coaltide | This is Yuletide, everybody make a scene

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2020

This is Yuletide, everybody make a scene

I am the sock with the tear-away face

Low-effort with your gift and gone without a trace

I am the "who" when you call, "Who does an exchange without acknowledging their gift?"
I am the wanker blowing through your fics comments
I am the coalie dragging your letter at night
Filling your exchange to the brim with fright!

This is Coaltide!

Nominations: Tuesday 22 September to Thursday 1 October

Sign-ups: Friday 16 October to Monday 26 October

Assignments out: between 26 & 28 October

Default deadline: Friday 11 December

Assignment Deadline: Friday 18 December

Yuletide Discord for Hippos. Google Group for PHs. F_F wiki for history.

NYR Info | 2020 NYR Collection |

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....I can't lie, the "DC" "DC." "DC." "DC" shit is cracking me up

NC

I stopped caring about what I got after a long string of subpar gifts. I might feel differently if someone had ever tried to write me the fic of my heart instead of illegible scrawls and issuefics.

Only Greir could end up with the orgy pirates by accident!

"CYRT"

nope

This is delightfully batshit. Keep going!

It's true that if you lack "IT skills" like being able to wrangle a tag, you should not in fact be a tag wrangler. Well spotted.

I had one of those too. Fortunately it was a treat and I checked one last time before reveals.

Be fucking clear about your DNWs, people. Playing coy is not helpful.

NCYRT

You don't. need. "skills". to. mod. exchanges. You need to read (at most) one friggin' document that EAD has crowdsourced about how Ao3 exchanges work, and maybe ask questions if you don't understand something. That's it. That's all.

Are you kidding? Coalie detectives would be ON that shit. Remember when people said they thought B_O wasn't that bad, and then a nonnie found the one where B_O had one of the requested characters get run over by a truck?

DA.

In modding terms, "IT Skills" is an umbrella term which includes things as basic as actually knowing how to use the basic platforms/software involved and being able to type, use email, and so on, to more advanced skills like being able to read, understand and even repair (if not adding to) the coding (or programming) which drives the whole show, no matter if whatever it is that you are modding is hosted on AO3 or elsewhere. Even if you take your coding problem inquiry to an external Help Desk, unless it's a service-wide fault, the first thing they'll ask you is: "do you know what the problem with the coding might be?" If you have even a vague idea because you know part of it doesn't look right, it can lead to a fix in a few minutes, rather than a few days.

"IT Skills" also includes the vital ability to be able to fix any mistakes in tags and so on. A glaring example of an exchange mod being both an egotistical berk and someone with enough IT skills to cause a massive problem, but not enough IT skills to fix that problem, was when Jenn amended everyone's nominations in Marvel comics fandoms she had no understanding of, and then publicly whined that separating all the nominated fandoms and characters back into their proper format was "too hard", even though the original nominators had provided her with their original nominations.

Modding an exchange like Yuletide also includes running the associated, additional channels, including the mailing lists, Google/Yahoo Groups, DW/LJ/Tumblr, the new Discord server, the old chat, etc. So yes, you can have some modding team members who have the IT skills of someone who died in 1631 as long as you have others who can step in and fix any mistakes that happen. (Ideally, your mods lacking IT skills make up for it in other areas, such as publicity, handling participant queries with grace, patience and timeliness, etc.) Because those mistakes will inevitably happen, whether it's that your tagset has problems, there's a coding issue causing lags, or your whole database is hacked because of security oversight.

With an exchange the size of Yuletide, you need members of your modding team with fairly advanced IT skills, because problems will inevitably happen even if your actual modding team hasn't done anything to cause them.

UGH

Someone messed up my character noms and now I can't request any >:(

DC. Yes, and a lot of those "support-related skills" include IT skills. Being able to fix errors in someone's sign-up or the YT tagset don't involve coding per se, but it requires a level of IT skill that a lot of people evidently don't have, and that includes some mods. You need a mix of skills to run something as big as YT and while not every individual mod team member may have all those skills, you need to have those skills within your team, or you're in big trouble.

I think we just need to stop giving them attention. My sympathy though. It's so annoying watching them act like modding an exchange requires you to provide a resume.

AYRT. I did my first modding in XF fandom before the younger participants of YT were even born. I know what I’m talking about: even if everyone on your modding team has a PhD in computer science, things will go wrong, even if none of you have done anything wrong.

Even if nothing goes wrong, you need to have people on your mod team with IT skills to ensure any issues are fixed ASAP, and you need to keep any team members who don’t have those skills away from certain parts of your exchange unless they break something. If you don’t have people in your mod team with the skill sets required, you are asking for trouble.

The bigger your exchange, the more important it becomes for you to have people on your modding team who have the IT skills to get you out of trouble. YT is a huge exchange and there have been huge issues over the years, some of which were actually fairly minor problems exacerbated by YT’s size.

You should also remember that part of the reason for AO3’s existence is YT because of the massive IT issues the old YT systems had. It was easier to start afresh with coding they had control over. Therefore, the significant crossover between AO3 mods and YT mods.

No, for someone with a grudge who has both the dedication and the right skills, it's possible. This is just a successful frame-up job, something people successfully carry out in real life all the time.

All this nutjob is claiming to have done is use their skills in lying and hacking to frame a couple of people so they were banished. If they were the one that broke the news of the "crimes" to the mods, that would have earned them browning points. Then all they had to do was make sure the people who were banned are kept out of that space, something made easier once they gained some power, espeically if they'd leveraged that situation to gain some power. I'd hope the YT mods would be more discerning, but depending upon which one was either first approached about the "crimes", or was the first to spot the issue which caused the bannings, the outcome could vary signficantly.

Well, that one Coalie's LGBT Monarchs RPF definitely got rejected - and not renamed - though all three of the dudes are there under different RPF fandoms. Might be worth a challenge of the 'why are my characters spread out over these other fandoms? And why is Anne missing?' sort.

Otherwise, Swallows and Amazons is an odd lot this year. And Brian is missing from The Breakfast Club...

On the other hand, sign of interest in your fandom?

Is that you, OP?

Same.

DA. I'm pretty sure the posts above refer how people have joined the modding team of an established exchange, which is what OP seems to be talking about. Although IIRC OP never actually outright says they joined the wider YT modding team.

More importantly, congratulations on starting your own exchange! :) How exciting! How did it go? If you do at any point need some extra help, I'm sure a number of our passionately argumentative "IT SKILLZ IZ SERIOUS BUSINESS ON INTERWEBZ DAMNIT!!1!" coalies here would be genuinely pleased to help you, including myself.

Are you sure you want to link yourself with the MY IT SKILLZ INCLUDE coalies?

Ah, the baptism by tag set. (Whyyyyyyy AO3)

(that coalie)

After how much work it took for that one person to get Catherine of Valois put back in their Plantagenets nom, I'm not even gonna TRY to argue that my gay monarchs should be together. They aren't even close to being contemporaneous, lmao.

Next time I will make an evidence post and ask the mods if there's any category name/framing that would be acceptable to get them together. But ultimately I may just nom them for different exchanges that aren't as strict.

cyrt

I mainly think a challenge would be worthwhile because I suspect they rejected it while basically thinking 'everybody should know that this wouldn't get accepted after last year' and imo that's some bullshit thinking on their part! If they can keep querying about which of the fucking seven dwarves some nominator wants instead of all of them, they can work from the assumption that somebody nominating under a not obviously banned RPF fandom name is doing so in good faith and ask if there's an alternate fandom name/some more acceptable way of expressing the way the characters are linked! Like, the tagset may be vast, and a shit-ton of work to compile, but if the characters are obviously eligible in their own right they shouldn't get tossed out of hand. Not everybody does Yuletide every year and/or follows every wrinkle of every rules discussion avidly, and that shouldn't be a barrier to entry!

NC

Nowadays I'm only in it for writing because no matter how well-crafted a letter I posted, the fic I got was boring crap that barely included anything I said I like in my letter. So now the letters are short and I get my Yuletide enjoyment out of writing fics.

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