coaltide | This is Yuletide, everybody make a scene

Entry tags:

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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AYRT

Thank you for the background. Is there a link to the wank this produced please? I feel bad for her being the public face of unpopular rule changes, which I take it never actually came in?

I only have time to find namespace stuff, but I know there was wanking on coal and ffa. If you're logged in, you can search coal and ffa has their dememe function for searching - https://dememe.info (login is nonnie/pony)

Character limits announcement - https://yuletide-admin.livejournal.com/150743.html
Fandoms need 2 nominations announcement and retraction - https://yuletide-admin.livejournal.com/150380.html

The 2 nominations rule was never enacted, but the character limit rule was for that year. It's what got Natasha Romanov's cat nominated when Natasha Romanov wasn't eligible in her own comic series and we got the Clone Gwen Stacy wank, iirc. I'm pretty sure the rules changed again in 2014.

My mind still boggles at the two nominations thing. Why would you even think to propose that for a small fandom exchange...

Something something tag bloat something something matchability

Maybe if any of the Yuletide mods actually could coding, they wouldn't have needed a saint of a passerby to supply the new matching code.

Um, coal, it's not the Yuletide mods' job to fix AO3 code. WTF?

They don't think it is. It's in response to an earlier comment claiming that mods mostly have IT experience.

IT skills =/= coding

IT skills doesn't have to mean coding, but it is a pretty big umbrella term and I think coding fits under it.

It's not so much that it's the Yuletide mods' job to fix AO3 code, as it is some of the people who are AO3 maintainers are also Yuletide mods.

See hhertzof and astolat (or at least she used to be). I think an AO3 support account was listed as a Yuletide collection owner.

I think there’s still a wide gap between AO3 support and people who do the actual coding. IT is usually used to refer to people who act in more of a support capacity—people who administer or figure out the best ways of using software, not the people who make the software.

SC and while nobody needs IT experience to mod, support-related skills are far more relevant to exchange modding than coding is.

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 most of _coal understands this. It seems to be just the subthread op who's making claims about unspecified "IT skills" being necessary to mod.

NC and I don't think it's the subthread OP who told the frightening tale of framing people to get them banned who starting talking about the IT stuff. I think it's a few people who read into the OP's vague comments about "IT skills" and "hacking" and went off on their own tangent.

The excuses of "tag bloat" and "matchability" were such claptrap. If server strain really was a problem they needed to make arrangements to upgrade their servers, not kick the can further down the road for when it became an even bigger problem. But I doubt it was truly a server strain problem either. Someone behind the scenes must have wanted to exert some sort of control over proceedings, although why I don't know. Word of God at the time was that the two-nominators rule was a "compromise" between old mods and new and that the old mods apparently wanted fandoms and characters to not be eligible unless more than two people nominated them. But why would they want three or five or ten people to nominate something before it became eligible? Fuck knows what the old mods' endgame was.

I knew that the two nominations rule was a compromise with what the old mods wanted, but I hadn't heard that what they wanted was an even higher number of people needed to confirm a nomination. I thought we didn't know what the alternative was.

This was a couple years after they moved the whole shebang to AO3, right? And just as its popularity was peaking and participant numbers were getting bigger every year- I wonder if they started getting nervous about Yuletide hitting 2500 participants, 3000, and wanted to limit the number of people submitting nominations to make it easier and faster to sort through them. Rather than, say, add more tag mods they proposed that you could only nominate if you had a clean record of doing Yuletide for 3+ or 5+ years. (This is pure speculation on my part.)

I don't why they wanted to somehow reduce the number of nominations and fandoms in the tagset, but ita, it sure as shit wasn't because of tag bloat, server strain, or matchability.

https://yuletide-admin.livejournal.com/151740.html

That post where they walked the rule back also had a section written by astolat that was supposed to explain why it was needed. Mostly focusing on numbers, like there'd been 50 unmatchable people the year before and how that was too high as it was larger than the total of other exchanges. But IIRC some nonnies crunched the numbers and the percentages were about average for exchanges. Also there was some waffle about how too many nominations would lead to tiny fandoms getting lost and unnoticed and therefore less written, but honestly that always sounded like bollocks.

Rather than, say, add more tag mods they proposed that you could only nominate if you had a clean record of doing Yuletide for 3+ or 5+ years. (This is pure speculation on my part.)

Actually, in the beginning (well, not the very first Yuletide, for obvious reasons) you could only sign up for Yuletide if you had either participated the previous year (and not defaulted or otherwise sinned) or written a NYR. I started in 2005 and had to write a NYR before being allowed to sign up.

(also, they have certainly added a lot of tagmods in the past few years! Just look at the Maintainers on the current tagset - that's more people than have signed up for some exchanges I've been in...)

AYRT

Thank you so much for that! You are most kind. I didn’t know we could search fo things like that.

The reaction was mostly at FFA and maybe in the old chat but that's lost to time, old!coal was only opened for the year after the rule retraction:

https://fail-fandomanon.livejournal.com/65658.html?thread=308470394#t308470394
https://fail-fandomanon.livejournal.com/65658.html?thread=308473210#t308473210
https://yuletide-coal.livejournal.com/3696.html?thread=3942256#t3942256
https://fail-fandomanon.livejournal.com/65936.html?thread=309910160#t309910160
https://yuletide-coal.livejournal.com/3696.html?thread=3990896#t3990896

DA

Oh my god, I had totally forgotten about this ahahaha wow, what a bad idea.

Do we know why this rule was proposed in the first place?

I think the idea was to prevent people from shoehorning megafandoms in by making sure they couldn't ask for popular characters even when the adjacent fandom was technically small enough for Yuletide.

SC

Oops, I thought this was in response to a comment upthread. Other coalie is right about the tag bloat reason, I was talking about the situation regarding characters from large fandoms that also appear in smaller fandoms.

The two nominations rule was something about tag bloat, there being a bunch of tags that never got fic written for them (but were still wrangled?), and it being a strain on the servers. I don't think the mods ever offered a real explanation or their reasoning.

Tbh, I think that was what kicked off people being really cavalier about using socks to nominate everything they might want instead of sticking to the prescribed number of noms (or previously keeping quiet about socking up).

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