coaltide | Coalway to Hell

Entry tags:

2020

Coalway to Hell

Yuletide Weather Forecast:

Temperatures are estimated to fluctuate between active panic and total apathy into the next weekend. Main assignments will have a minimum temperature of regret and a complete climate change once editing is complete. Expect treat writing to continue at all free hours unless the dangerous front of procrastination cropping up in the Northeast successful moves into the area, effectively killing the treat storm conditions for the season.

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

yulefairy for treats you can't find a recip for.

yuletide_admin |

yuletide | Writing Post
Sign-Up (Summary) | 2020 Collection | Tagset

2020 App (Easter Eggs) | Letters Post

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

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It annoys me that breaking one of the base rules of the exchange is so taken for granted. If the socks aren't hurting anything, make (up to a certain number of) socks legal! If they are, actually attempt to enforce the rule! It can be annoying as a writer too because it can be hard to tell if someone is a low-effort sock for a very active fan or is a real inactive, yuletide-only fan (or is a sock of an inactive, yuletide-only fan), and that can change the ways you interpret the signup, but making socks legal would make that less of a thing too. Right now we've got a situation where a certain subset of people can follow a set of unspoken rules that directly contradict the written ones, and that setup always sucks.

But in terms of "this person I'm talking to could be someone else" - you're on coal. You're actually talking to fifteen different anons who are all the same person, OP.

The way I understand it, there's no easy way to identify well-behaved socks in an event the scale of Yuletide. On the other hand, the mods do boot badly-behaved socks, and socks they discover one year through bad or even borderline behavior will probably be booted the next, because of the no-sock rule. I suspect the ~5 participants that the exchange always loses between sign-ups and assignments are generally due to this. (Kind of like getting gangsters for tax evasion - a minor rule that isn't always enforced is used to bring down the hammer on people for other issues which are harder to prove.)

Yeah, well, we should be auditing all rich people for tax evasion too, not just gangsters and the poor. Not going to get into US politics here, but that's exactly the sort of reason I don't like unenforceable rules.

I know they couldn't catch everybody, but it would be nice if the mods at least attempted to be publicly (and privately) disapproving of it, tried to change the culture a bit. Or, you know, change the rule! Anything that gets an illegal sock booted for bad behavior oughta get any participant booted. There's clearly a demand among good exchange participants for a way to double-participate, maybe we should brainstorm ways to let that happen other than flouting the rules.

The things that get an illegal sock booted that wouldn't get a legal participant booted are jus getting caught being an illegal sock. The reason most people get away with multiple signups is that they're careful to not link their accounts in any way and to sign up and participate exactly as a legitimate participant would.

Right. So we don't need an anti-socks rule just to get rid of badly-behaved socks, they are got rid of for being badly-behaved. So we have the occasional well-behaved sock that gets booted largely at random. Meanwhile there's a large number of people (many of whom aren't really *that* careful about never mentioning they have a sock) who get away with it, but only because they're insider enough to know that it gets winked at, and anyone who isn't insider enough or doesn't want to actively break the rules doesn't have the option.

Like: Honestly, the entire Yuletide FAQ is currently written as if the rule is "one signup per AO3 account." All they would have to do is quietly remove rule #1 and voila, that becomes the de facto standard. Make sure NovaMisting-type gimcrackery is covered under general bad behaviour rules (which it should be) and Bob's your uncle. Or possibly dentist.

If the mods really cared about socks, they would note when fics get switched around during the anon period. If you switched it to an account that had ever signed up as your main account, there’s a ban lol

It wouldn't have to be "ever" - some people do just switch to a new account - but if there's more than one non-PH assignment for the last year on the same account by the next-sign up time, that seems like a pretty obvious "ban for sockpuppeting". If the mods actually cared. Which they don't!

This is hilarious.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Coalway to Hell

Re: So many socks

Re: So many socks

Re: So many socks

Re: So many socks

Re: So many socks

Re: So many socks

Re: So many socks

Re: So many socks