yuletide_coal | The Dirty Energy Source

The Dirty Energy Source

Do you want to make a spreadsheet about spreadsheets?
Do you still need to figure out what two other fandoms you should request beside the only one you really want fic for?
Or are you trolling ALL the letter posts for placeholders, just so you can write those people some nice, dry coal?

We want to know all about it.

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Not sure what good that does. If someone edits their letter, they also might edit their entry in the letters post. If they take their letter down, it was probably a wankstorm that someone screen captured anyhow.

na

it's good because everything points to the same place. you can verify that someone willingly commented and listed their fandoms on the actual post. no sneaking in friends, etc. or "missing" people who you don't like. it's an index of all the comments posted on the post, not all the letters across lj/dw.

like ayrt said, a big part of it is that that's always how thing have been done so going against the grain could be seen as incompetence.

"going against the grain could be seen as incompetence"

Given everything that's happened with the letters post and spreadsheet this year, you think that changing to link the letters directly would be the thing seen as incompetence?

yes, because after 4+ years of spreadsheets it's always been done this way to avoid linking to virus'/nswf stuff/taken down letters/etc. you can control all the content in your letters post, so you link to the things you control.

if someone linked directly to letters, despite everyone always linking to comments, and someone got a virus or complained that they saw porn at work and it was your fault, that would be seen as incompetence by other spreadsheet people and the participants to the exchange. everyone would go "smh, rookie mistake."

Hi TCC. Explain it all you want, it still makes no sense.

yeah i'm not tcc. i've ran a lot of spreadsheets for other exchanges. tcc is doing literally everything else wrong, but linking to comments intead of letters is standard practice for a multitude of reasons. it may get you super mad but that isn't enough to change all the reasons why spreadsheeters do it.

NA

I liked the comment someone just made on that thread, saying maybe direct links to letters could be an additional option - so, keeping default the link to the yuletide thread, but adding an additional column with links directly to letters. That way any spreadsheet-browsing yuletiders could pick their poison.

The downside is that it obviously sounds like a lot of extra work, but the commenter was offering to do it herself, so more power to her...

definitely! having it as an extra is a lot of extra work but it's worth it imo. it isn't a good idea to have it as the main and only link, but having it as extra information (like how some spreadsheets will mention the characters requested in addition to the fandoms) is great. bonus info never hurt anyone. having a part-time spreadsheeter dedicated to it while "main" crew works on inputing comment links + ao3 + fandoms sounds perfect to me.

I missed the offer to add direct links to the spreadsheet. Could you point me to it? Thanks.

http://yuletide.livejournal.com/1206311.html?thread=18934823#t18934823

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The Dirty Energy Source

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