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

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Yuleporn | Make the Yuletide Gay | Jewltide | Three Turtle Doves
YuleBuilding | Two for One | Crueltide | Yuletunes | Yule Be First
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....and a Partridge in a Pear Tree!

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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.

That fucking code was as robust as the JournalFen servers. Holy crap, it was a nightmare.

Was the old site one of astolat's automated archives where you uploaded your own fic, or did you have to get the mods to do it? I was on a few fandom sites that used the latter and you had to send your files to the mods to upload, and god forbid you later spotted a typo or error as you'd have to send a new file and beg the mods to switch them over.

You could upload your own file, but if you made an error you'd have to ask the mods to replace it.

Per Fanlore, it ran on Automated Archive. (I never had to send things to the mods to upload to any of the Automated Archive archives I posted to back in the day, at least not that I can recall, but my memory's spotty. You'd think, having actually run things on Automated Archive, I'd remember that shit, but that was so long ago.)

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.

Yep, I also started participating in 2005 and I had to write a fic to participate. It was more or less like getting yourself cleared from a late default is now: you could pick any prompt from the previous year and write it for the NYR collection in order to be allowed to participate. (Once you were in, though, you were in - it was only a rule for first-time participants.)

I don't remember what year they stopped requiring this, and I really don't know why they even had this requirement. I suspect it was so that people would understand rare fandoms mean rare fandoms, here's an example, if there's nothing here you can write you won't be able to find things to write and request for the actual event.

I think they only had it that one year. I started in 2006, and I didn't have to write anything to get in.

I can also confirm you didn't have to do this in 2004.

Re: Yuletide history

(Anonymous) - 2021-11-04 03:48 (UTC) - Expand

The first few years, it was basically astolat's flist. Everyone was pretty well known in lj circles. That's why it really wasn't a default gen exchange despite how matching works.

The archive went down repeatedly every year, like people have said.

Five minute fandoms weren't typical. It was more likely to be requests for m/m of some historical novel or something. Treats weren't much of a thing until like year 3.

Only the first year was mostly astolat-adjacent. I participated the second year and it was already big, and I don't think most people knew her particularly well. I don't think I knew who she was at all until AO3 started getting off the ground. Also, I got a blank sign-up from someone without an LJ that year, if that tells you anything.

The rest is right, though!

yeah it was a bit cliquey at first - and i don't mean it in a bad way, it's just how it was. i'm glad it became a wider fandom thing though!

The first year was pretty much people who had Astolat friended, which isn't exactly the same thing - she was already a bnf for fic and this was the days when you had to friend someone's lj to get their fic. Most of them were not well known, or people Astolat had ever interacted with (I certainly wasn't)!

Once that midnight deadline rolled around, that was IT. No editing, no uploading, nothing. AO3 has spoiled us.

The first year was just a rare ship exchange, which meant, yes, Harry Potter had one glorious year as a Yuletide fandom.

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.

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