Make The Yuletide Gay
| Challenge | |
|---|---|
| Name: | Make the Yuletide Gay |
| Date(s): | 2007-2017 |
| Moderator(s): | nopseud, pensnest, snarkyllama |
| Founder: | ephemera, nopseud, phaballa, vaudeville |
| Type: | fic exchange and archive |
| Fandom: | popslash |
| URL: | http://www.maketheyuletidegay.org/ |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Make the Yuletide Gay (MtYG) is a popslash holiday fic exchange. It was first held in in 2007 as a continuation of Don We Now Our Gay Apparel, the original popslash Secret Santa exchange. It runs from the middle of October until the revealing of author identities in January.
MtYG follows essentially the same format as its parent challenge. Participants sign up with a request consisting of two pairings (either intra-Nsync, intra-Backstreet or a Crossover between the two groups) and a short description of something they would like to see in their story. They may also optionally request that their assignment contains either an intra-Nsync or intra-BSB pairing. Assignments are made randomly by the challenge back-end code.
Stories go live on the 24th of December, and the author identities are revealed on the 7th of January. In line with the tradition established by DWNOGA, everyone who signs up is guaranteed to receive a story, and pinch-hit volunteers make up any short-fall.
Feedback is sent to authors via the website between publication of the stories and the reveal of the authors' names. Unlike DWNOGA, non-participants in the challenge may sign up for a reader account, allowing them to send feedback during the anonymous phase.
Despite the shrinking of the popslash fandom as a whole, its secret santa remains a popular and much-anticipated exchange.
History
The final DWNOGA exchange ran in 2006. In 2007, the sole remaining DWNOGA moderator still active on LiveJournal handed over the popslash SeSa to a new group of mods. As no one had access to the DWNOGA code or server, an entirely new challenge site was set up, with a new codebase, at maketheyuletidegay.org [1].
The second year of MtYG introduced several new features to the challenge code. These included 1) the option for participants to leave a 'Dear Santa' letter on the MtYG site itself, allowing participants with no LJ or a locked LJ to give their Santa extra information, and 2) Elfmail, a web based mail system designed to reduce the chance of email being lost to spam filters, and to streamline mod response.