Yuletide IRC

About
Yuletide has an IRC chatroom at irc://irc.slashnet.org/yuletide.

#yuletide web chat

Server: irc.slashnet.net

Channel: #yuletide

Each year the chatroom gets fairly busy during yuletide season. Discussion may be about Yuletide or it may be off-topic; impromptu recipe exchanges are common.

The original #yuletide was on irc.sff.net, but when that server closed in June of 2013, #yuletide made the move to slashnet.

Relevant Links
How to Connect to IRC (if clicking on the above link doesn't work automatically)

Beta Services
The chatroom can be used to find a beta for works written for Yuletide while preserving anonymity. To do so a participant can send a private message to anyone in the chatroom with the word "hippo" as part of their name (usually at the front for easy location by alphabetical order). The hippo will then ask everyone in the chatroom if there is anyone who is willing to beta and will get back to the participant with a match.

If you have to leave before the hippo has found your match, leave some private contact information so your hippo can alert you when they find someone.

Relevant Links
Yuletide Beta/Hippo Guide

Culture
Any group that has been around long enough will develop culture and traditions. Yulechat is welcoming to basically any past, current, future, or questioning Yuletide participant, and also people who like to read Yuletide without writing. Yulechatters are happy to explain the sometimes inexplicable traditions and in-jokes. A good sampling of 2011-era Yulechat culture is included in The Tough Guide to Yuletide.

The channel topic has a lot of information, frequently referenced items, and channel business updates (particularly hippo requests). To facilitate regular topic updates, various (read: all) Yulechatters are granted ops.


 * Ops loss
 * On sff.net, the server would occasionally throw a wobbly and chuck everybody out of the chatroom. This would usually result in opslessness, and consequentially a frozen topic until astolat or elyn came along and restored ops. Slashnet has been less prone to this problem, and there are a few more folks who are auto-opped on join by the server (as opposed to auto-opped by Azz's script).

Animals

 * Hippos
 * Beta matchmakers. Hippos dwell in the Wallow, and dance to get attention.


 * Bears
 * THREAT LEVEL: BEARS.


 * Goat
 * The Yulegoat is the somewhat benevolent caretaker spirit of the Yuletide exchange. Also, the traditional semi-mythic figure.

Yulechat Challenge
Each year there is a chatroom challenge in the form of an object that participants can try to include in their fics in a plausible way. Previous challenges include:
 * 2013: snorkels
 * 2012: fireworks
 * 2011: icebergs
 * cows
 * tentacles
 * explosions

Fanfiction
The yuletide chatroom has spawned its own Yuletide RPF fanfiction.

Yuletide RPF has become opt-in.

2013 opt-ins. Opt-ins closed with nominations.