Fall 2024 Print Exchange (via Reddit)

The deadline for sending prints has now passed. On Reddit I've seen a good number of people posting about sending theirs in the mail (and the traditional huge upswing in those posts in the last ~2 days of the window haha). Hopefully we had a good level of participation this time around and fewer freeloaders.

In a little over a week, I will be posting a Reddit thread for those who are still missing prints from at least 1 sender. I'll come back here and post the same thing in this thread. We have volunteers who signed up to help fill gaps like that, and the system has worked really well for a couple of exchanges now. Keep an eye out here if you don't have all your prints yet.

On Reddit, I have now posted the thread for people to report on missing prints. We have a lot of volunteers who will help fill these gaps. I'll copy/paste below, if you're not a Reddit user, feel free to reply here instead of on Reddit, and I'll make sure we get you taken care of as well.

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Okay, at this point, surely everyone has sent and received 100% of the prints they planned on, right?

...yeah. I know. It's okay. We were prepared for this.

Please comment below if you meet all of the following criteria:

1. You sent all your prints
2. You have not yet received prints from at least one sender
3. You have not received any communication from said sender(s) to the effect of "sorry I'm late, it's coming."

Here's what needs to be included in your comment if you want to be added to the volunteer recipient list:

• Your RPE ID (just makes it 1000x easier for me to prep the script for generating volunteer assignments)
• How many senders have ghosted you

Also, if you're one of our dear deadline-challenged friends and still haven't gotten your prints in the mail, please do reach out to your recipients to let them know you haven't forgotten them.

One last thing - this thread is going to stay up for a bit, so if you hear from one of your senders, or something shows up in the mail, please do remember to come back and let me know, so we don't strain our volunteer resources unnecessarily.

I'll be shipping my to assingments next week to France and Germany (RPE0203 & RPE0345). My apologies for my lateness.

I received an envelope with 4 prints from u/why_go_out (RPE0295) this weekend. Thank you very much!
I'm still camping in my mailbox for the mail from u/mquinlan56 (RPE0141), but I brought my sleeping bag so no worries there.

Bert from Holland

Volunteer assignments were sent out a few days ago, and I have already mailed out my "extra" prints. For all intents and purposes this print exchange has concluded, though I'm sure there will still be prints trickling in over the next several weeks and months. Particularly in Canada.

I'm already hard at work writing the next version of my Python script for managing these exchanges, which will hopefully be done and QA'd in time for the Spring 2025 exchange. I think it's time to finally take a real crack at offering some options for people who can't or don't want to send to international recipients.

Thanks all for your participation, this has been one for the books! Keep an eye out around March, I'll post here again when sign-ups open.

When these exchanges wrap up, I like to post a "postmortem" thread to get community input on how to make the next exchange even better. I'll copy/paste that below in case participants here want to weigh in.

Another great exchange is in the books, and I think we're at the long tail of late/volunteer prints finishing trickling into their final destinations. Except Canada. I dunno what to tell you about Canada.

I am open to any and all feedback in the comments about what would make these print exchanges better for you! I can't promise I will implement every idea, but some of the better ideas we've integrated over the past several exchanges (like the volunteer program) were dreamed up by participants like you.

Specifically this time, as I work on upgrading the Python script I use for running these exchanges efficiently, and specifically the algorithm for generating random assignments, I want to take a real swing at tackling a problem that has come up from a lot of independent people over the years: the ability to opt-out of international assignments.

With such a wide spectrum of preferences regarding international shipping (ranging from "I can't/won't ship internationally even if it means I can't participate in the exchange at all" to "I would prefer to send/receive 100% of my prints internationally if I had the option), it's a real challenge to design a system that honors all of those preferences to the maximum possible extent when generating assignments.

But I want to try anyway.

So far I figure I'll have a few extra questions in the sign-up form. Basically everyone would be able to choose "I prefer to send to my own country," "I prefer to send to my own continent", or "I will send anywhere." And then additionally - "If I can't be matched up with a recipient from my own country/continent, I'd rather sit out this exchange" or "If I can't be matched up with a recipient from my own country/continent, I guess that's fine, at least you tried, hit me with those recipients in Timbuktu".

There's also a question of whether someone who opts out of sending internationally should be eligible to receive internationally. This is easy enough to solve for the USA, but much trickier to solve for our single participant from Bahrain.
So I'm opening the floor. Tell me what you think below, about how to make things better!