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 |

yuletide_admin |

yuletide

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Yep. Back in my HP fandom days, a bunch of exchange mods had a private community where we would talk about various participants and warn each other about potential problems they might cause, including likelihood to default.

*waves*

I was in that comm.

We were probably LJ friends, then. :)

+1. Even years ago before I stopped modding, the mods for different fandom challenges talked to each other privately through various methods, about lots of different issues. I'm legit stunned that participants think mods of different challenges *wouldn't* talk to each other, tbh.

People aren’t LOL noping about mods talking to each other, they’re LOL noping about any sort of IT or coding knowledge being needed to get into modding “clique.”

Also your tells are still painfully obvious. Like I suck at poker, but I’d put my savings in for a game against you.

SA as above. What are you going on about?

NA IIRC the OP didn't say they joined the mod/wrangler "clique" because of Mad IRL IT Skillz, just that the skillset came in useful for the job? IDK YMMV but it's not a LOL nope for me.

ITA. Also, I thought it would be obvious to pretty much anyone here that mods of anything internet-based would need to have good IT skills? Mods needing to expand their team often recruit from within their forum or exchange as they need people with good IT skills who also have a passion for the project.

I was a mod for a large fandom exchange for several years (couple hundred sign-ups) and I don't have any "IT" skills beyond the necessary ones for, like, using Dreamwidth and AO3 etc.

I think you would lose that bet, Coalie: you sound more like OP than those posters do, to be honest. Are you OP, pulling some MsScribe, 4D chess level shit, posting contrary replies and accusing other people in the thread of being you just for the lulz?

DA. What are you talking about, Coalie? OP is very real with very real skillsets, that they used. The exchange world is blind and stupid for not believing in them, and not distrusting mod McCarthyism behind the scenes.

NC. Not all mods are saints: some abuse their power, some trust people they shouldn't, and some make dumb decisions hastily or when they don't have all the facts. OP is a real person and whether their story is true in part or in full is unclear, but there are plenty of shitty people involved in fandom and some of those shitty people happen to be mods, or are trusted by mods.

Mods are human and are neither perfect nor infallible. Mods outside of YT have definitely made mistakes: writers have been dragged, blacklisted and even outright banned when they shouldn't have been and considering YT has been running since 2003, I'd be surprised if it hasn't happened in YT at least once.

I'm late for this party but why would Coal of all places not realize that this sort of fuckup could happen really easily in a world this shitty and full of injustice? People's lives get ruined every day because of false accusations, even when none of those accusations should ever have been believed, especially by well-educated, clever people. The AO3 mods, as great as they are, aren't going to be any more immune to manipulation than the rest of the population.

+1

We just had a coalie bring up being on the receiving end of something in this vein in this very post. I have doubts about the actual level of success, but tbh even if most of it didn't happen, having a fantasy like that over fandom fallout years ago is bad enough. I don't fear being the next victim, but I'd rather not interact with someone like this even if everything goes fine.

(Is it me, or is the aggression up way too early this year? First there was BEC-ing over Trialia for nothing, and now too eager troll-calling. Hurry up, letter post?)

+2. ITA with everything in your post, Coalie, including that some Coalies would seemingly need very little encouragement at the moment to start frothing at the mouth over the slightest amount of potential drama. We've had more than one Coalie talk recently about how they've had to create whole new fandom identities to get away from stalkers and other creeps online and yet some Coalies still aren't alert to the fact that there's a whole bunch of awful people just like the OC in fandom who love causing trouble?

Some of these awful people are pretty incompetent at causing any real problems but others are extremely talented and I've had the misfortune of coming across quite a few of them. The only thing that saved me from falling victim to one of these awful people who was very talented at causing trouble was my (real-life) friendship with one of the mods who was being worked on, which was something my would-be assassin didn't know about. I found out later that this awful person had been successful at least once before, and probably a few other times. OC could have succeeded in their little game especially if they had the "right" type of audience willing to buy into any sort of drama whether or not any actual evidence was presented.

As one of the starting-over-to-avoid-stalkers coalies, +1, though I will say I don't really believe the full story here because the details seem weird to me. If two apparently excellent writers who had been doing Yuletide unwankily for years uncharacteristically did something drastic enough to merit a ban (possibly a permaban), it would have caused enough wank that we'd probably know who this coalie is talking about. Especially if that uncharacteristically bad behavior was bad enough that it's gotten them banned from other exchanges.

Re: Your Yuletide sins

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Re: Your Yuletide sins

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Re: Your Yuletide sins

(Anonymous) - 2020-10-09 02:21 (UTC) - Expand

DC Coal always BECs over Trialia.

I agree with the rest of your points, though. I doubt this specific story - it's too /thathappened - but I've had a different fandom group that had some nasty hacking fallout, so I buy that hacking and at least attempting to frame people can happen in fandom.

What does BEC mean?

Re: Your Yuletide sins

(Anonymous) - 2020-10-09 02:25 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Your Yuletide sins

(Anonymous) - 2020-10-09 03:02 (UTC) - Expand

DC I mean, though... what kind of thing (in YT as of 10 years ago) would have been able to earn a hard, lifetime ban just based on access to their account? Deleting their gift before the deadline wouldn't be enough, because they could just write a NYR. Did alleged hacker coalie post a new fic with a DNW for each account they were trying to get banned? Post insulting content about their frame-ee's recip?

Were the mods 10 years ago much less forgiving? Because I'm trying to think how someone could frame another two people into a non-negotiable lifetime ban now (just based on having access to their AO3) and honestly, it'd be a challenge. I mean, if Untherius and Rosefox and so on haven't earned that....

DC. There are a few things that will get you a pretty solid ban from exchanges like YT. If the OP’s efforts went beyond just the AO3 accounts of those who were banned and no one worked out that a hacking had occurred, sadly I could see this sort of nonsense being successful. (I remember hearing third-hand about some non-YT exchange bans which happened after assignments and sign-ups had somehow broken rules. But those who were banned had apparently been framed by a hacker, who’d hacked their accounts and sign-ups for a couple of years. One of the mods in particular who’d been fooled was loath to admit they’d misjudged the whole mess and behaved really badly about the whole thing.)

There have been some mod changes at YT, too. Some mods will react differently to situations and have different levels of both tolerance and ego. What one mod might believe deserves a lifetime ban could be something another mod thinks requires a year-long ban or even just an apology or make-up assignment or something.

We're talking about Yuletide though, not exchanges like Yuletide. Regular bannable offenses are defaulting (pre AO3, defaulting without warning) and not including requested characters. Even writing DNWs won't earn you a ban.

And if it happened before 2009, there was a general amnesty that year for everyone who had been banned.

OP, fuck off already.

Or, if you're just someone who wants to believe that stupid nonsense could ever happen in fandom, fuck off as well. But wake up while you're at it.

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