think of it as a weird psa

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

[seperis.livejournal.com]

*nods* Until now, I knew lj didn't have the creator privilege, but when I read this? Still a shock.

See, I've never seen this before. I mean, now it seems obvious and of course it has, but still a shock.

[that_mireille]

I've seen it (wankily) in HP fandom, and non-wankily elsewhere. I mean, it's nice, to some extent: if I get sick of a community I run, I can completely hand it over to someone else, and they have all the privileges they could possibly need.

But it does mean that people need to be very, very careful about who they give mod privileges to, and I don't think most people are.

Personally, after about 18 months lurking in SPN fandom, all I can say is, any jerks who make me feel bad for ckll are grade A #1 jackasses.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

No joke. I've--er, been linked to her posts before. It's very--something. Yes. Something. *nods firmly*