, but it was genuinely a throwaway comment in the strategy-chat that gets a ton of traffic for Tower, and we are all from different time zones so some of us may not have even seen it if we weren't backreading.

Atleast if it was in one of the pinned announcements with everyone pinged, it would be far easier to ensure that more people read it is all I'm trying to say on that.

[soulstoned]

There is no rule breaking behavior that I intend to name and shame a participant over. Works were unrevealed so we were able to make sure they were not gifted anything explicit and that the author of the T-rated work they had already been given was aware so they would have a chance to remove them as a recipient if they wanted to. (If it had been an M or E rated work, it wouldn't have been a choice, we would have kept the work unrevealed until the recipient was removed)

We also checked to see if they had already posted anything, and they hadn't.

I don't believe making a bigger deal out of it would have helped anything.

[(Anonymous)]

If you didn't want to name and shame a participant, I totally get that.

With them being a minor and wanting to keep things private, I don't think you had to out their name publicly (even if that is what I suggested earlier, I totally get wanting to respect their privacy and not wanting to target them in particular).

But I do think it would have been appreciated to have an announcement saying,

"Hey! We had a participant reach out and say that they re-read the rules and identified themselves as a minor. Just another quick note that this is an 18+ exchange, so please reach out to the mods if you don't meet this criteria.

For the sake of the minor's privacy, we won't release their username but their prompts have been deleted and have been removed from the discord.

If by chance a collection reviewer notices that you sent a gift to them or any subsequent submission from this point forward, you will be contacted in DM if you feel comfortable with sending the gift still, but you won't be penalized in game for whatever tags were claimed for it."

Then it brings awareness (without naming and shaming) while also drawing attention that the issue was resolved.

It doesn't need to be made into a huge deal, but a lot of us craft our fandom spaces for 18+/not wanting to interact with minors, especially for NSFW-heavy fandoms, so not knowing that it it was breached, even inadvertently, warrants some sort of heads-up, IMO.