coaltide | C.R.E.A.M

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2021

C.R.E.A.M

Coal ruins exchanges around me - spitey spitey fic y'all.

Sign-ups: Fri 15 Oct to Sat 23 Oct (~~Countdown~~)
Assignments out by: Mon 25 Oct
Default deadline: Sat 11 Dec
Assignment deadline: Sat 18 Dec
Reveals: Sat 25 Dec

Mini-Challenges:
Yuleporn | Make the Yuletide Gay | Jewltide | Three Turtle Doves
YuleBuilding | Two for One | Crueltide | Yuletunes | Yule Be First
YuleSwaps | IF | Wrapping Paper | Yumadrin | MultiLingYule
....and a Partridge in a Pear Tree!

Yuletide Discord for Hippos & Exchanges After Dark Discords for Namespace ~~drama~~ 18+ discussion. Google Group for PHs.

yuletide |

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2021 Collection | 2021 App (bonus) | Letter Post

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Wank:
- Gay-bashing dragons
- Untherius dewclaws
- Beatrice_Otter's "ship ran over by an ambulance" fic
- The Gwen Stacy wank
- That time the person anonfailed on coal while suicide-baiting themselves

More generally:
- The year mods wanted all noms to be nominated by TWO people in order to go into the tagset. This got rolled back before noms even started.
- The year mods treated FPF characters like they treat RPF characters now (ie a character couldn't appear in a rare fandom if that same character tag had too many fics in a popular fandom, for example Clint Barton in the Hawkeye comic)
- The time some rando walked in off the street with improved matching code and Yuletide matching times went from days to hours
- Yuletide was a rare ship exchange its first year
- Yuletide was started by Jewish people who wanted something fun on Christmas
- The entire AO3 exchange apparatus was largely motivated by Yuletide

Not exhaustive, obviously.

I have been around for a while but I didn't know that it was a rare ship exchange!

The time some rando walked in off the street with improved matching code and Yuletide matching times went from days to hours

rofl at the way this is phrased

where is the lie, coalie

lol you’re not wrong

This is 100% what happened, though!

Ok I don't know anything about this please fill me in.

The code's visible, so tickinginstant just appeared one day "hey here's some improvements to your code".

and we all rejoiced

Interesting, I didn’t know that about ao3 exchange apparatus and Yuletide

AO3 and Yuletide were both astolat projects, so it makes sense. It just seems wild in retrospect, when AO3 is SO HUGE now. Yuletide's annual signup numbers aren't even a drop in the bucket.

Seldom do I feel older in fandom than when things like this come up. (I'm old enough that my most successful Yuletide stories were pre-AO3, yet I still feel like a Yuletide newbie.)

Tell us more about Yuletide pre-AO3! I think a lot of us came on board around 2010 when it was first on the Archive.

I only know about a wank with nominations (or was it signups?) overlapping Jewish High Holidays, from that era.

If my recollections are correct, back in the day, things tended to come in a lot closer to 1000 words than they do now, which makes sense, as fandom, when Yuletide came along, was filled with challenges where you were supposed to write something of exactly 1000 words.

Your chances of getting someone you knew seemed higher back then. I think I knew almost everyone I got those first few years.

Mostly, I just remember the flop sweat last day panic of trying to get things in being much worse than it is these days. I must have been in IRC as far back as '07 or '08, as I remember people cheering me on in real-time as I uploaded my assignment one year (I'd had an unexpected family health issue that screwed with my schedule).

And yeah, I think it was noms that started during the High Holidays. Noms that, you know, extended far past them. Weirdest damn wank, that one.

The absolute ball-ache of posting pre-AO3, my God. Didn't you have to delete completely if you'd fucked something up and start again? I seem to remember doing that once or twice.

Re: Yuletide history

(Anonymous) - 2021-11-02 00:14 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2021-11-02 04:36 (UTC) - Expand

One thing I miss about the old site was nominations rolling over year to year, and IIRC you could nominate way more characters, which helped for canons with big casts.

I don't miss the archive falling over every year both for last minute uploads and the next day when everyone tried to read at once.

There was also some wank over the AO3 move when it was announced they'd import the old fics. There were a handful of users who were very much against it as they were anti AO3; I vaguely remember one of them having a meltdown over the term orphanfix, when it was suggested as a way to compeomise for those who didn't have an account.

I had to write a qualifying fic to participate! This was in 2005, and I think I wrote something to a prompt from the previous year, but honestly I don't remember what the details of the requirement were very clearly or why they were requiring qualifying fics from new participants.

Re: Yuletide history

(Anonymous) - 2021-11-02 14:57 (UTC) - Expand

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Re: Yuletide history

(Anonymous) - 2021-11-03 18:53 (UTC) - Expand

The relationship between AO3 and Yuletide is complicated. At the time of the exchange moving to AO3 astolat was running the board and doing most of the coding, and was also running Yuletide. However right from the start they kept emphasising that Yuletide remained a separate entity and was not a official AO3 project.

However the first year on AO3 saw the wranglers being asked to drop all their usual work and wrangle all the yuletide fandoms just before Xmas. Then there was the year the new skins went live. Astolat had coded the new tagset features to be compatible with the new skins, which meant the skins got pulled out of testing so that they could be deployed alongside the tagsets in time for yuletide. And that caused massive issues over them not being accessible and not working right for people Compounded by the fact that one coder had worked on them alone, so feedback had been limited. Then their accessible version got changed before launch because people hadn't liked how it looked. https://archiveofourown.org/comments/497247%20:

There was quite a bit of ongoing resentment about diverting AO3 resources to benefit yuletide when astolat and the other mods were adamant that yuletide wasn't an AO3 project. From a dev point of view using yuletide as a test for exchange developement nakes sense as it's the biggest exchange, and so they know if a new feature works for yuletide it'll probably work for all exchanges. But for some people who weren't into yuletide but were supporters of the archive it felt like astolat was playing favourites by peioritising things by what would help yuletide rather than the archive as a whole

Honestly this is so interesting. I only heard about Yuletide a few years ago but obviously knew and used AO3. I think most people that have ever even dipped a toe into the fanfic waters know about AO3, but Yuletide not so much.

I'd say it depends on which platform you did/do fandom. I saw Yuletide mentions all the time when I was on LJ. Now that I'm primarily on Tumblr, I've seen it get mentioned very little, if at all, even though people apparently use Ao3 a lot.

Astolat was also like 8 months into a very difficult pregnancy and not really planning for how that would affect things and screw other people who could only do their work after a previous piece was completed.

Even (a) understanding the dev POV and (b) being into yuletide, it sometimes felt to me like astolat was playing favorites.

Nova_mist.

Agree, definitely NovaMist.

Who was the code-improving rando?

tickinginstant. They still work on the code.

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