Back in the day, I was a member of the Kevin Spacey fandom. Yes, Kevin Spacey has a fandom.

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Title:	"Back in the day, I was a member of the Kevin Spacey fandom. Yes, Kevin Spacey has a fandom." (The original post does not have a title; this is the title used here on Fanlore.)
Creator:	bnfshavemorefun
Date(s):	June 24, 2004
Medium:	online
Fandom:	Kevin Spacey, others
Topic:
External Links:	post at Fandom Wank, Archived version; Wayback Machine link
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Back in the day, I was a member of the Kevin Spacey fandom. Yes, Kevin Spacey has a fandom. is an essay by bnfshavemorefun, one of Aja's pseuds.

It was created in response to the mass deletion of the Fandom Wank site on June 23, 2004.

Some Topics Discussed

• the deletion of the Fandom Wank site
• responsibilities of moderators
• the demise of the Kevin Spacey Mailing List in late 1999 due to Spacey's personal awareness/involvement in it, RPF, fannish embarrassment, and violating the fourth wall
• politics and another Kevin Spacey mailing list called KSML

Author's Comments Twelve Years Later

Fandom shipping isn’t what it used to be

Fans have historically dubbed the creative teams behind a show or media franchise "the powers that be," as a reminder that the creators are ultimately in control of the story. Fandom etiquette on interacting with the powers that be used to be extremely clear: They were to be left alone and untouched.

In 2000, I ran a tinymailing list for fans of a certain celebrity. One morning, I awoke to find the entire mailing list deleted overnight by one of the moderators who helped me manage the list. The moderator had discovered that the celebrity had secretly been monitoring our mailing list the whole time, and had been deeply alarmed by a shipping joke that one of the mailing list members had made about him and a friend. Not knowing what to do, the mod, who feared the celebrity had seen too much of our fandom, nuked the whole community.

This was an extreme move, but it represented what at the time was the prevailing attitude of fans toward creators: Don’t let them see you. In essence, the first rule of fandom was, "Don’t talk about fandom."

The Post

The post has two major parts to it. The first is the Kevin Spacey mailing list deletion that had occurred just over five years ago. The second addressed the deletion of the Fandom Wank site the day before.

The Kevin Spacey Mailing List Part

Huh.

Possibly this post isn't productive in the slightest, because I'm not a mod of anything JF-related, nor an old skool wanka by definition, and I'm known more around here for bringing the wank than the funny.

But I sort of want to sound out how I feel about this, because I'm just reading through the basic fallout of what happened, I'm confused and not 100% sure how I feel about it--and also, hurt feelings everywhere like woah.

Back in the day, I was a member of the Kevin Spacey fandom. Yes, Kevin Spacey has a fandom. This was just over 5 years ago, and the largest mailing list in the fandom had a staggering 300 people. There was no fanfic, the community was based purely on fannish squeeing and OMG the Spacey love. It was all done on mailing lists and there was no livejournal.

I was a BNF in that teeny tiny fandom, not that I knew it at the time--and like every BNF I had a cluster of people who hated me, and one day I came online to discover that the mod of the fandom's one and only mailing list, the KSML, had unsubscribed me from the list without warning or explanation. By their own TOS they claimed that they always explained why they removed anyone, and that if 10 or more people requested a person's removal from the list for any reason, that person could be unsubbed. (I never found out what reason caused my removal from the list, but nevermind.) When word got out that I had been unsubbed the list went up in flames, all the members were outraged on my behalf, and my friends came up to me and said, "You should start a new list."

I said okay, and I did--but I did so with the disclaimer that I didn't want sole control over the group. I didn't think it would be right--so I let the person who had first suggested the idea to me take ownership. Everybody thought of it and promoted it as 'Aja's list'--and within like two days, the new list had drawn half the members away from the KSML and everybody was utterly appalled that the new list had gotten over 150 members in such a short time omg! and that now there were two lists in this fandom, and we all felt like revolutionaries of the Great WankSchizm. Our new list was laidback, cool, hip, generally unmodded, and relaxed. We were virtually wank-free for a little while. Good times.

And then, we had wank. To make a long story short, we had wank coming from Kevin Spacey himself, and the mods of both lists were running around freaking out that our lists were being spied on and 'infiltrated' by Spacey's assistants. It was crazy and chaotic, and really scary because as wanky as this is, our list actually was being infiltrated by Spacey's personal assistant--and in the middle of all the pressure, one morning I woke up to discover that the person I had allowed to be owner had deleted my mailing list.

She had done it out of the blue, just because of her own personal issues over the Spacey wank. It was completely my fault for unthinkingly letting her be owner while I was the head Mod, but I never thought that she would actually use the access to just delete it literally on in impulse, without telling or consulting any of the other mods. I mean, wtf WHO DOES THAT? I was hurt and betrayed and all my other mods were thrown into even more confusion, and I've never really forgiven her for it.

So my lovely little list that I was so proud of was gone forever, along with all its archives and member list--and we had no record of who had been on it, and no way to contact anybody on the list to tell them what had happened. We immediately made a new list, of course, and people found their way back, but now instead of being the cool revolutionaries we had been tainted by the wank, and it felt like we'd lost our street cred. Very rapidly after that the entire fandom became wankier and wankier, and I soon handed over the reins of the new list to somebody else and got the hell out of Dodge. The 9 month period I was in that fandom was the wankiest, most ridiculously dramatic, petty, and stupid online experience I've ever had. Nothing I've seen in HP fandom has ever come close to it, not even Ivy accusing me of threatening to kill her.

The Fandom Wank Site Deletion Part

Because of that experience I have a kneejerk reaction of *vomit* whenever somebody deletes a community on Livejournal because of his/her personal issues. It's wanky, it's unfair to the community members, and tends to destroy the credibility of the community. What gets me most of all, though, is when one mod supercedes the other mods and goes off on their own--see Gryffindor Tower. There are certain unalienable laws of modding I stick to, and the first one is that you don't make a major decision like that if you're a mod or a maintainer of a community without consulting your other mods.

I am of two minds regarding the deletion/undeleting of fandom_wank. And yeah, I knew about it in advance and cast my vote in favor of deleting it.

Had it been intended as a permanent deletion I would never have voted for it. We all knew it was going to be wanky. The mods knew there was going to be a huge ugly nasty wanksplosion sooner or later--but the F_W mods also wanted it to happen on their terms.

I think people just tend to assume that because the f_w mods aren't very verbal or active that they don't actually mod--and that therefore if they don't actually mod then they don't actually do anything that gives them the right to have a say in the goings-on of the community. Frankly, I think that's bullshit and I also think it's a willful misunderstanding of how much perspective and patience and self-awareness it takes to be a hands-off moderator of a place like fandom_wank--and a JournalFen admin as well. The thing that bothers me most right now about this whole entire thing is how the now former mods of F_W are being demonized by the community and how people are treating them as though they were renegade wankers who suddenly got too big for their britches and overstepped their boundaries. Uh, no. They've *always* been the mods and they've always been good mods--it's just lately they've been having to take more of an active role in shaping the community direction, because in the past 2 months the community has gone to shit. This isn't about them suddenly getting egoboosts, it's about the community changing, and about the way they chose to deal with it. Making it about anything other than that is wanky in the extreme and doesn't do anybody any credit. (And I personally feel the former f_w mods deserve a hell of a lot more of it than they're getting.)

When the mods chose to delete fandom wank they went to those of us who had a vested interest in keeping the community wank-free. By a vast majority we all agreed that locking down the community for a few days would let the wank happen, let everybody cool off, or go elsewhere if they couldn't wait long enough to get their wank kicks, and kill off a lot of the excess tension that had been brewing just under the surface of the community for weeks. The intention was always to undelete it again after a few days. It was the fandom_wank equivalent of "okay, take 5 minutes and cool off." Moreover, all the fandom_wank mods approved the decision and had notified orrorojo of exactly what they planned to do.

Up and until zorrorojo made her first statements yesterday about the journal deletion, I had assumed zorrorojo was okay with it--I knew she had gotten the heads up from the mods the night before, and I assumed if she had issues she'd take it up with them first. Maybe I was wrong to assume that, and certainly I understand and respect that Zorro has a right to be mad. Whether or not she created JF.net specifically for FW, she had a lot to do with FW's being here on this server, and if she honestly didn't like the plan to delete, it has to feel like a huge slap in the face to her that she wasn't more closely consulted about this plan. And if Zorro wasn't informed that it was going to be undeleted again within a few days, then I have no qualms about saying that was a major major mistake on the part of the mods.

But it was my understanding that Zorro did know that the community was going to be undeleted within a few days. This was intended to be nothing but a wakeup call and not a permanent censoring. I know, Zorro felt like the f_w mods were overstepping their bounds and taking themselves too seriously--but speaking as somebody who has had one of my moderators go in and delete my community right out from under me, without ANY explanation whatsoever, leaving all of its members confused and out in the cold--I think the only person overstepping their boundaries here was Zorro. :

The mods talked about it extensively, they knew what they were doing, they let the system admins know what they were doing, and planned to bring it back. The deletion was done to make a point--and no matter what you might think of the conduct of the mods, surely you have to acknowledge that if anyone has the right to make a strong point on a community, it's the moderators of that community. Yes, they knew it would be wanky, but those of us who encouraged them to do it hoped to see positive things come out of it.

When Zorro superceded the community mods and undeleted it without asking them or even notifying them in advance, she stripped the action of its point entirely, and left us with nothing but wank. I mean, nothing's been resolved this way, at all--the community is still going to shit, and now it has the dubious addition of being currently overrun with people who are just happy to see the perpetuation of wank, and who are more than happy to blame it on the old mods without wanting to deal with the reasons why the mods felt they had to delete in the first place.

Most of all, I feel like the freedom of speech ethic that Zorro founded journalfen on also encompasses the freedom not to speak, or to make a point through non-action, even if that action is wilfully passive-aggressive. It's extremely frustrating to see the head mod of the server override the free speech of the former mods of fandom_wank. Because that's ultimately what it's about. Journalfen was founded as a place to give everybody a chance to speak. No one was depriving anyone on fandom_wank their opportunity to speak, but by assuming that the rights of the many superceded the rights of the few (the mods), and undeleting, I feel like the mods had their right to free speech taken away. Again, had they not planned to undelete the community within a few days, the speech would have been action, and it would have been within Zorro's right to take other action--but as it was, deleting the journal was a statement, just like it was when anatsuno deleted DL_A. And despite the close relationship fandom_wank has always had to the journalfen servers, if this had been livejournal, and brad had stepped in out of the blue to undelete a community after the moderators had chosen to delete it for whatever reason, it would have looked utterly bizarre, and most people would have thought he'd gone off his top.

That said, I'm not blaming Zorro, even though I think she was wrong to undelete without consulting or even notifying the moderators of fandom_wank. I blame the steady decline in tolerance I've seen around here over the last 2 months, the lack of open discussion, and the willful refusal of the influx of new fandom_wank members to acclimate themselves to the way things have always worked around here, or to understand the purpose of fandom_wank. And as I see it, the best thing to do, as soon as possible, is to regroup and figure out how we can get the community back on track and deal with those issues, not who was right or wrong to delete or undelete.

Those of us who knew about the deletion are feeling terribly alienated right now, and while I really want us all to have a place we can feel comfortable, I really hope that it doesn't involve splitting fandom_wank in two. When I came to the HP fandom from the Kevin Spacey fandom, I lurked for a year and a half because after the wankery there all I wanted to do was just lie low and enjoy myself and not get involved in fandom politics. But then I delurked, and despite still not wanting to get involved, I got involved and how. In the middle of that journalfen gradually started to seem like a safe haven of sanity and self-mockery, where nothing was ever taken too seriously. Journalfen has never been a place of cliques and bitchery, and if there's a way we can get it back to that point again, without splitting into two groups defined by the outcome of this wank, I really hope we can do that.

And, uh, I'm hitting post right now and hoping I don't regret it. Much love to everybody, all around.