coaltide | Coal All The Way

Entry tags:

2019

Coal All The Way

yuletide |

yuletide_admin | Writing Post
2019 Collection | 2019 Madness
2019 App | Letter Post (LJ)

Flat / Recent | Top-Level (Last) | Search

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I don't think they're allowed to do that anymore.

There are links and discussions to some fics over there, and some participants mentioned. So even if they're not allowed, it's happened.

What? How?

Uh, what. People do that all the time? WTF are you talking about.

You can't "out" someone by deanoning who wrote a fic during an anon period, even though they might not continue to anon it. That's what all the heeroluva fic was about and the FFA mods will still delete/screen any mention of his name. Even though it was a problem that he was really pushing the limits with writing DNWs and kinks.

I felt the ruling was consistent with their other rules on not posting friendslocked content, not linking wallet names to pseuds, and similar things like that. The fic was put into an anon collection and heeroluva's name was only discovered through an ao3 exploit. I don't care one way or another that they were de-anoned, but I don't consider it the worst modding ever to consider it off-limits to post usernames discovered that way.

+1

IDK why everyone is so hung up on what to call it, when deanoning people (via actual knowledge, not suspicion based on past behavior or whatever) or connecting unconnected identities has NEVER been allowed on ffa.

This isn't FFA, who the fuck cares what their mods are doing.

You're not allowed to out someone. Like when someone used the now patched thing where you could find out an anonymous author's name by adding their fic to a collection you maintain. You're totally allowed to link to a story.

Not allowed by who exactly?

... the mods?

The mods of what? If I wanted to do the deanoning trick (which doesn't work anymore iirc? but n/m) and post the results on Coal, who would give a shit?

SA I got it a second too late, you meant that FFA doesn't allow it. Fair enough, coalie.

Yeah, nobody on coal would give a shit.

I do kind of wonder where the line is on FFA, though. e.g. revealing fawatson as the almost-certain author of the depressing death-o-rama of a last leaf fic yesterday. That didn't use an exploit, so would it be OK on FFA? She's the one who chose to use the same damn disclaimer statement in all her works, and they're publicly available to search.

Yes, that would be fine on FFA.

Sure, that would be fine. All of that is publicly available information. If your formatting choices or whatever make you easy to guess, it's not FFA's job to protect you. (And I say this as someone whose formatting choices make me easy to guess.)

My thing is that FFA mods seem to want outing based on (wild) speculation and not confirmed facts, and with the whole exploit thing is that heeroluva’s reveal didn’t come with screencaps so they could have been lying/speculating? (Multiple people before that checked and I’m sure a lot did after too, but again no one posted caps.)

Heeroluva totally wrote it but there is no reason for the mods to act like “I had to know and I’ll share the info with you” is undeniable proof of anything. I can say “I happen to know for a fact that coadie wrote gaybashing dragon fic. I also know morbane’s name is Donald Trump. I would want someone to tell me so I’m sharing” and it is the same level of baseless information sharing as the heeroluva reveal.

To me, if anything, allowing things where people compile evidence and links to conclusively name someone is what the FFA mods should ban if they’re ~so~ worried about outing people on meme because that’s the sort of stuff that exposes them without a doubt. If the heeroluva exposing anon had originally said “anon upthread saying it had to be a BNF made me curious so I compared all the BNFs I could think of in the Google writing thing and holy shit meme, heeroluva was 99.99989% match. I can’t believe such a good egg would write DNWs and unrequested racist bullshit” (even if what they really did was the exploit) would we still be able to say his name???? It just seems so dumb and arbitrary.

Wild speculation is just wild speculation. Nonnies will take it with a grain of salt if you say, "I know gay bashing dragon fic was written by Morbane! Don't ask me how, I just know!". Maybe a couple of people will believe you, but it's not an actual "outing". And I don't think FFA mods would mind evidence, but there's a difference between compiling readily available information and essentially hacking AO3 (yes, I know, it was a bug they exploited, but it's still iffy af).

But again to that I say, there is no proof of hacking. Before the exploit, I looked at all the anon fics in the collection and they were all written by Morbane, can you believe it? What an asshole!

Like there, the connection between the exploit and the Morbane name has been established. Even if it was true, with only me knowing that I actually did those things it should be speculation, but “hacking” Ao3 to look at all of the watson’s posting and noticing a pattern really does conclusively out them during this writing period. If they smarten up and throw it in an anon collection before reveals and delete the note, are we suddenly not allowed to say that it was them because xyzanon went in and used now-unavailable information? Because that is effectively true of heeroluva as well.

The real reason we know it was heeroluva is actually because he completely ghosted after the reveal happened. If he had stayed around like usual, either pretending he didn’t know about the wank or saying “I don’t know who hates me this much but that was not my fic? I only kink on biological races not ethnicities wtf” he could have caused some reasonable doubt in the FFA nonnies that will do anything not to have to confront racism, and he could have carried on with his namespace life.

The person who exploited the bug DID post a screen cap, though. Which could have been doctored, of course, but they shared what likely amounts to proof.

“hacking” Ao3 to look at all of the watson’s posting and noticing a pattern really does conclusively out them during this writing period. If they smarten up and throw it in an anon collection before reveals and delete the note, are we suddenly not allowed to say that it was them because xyzanon went in and used now-unavailable information? Because that is effectively true of heeroluva as well.

If you can't see the difference between sharing public information, regardless of whether or not it's deleted afterwards, and doing what the person who outed heeroluva as the author of the fic did, I can't help you.

Wasn’t it a tiny screencap, which of course is very easy to fake on a plain text site like Ao3 anyway? It just seems to add needless work to their modding life by this being something they have to actively mod against. If someone was trying to doxx heeroluva’s real name/location then yes, please put in the work. But defending a pretty much baseless claim for a fandom pseud that seeks to have been retired is crazy.

No, I don’t see how the means has that big of an impact on the ends when the ends are the same when the motives of those means (to expose someone for a perceived bad behavior on behalf of the researcher and against the will of the bad faith actor who undoubtedly doesn’t want to be exposed) are the same too. If isn’t a case of A accidentally putting a peanut in soup and B doing it on purpose, with C who ate both bowls dying because they’re allergic. The heeroluva anon sought out information and shared it to damage his rep. This Watson anon sought out information and is sharing it to ruin her rep. They used different tactics but the intent and outcome is literally the same.

Re: Unfinished fic

(Anonymous) - 2019-12-27 15:11 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Unfinished fic

(Anonymous) - 2019-12-27 15:17 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Unfinished fic

(Anonymous) - 2019-12-27 15:11 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Unfinished fic

(Anonymous) - 2019-12-27 15:17 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Unfinished fic

(Anonymous) - 2019-12-27 20:45 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Unfinished fic

(Anonymous) - 2019-12-27 20:48 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Unfinished fic

(Anonymous) - 2019-12-27 20:50 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Unfinished fic

(Anonymous) - 2019-12-27 21:44 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Unfinished fic

(Anonymous) - 2019-12-28 00:35 (UTC) - Expand

You can't dox a pseudonym. Why does nobody get this.

Re: Unfinished fic

(Anonymous) - 2019-12-27 23:19 (UTC) - Expand

The real reason we know it was heeroluva is actually because he completely ghosted after the reveal happened. If he had stayed around like usual, either pretending he didn’t know about the wank or saying “I don’t know who hates me this much but that was not my fic? I only kink on biological races not ethnicities wtf” he could have caused some reasonable doubt in the FFA nonnies that will do anything not to have to confront racism, and he could have carried on with his namespace life.

Yup. The ONLY reason heeroluva put that in the anon collection was they were warned they were being wanked about and wanted to avoid the consequences. The FFA mods are just enabling them in that.

I doubt anyone had to warn heeroluva. He's been on FFA a long time.

"Name and shame fics" =/= outing anon authors. No one is forbidding you to say "this fic here is still being edited".

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only