Deletegate
From Fandom wank wiki
caused by: hugsnkisses fighting with everyone on June 23rd 2004.
Was the Twenty-third of June a mysterious date? No, not really. However, nobody can keep what happened straight. Or gay. Whatever.
Contents |
Quick summary
Some people in Mockitymock thought it would be funny to delete Fandom_Wank. Some disagreed.
Nevertheless, F_W was deleted, and some people thought it was funny. Some disagreed.
What was agreed was that it was a wanksplosion all around.
A slightly longer summary
A few months after Crystalwank, a small group of F_W regulars in Mockitymock (including several of the then-current mods) thought it would be a humorous practical joke to delete F_W for a short time. There was a vote, and the decision to delete was agreed upon. The JFA were contacted, and told what would be happening.
Unfortunately, the deletion was announced via the mod sockpuppet brad, and the impression given was that the community had been hacked. (This was shortly after the Gryffindor Tower implosion, so there was precedent.) The JF server was hammered as people tried to find out what the hell was going on, while those in the know pretended they didn't know.
Finally, ZR tired of the complaints, the panic, and the way the server kept crashing, and so reinstated the community via her administrative control. This return of the community also happened to (temporarily) de-mod most of the mods. Oops.
Oh, and to make it even better, a post in Mockitymock reacting to the unscheduled end of the joke was accidentally left unlocked. Um.
There was huge amounts of wank, re "the Cabal", the rights of mods & regular users, ZR overstepping, who knew what when, oldbies vs. newbies, it was all WTF.
Wait... hacked? People seriously thought that?
Well, here's brad's (now deleted) post, made June 23, 2004:
| “ |
MOD ACCOUNT We are all fucking SICK of your whining. The trolling, the inter-community wanking. This is NOT a place for wankers, don't you people get this? If you want to wank, get the shit away from here. As for that "people who are new are kool omg, we dun no nuthin!!!" what is up with you? Since when is it cool to be clueless? Seriously, FUCK OFF. Exactly the same goes to the "oldbies", you know, when EVERYONE'S accusing you of being elitist, maybe there's some truth there huh? If you can't laugh, fuck off. And okay, wtf is up with all these new comms? Yeah, okay a place to bring nonfandom wank, okay? But the rest? Does anyone fucking care? You can't solve life's problems by making a new comm, well, maybe taking away an old one will work. Seriously, we are so tired of you wankers. And yeah, we're angry. This is IT. This thing is gonna BURN to the GROUND. Congratulations, you did it. | ” |
You be the judge.
Panic, chaos, disorder...
Those who missed brad's post were alerted to the deletion by a post to OTF Wank.
This lead to a post by Hinky at her journal expressing confusion and denying involvment in the debacle, in addition to stating that before the deletion, the password had been changed. In response to that post, Aja (also a mockitymock member) drew a comparison to Gryffindor Tower. Others didn't believe Hinky's story.
Now, while the ModSquad had informed the JFA in advance of the deletion, via email, the practical jokers had not predicted the incredible reaction as people all over LJ and JF were either celebrating or panicking that Fandom Wank was dead. As all of them kept refreshing their browsers to see if there was any news -- and since the robustness of the server was not yet legendary -- Journalfen kept crashing.
So, in less than a day, the admins tired of the disruption the F_W deletion was causing. Claiming that Fandom Wank "belongs to the fannish communities", the JFA restored the community on the 24th of June. Since, as they said, they weren't certain whether it was a mod coup or not, or possibly through a coding error, the mods were unmodded and control of the community was returned to its original creator, Dara. Some of the mods were not happy about this particular turn of events, and wanked a little in their own JF accounts.
...Our job is done.
After a very brief period of general confusion, things returned to much the way they had been. Unfortunately, those who had missed The Cabal Are Plotting Against Us Oh Noes were now more aware of mockitymock, and Phoenix had just enough new "evidence" to be that much more annoying in his trollery.
Fandom Love, a year later, was done to celebrate the anniversary of this historic wank, and the Fandom Love aftermath proved that history repeats itself.
Oh, and we shouldn't forget -- during the deletion, someone set up a new Fandom Wank community[1] so that wanks occuring while F_W proper was gone would not go unmocked. The first post to that community was about the deletion, but it hasn't seen much action since.
Links
- "The Night F_W Died", a filk by llama_treats
- The JFA restore the community [2][3]
- Post-restoration metawank [4]
- llama_treats finds the unlocked Mockitymock post, and links it to we_wank [5]
- Redpanda's post on Deletegate [6]
- Aja's post on Deletegate [7] - don't miss the thread where one JF admin tells her side of the story [8]
- The other admin's personal reaction [9]
- Dara's reactions [10][11][12]
- HnK summarizes it all [13]
