I'm not suggesting Marty is fucking off. We know he works hard, the problem is its just too much damn work and too little time. And he sure as shit isnt getting paid so I cant expect him to put his life on hold for this project.
Every year Jeff and I come up with different ideas of how to do things. The hard part with determining how early the sign up thread should be posted is you don't want it up there too long because people get upset that they've seen the same thread stickied for 2 months, OR they put off signing up thinking "Oh, I have all this time to wait" and end up missing the deadline. But in the same sense, you want to give as much time as possible. We figured that giving almost the entire month of November was fair, and not to the point where Christmas was coming too early.
The main issue is the transition from sign-ups to emailing the match-ups out. To be fair, this year was the earliest we have sent the emails of people's match ups which we were extremely happy about. However, it was an issue as there were a few "latecomers" to the party so we had to figure their match-ups as well. The secret santa is never a perfect running greased up machine. There will always be hiccups and inevitably someone may end up being unhappy about it.
We definitely appreciate feedback on how we can make this SS program more efficient, so feel free to chime in. We will take into consideration next year making the thread earlier. Thanks!