Hyphenfail

The ever-mysterious hyphen: Oh yeah, it's sinisterFFA started on LiveJournal. Though there was always a backup meme on Dreamwidth in case of technical problems with LJ, for the first four years of the meme's existence the vast majority of the activity was on LJ. There have always been nonnies who wanted the entire party permanently moved to Dreamwidth and nonnies who did not, and this disagreement was the source of much bitter wank.

In April 2014, a LiveJournal glitch made it impossible to access FFA unless the user manually changed the hyphen in the comm's name to an underscore. Mods, who had said in the past that they didn't plan to ever move the meme to DW, began reconsidering.

The contentiousness of the topic is illustrated by responses to this April 21 comment, “Maybe it's time for a permanent move to DW … Just a thought.” There were nearly 500 comments in reply. However, a few days later, when another nonny wrote, “I hope the underscore problem is never fixed. Shit actually works here,” there were only a tenth as many comments, and they were much less heated.

Poor Dememe Nonny had a terrible time trying to keep up with both sites at first, accidentally deleting three weeks' worth of backups after finishing DW support. “Things that are certainly gone are the underscore fixes for the LJ meme and some link changes to support Dreamwidth. If I wasn't in public I'd probably be crying.” However, things worked out a short while later.

One nonny floated the tinhat theory that “The FFA LJ comm broke due to active sabotage by a Livejournal employee or employees.” Another source of wank was ownership of LJ by the Russian company SUP: One nonny noted that Dreamwidth is banned in Russia and certain other countries (citation). Additionally…

Out of the five support requests that were lodged, the only one that got a reply was the one that was lodged with the Russian LJ support and set to private by LJ. The other requests are still open and ignored. (The anon who left that request just posted on the LJ post about the reply they got saying that the error was fixed now.)

Toward the end of April, one nonny offered to set up a poll with their paid SurveyMonkey account to see whether nonnies preferred to stay on LJ or move to DW. Ur-Sunny politely declined: “While I appreciate the offer, where FFA lands is not going to be up to a vote or a poll. At this point it is a question of technical issues and useability, not a question of what people like better.”

This comment, from “a survivor of the Great RP Migration of Christmas 2010, and a former mod of one of the largest games that had to migrate over [from LJ to DW],” explains in technical detail why that nonny is pro-DW. “Moving would be ripping off a bandaid that we've been trying to keep in place with duct tape and prayers, when we'd really be better off just putting on a new freaking bandaid.”

Some other relevant threads:

The celebration over the return to LJ was short-lived.

The topic of what this clusterfuck would be called arose. Suggestions included “The Great LJ Comm Crash of 2014,” “LJ Fail '14,” “Hyphengate,” “Underscore Scare,” “Underscare,” “The Move,” and “Underscorned.” The one that got the most nods was “Hyphenfail.”

On the bright side, the stress of the move did prompt //"some terrible and innacurate anthropomorphic,"// a parody of the song "Flowers of Bermuda," and "Deliver Us From Uncertainty."

On April 30, Ur-Sunny made //"A non-announcement announcement:"// The mod team would make the final decision over the upcoming weekend and post it in “all the usual places.” In the meantime, LJ vs. DW wank would be banned and frozen. On May 5, it was announced that the meme would move to Dreamwidth on July 5, 2014, which it did.

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