Yuletide 2011 is officially over and authors have been revealed! Thank you to everyone who participated and helped make it happen! ♥

Additional stories written to Yuletide 2011 prompts are now welcome in the New Year's Resolution 2012 challenge, which will remain open until next Yuletide. The full list of all requests can be found here on googledocs or here in an html version.

\o/

(eta: PS: Yuletide Madness was revealed shortly after! ;)

COMPLETELY EDITED POST! Because although Elz was perfectly clear, my brain was not, and I completely misinterpreted. *g*


An updated list on Elz's DW of stories with 0 or 1 comment, but I'm including the original one she actually sent behind the cut, here. Some of these now have more comments!

( Stories that Need Love )

This is only for main Yuletide 2011 stories, but here is the list for Yuletide Madness 2011.

Now that the panic has subsided and we are all on into the joyful phase of rolling around in piles of stories, elynross and I wanted to say a bunch of thanks!

First, a special thank-you to the AO3 Tag Wranglers! \o/ If you look at our fandoms index and the fandom filters on the Works page, every single one of those fandoms had to be wrangled. In many cases, you can find stories posted under slightly different versions of the same fandom name grouped together on the AO3 -- that's again because of the work of the hundreds of AO3 Tag Wranglers.

It's a giant and complex and manual job, and made all the more challenging by Yuletide with our annual wave of fandoms like "Octopus Steals My Video Camera and Swims off with It While It's Recording" and "Michael Fassbender with Pugs", and with our giant last-minute swath of posting. Despite that, you can find all our thousands of stories beautifully shinily indexed for your reading delight. \o/


Many thanks also to our own team of nomination-wranglers, alianne, Arduinna, hhertzof, greenlily, Jenn_Calaelen, lydiabell, Senji, starseverywhere, and Truth, who all did huge amounts of work helping us sort out the giant pile of noms! As a happy note on the new nominations process -- last year we had 4508 fandoms nominated and 2220 fandoms actually requested. This year we had 2905 fandoms nominated and 2518 actually requested, meaning that the new nominations process doesn't cut down on the breadth of requested fandoms, but does successfully cut down the sheer number nominated, yay. :D


We also are SO grateful to the AO3 sysadmins and coders. It has been a long haul getting here since the AO3 was launched, but this year for the first time Yuletide ran completely end-to-end on the AO3, and with no serious performance problems, woo! We didn't even need to use the static pages. :) That is because of the new servers and new configurations and new code that's been installed and deployed over the course of this last year, with a huge amount of ongoing effort from the entire team, with the support of the OTW, the AO3's parent organization.


Speaking of which, with my own coder hat on, I want to thank ALL of you (and elynross especially haha), for your patience and support while we slogged through this migration. The heavy lifting is now over, and while there are still bunches of things to improve and fix (and the migration of the past stories to run!) and a lot of bells and whistles I hope to add, not only do we now have a stable home for Yuletide going forward, but the same tools that we use for Yuletide are now available to ALL challenge moderators in fandom, and the stress-testing that Yuletide represented for the AO3 has paid off with better performance for us and other AO3 users as well.

And despite our even later start this year, we ended up with 2598 stories in 1452 fandoms. But I am very happy to say that from now on our start date will no longer have to depend on new code making it out in time!


Finally, we also want to give one special mention this year to kittydesade -- who went WAY above and beyond the call of duty and wrote around thirty pinch hits for us, most of them ones no one else could take and several wildly urgent last-second ones that turned up late on Dec 24. Thank you SO MUCH to her and to all of our amazing pinch hitters -- we had almost 300 pinch hits total this year, and we couldn't possibly do this without all of you. ♥

Yuletide! \♥/

1) Commenting on a story and chastising a recipient for not being grateful enough, or otherwise not responding in the fashion you find appropriate. Not all of us are comfortable with raving enthusiasm, nor is a story necessarily going to be to your taste. All we ask in Yuletide is that you respond to your author; we do not try to dictate how that should be done, beyond being polite.

2) Posting anonymously to harass a Yuletide author for not filling the request the way you think they should have. OPTIONAL DETAILS ARE OPTIONAL, and you have no idea what an author was thinking. Regardless, comments to the author are NOT THE PLACE TO BE BITCHY.

Note: I'm not identifying the stories in question, and I'd ask nobody else to. The last thing they need are more attention. My deepest apologies to the authors this has happened to. If you choose to delete the anonymous comments, you have both my permission and my urging to do so.

ETA: In the most egregious case that's been reported, it should be noted that the recipient was very gracious in their response, and rather embarrassed and humiliated by the anon response. Author and recipient have communicated through me, and are not upset with each other.

You should find all your gift stories on one page on the Gifts page of your own AO3 account:

http://archiveofourown.org/users/YOUR PSEUD/gifts

If you want another way to check, there is a "Find gifts for" option on the Works page for Yuletide 2011.

And please do leave a comment for your authors, regardless of how you feel about the gift. As we have said in the FAQ:

Please leave a thank-you comment for your writer. You aren't obligated to rave publicly or rec the story if you aren't enthusiastic about it, but an appreciative comment thanking them for their time and effort is simply polite, and will end their Yuletide experience on a positive note. Leave a comment even if you default -- you may feel too embarrassed to say thank you when you didn't give something yourself, but silence will make your author think you hated the story or couldn't even be bothered to read it.

Please don't complain about your gift in public. If you get something that doesn't match your fandom/character requests, contact us in private and we'll handle it. If you get something that matches your fandom/characters but isn't to your taste, please say thank you anyway and move on to the hundreds of other stories available to read and enjoy. And maybe someone will pick out one of your unused requests to write for the NYR challenge!

Yuletide Madness 2011 IS NOW LIVE. Bwaaa ha ha ha haaaaaaa.


I hope you have enjoyed your stay with Yuletide 2011. Be sure to comment on your stories, and have a happy continued gluttonous reading experience!

I've had a pleading request for 30 more minutes, so I'm off to feed the cats and putter a bit. *g*

That's around 9:10 am US Eastern time, which is... other times! Other places :P (I is too bleary from lack of sleep to think, sorry...)

After Madness is closed, notifications for treats will go out. Any stories and snippits that are started but not finished in time can go into New Year's Resolutions TWENTY-TWELVE (2012).

I just had to spell that out for emphasis, because my gawd, it's nearly 2012, how did that happen. (And generally we've said that NYR's should be the standard 1000+ words, but hey, if you have a fine drabble, I think we want to read it.)

And then it's read and comment, read and comment (MAKE SURE YOU COMMENT!), and author names will go live sometime on New Year's Day! If you're in the some portions of the world. Possibly the day after, if you're in others. Time travel is haaaard.

I'm planning to close Yuletide Madness to uploads at some point after I get up in 8-9 hours, which will be 9-10a Eastern US time, maybe a little later than Yuletide closed this morning. I'll announce it here a bit before doing it, and then Yuletide Madness 2011 will be revealed!

Thanks to everyone for all the lovely things you've said. Being able to do this for all of you brings me joy, and is the highlight of my fannish life, these days. <3

To the best of my knowledge, everyone should have at least one story in the Yuletide 2011 collection, barring a very last-minute default (which is covered, and the recipient has been notified!). If you do not find a story for you, please notify me at yuletide@yuletidetreasure.org. I will make it happen! *flexes magic powers, which amount to depending on pinch hitters of fabulosity, and sometimes their friends*

Similarly, if you're reading and you find a story that is obviously incomplete, or significantly short, or isn't a proper story-type thing, please do let us know. I'd hate for anyone to not have a story!