No offense but literally people are gonna just pick mutuals and friends and that's okay, but if you're mutuals and friends are not participating then you're doomed unless someone is really nice and includes you. Also the Pride Challenges are just... Why can we not have simple straightforward challenges anymore without all the fancy blurbs etc. I just spend all my time trying to interpret it.
As of recent years, we've only ever had the same people join the exchanges. At this point, everyone's already 'considered' mutuals. No matter what we do, no one else wants to join or attempt to join. This has been going on for four years. We created this blog after the Maddie ordeal because they purposely shut us out of the blog we used to have called ocgiftexchange where I and another admin were the only ones who did the work while Maddie promoted everything.
We remade this blog in hopes of bringing more happiness and comfort to those who wanted those without judgement or limits. When we started, we had many people who participated but due to anon hate, many have reached out to us to say that they wished to no longer join because of the remarks that been said. Some have even been pushed off from Tumblr which is a horrible thing because as I said, we made this blog to be a small positive corner of the oc community. We may not have a huge following, and sure it's manly mutuals that join but it isn't our fault. We try to accommodate, but no matter how hard we aim to please, we seem to fall short in someone's eyes. And that's a very real life lesson, so we move forward.
I'm personally going to health issues so next month of June is going to be hard for me and the other admins are working their 9-5 jobs that require them to head to bed early at night and still need to make time for their college courses. We just figured since it's been the same people that been joining in for the past years that they could choose any three of the participants that they'd like to edit for. But even that is just a mere suggestion of who'll they'd like to gift for, it's no guarantee. We're still matching the people but they just get a say.
I also cannot speak for Pride Challenges blurbs. I don't write them personally, the only one I ever wrote for was for the Star Wars challenge. I solely run ocpotluck.
Some people prefer the more lengthy summaries to help them get an idea of what to do and how to do it because they need references, and that's not a bad thing. Some people naturally have a hard time understanding things so the blurbs help reduce those slight frustrations. However it can be hard for others to understand the text and try to decipher the meaning, but it's all up to interpretation.
I didn't mean for this ask to go on and on, but I just wanted to clarify a few things in a well respected and mannered way. This has no ill-intention or was supposed to be read in a passive tone or anything. This is just a simple reasoning behind our exchange and mission of ocpotluck.
