think of it as a weird psa

[seperis]

So dramatic incident over the weekend. I'll link at the end of the post. I'm jumping straight to Saturday night.

Saturday, me and svmadelyn decided to do a dress rehearsal for the day we decide to break up dramatically. It was--intersting. After stripping each other of our communites, Madelyn hacked my lj (in that she has my password) and logged me out while changing my email. Sadly, I had just started changing her password when she changed hers and stopped me.

It was fun--but also chilling. The thing is, she has all my passwords, with the exception of two of my email and my webpage. While mulling creating a defensive sockpuppet (when she was trying to remember the password she gave my lj), it occurred to me--that was fucking scary. Mostly because I'm fairly sure that unless she told someone what she was doing, no one would figure it out unless she started posting fic, at which time probably a couple of people would mildly wonder about my sudden and inexplicable style change.

Granted, I trust Madelyn completely. (We also realized we co-run a disturbing number of communities.) Here's what gave me pause.

Egroups, yahoogroups, a creator in the end does have final say; yahoogroups doesn't really allow a coup (this could have changed since I was mod of wrbeta). Other mods can screw around, but they can't oust the creator and they can't throw them out. The creator can delete, can give the list to someone else, but there *is* a single authority, much like a ring if I were feeling pretentious, that rules them all.

Thing is, Livejournal doesn't have that kind of protection for the creator of the community. Some part of me knew that all along, but I was actually still shocked that it was possible; I'm not an active mod on a big community, so I don't come in daily or even weekly contact with many mod duties.

Here's why my Saturday was spent blinking slowly at lj in a kind of blank horror.

ckll and the dean_sam community coup - journalfen is being very robust, but just keep hitting refresh--totally worth it.

Short version: ckll gets thrown out of her own community. The full story on this is even better.

And believe it or not, this has happened before:

A Long Time Ago: Snarkstorm and the supernatural_tv coup

snarkstorm gets thrown out of her community, then banned. This one is a must-read. I also seriously have to admire marishna for posting all that.

Not my fandom, but if it hit me with a kind of shock that it was possible to steal communities--not to mention, hell, the latter of those two managed to keep it fairly under wraps--I wondered if anyone else would be surprised.

Read the caps in the last one as well. Fascinating reading.

Comments

[burntcopper.livejournal.com]

only comms I mod are the main BBC's Robin Hood ones, robinhoodbbc and its iterations and that's a tiny (less than 1k) in comparison comm. Where it's genially accepted that I'm pouty and bitchy and power crazed (they've been known to rate my mod posts with points taken off for lack of style and obscure threats), partly because I stated it in the user info. We're talking a fandom of such smallness that someone did set up a rival comm early on, but it got so few posts that they got bored and deleted it - partly because everyone either belonged to the main one or had the newsletter friended, so not exactly any point to it. Mind you, I only set it up so I'd be able to keep a leash on possible wank - I don't even create any content aside from mod posts, and the only time I gave co-mod powers to jamjar was when I went away for the internet for a while, and she de-modded herself when she missed too many. Having someone take it away would be... weird.

I'm still not entirely sure that giving me maintainer powers on thedarkisrising was an entirely wise choice on the mod's part, because all I was expecting was to be given the co-mod position, on the exceedingly shaky foundation that I wanted to go through the memories and tag all the posts. That's all I've ever done, and the only thing she knew about me? long-term member of the fandom who writes once in a blue moon snarky fic who runs the main slash site for it, and posts occasionally in full snark mode. Gave me the shivers a bit, due to the 'er... you don't know me, why the hell did you give me that much power?' factor. I mean, admittedly she was probably looking for someone who's more active in the fandom than she seems to have been in a good couple of years to just keep an active eye on the comm, but *still*.

Does bring to mind the case of indeedsir (main Jeeves and Wooster comm), where one of the comm members sought the opinion of the rest of the comm and then successfully petitioned lj to turn over the maintainer rights. The original mod had been absent from lj (deleted account and everything) for a good while, and said user wanted a chance to do stuff with it - tags, memories, design, etc. They also petitioned lj using the (very valid) argument that a lot of the posts contained nc-17 content and thus the comm did need a mod, with links to the post where she'd canvassed opinion.