tzikeh

Okay, gotcha. That's...well, I'll be frank, that's interesting, not necessarily in the flattering sense, because Yuletide is and was the biggest pan-fandom social event of the year well before it was pulled (inadvertently or no) into the politics of the OTW*, but I don't have any reason to disbelieve the assertion that the old servers had had about all they could take. However, if AO3 was genuinely the only server remotely capable of handling that visiter load, and those who deleted their stories would be those who disagreed with the OTW that they would be highly unlikely to participate again, anyway, then the mods gotta crunch the numbers and do what's necessary. I can respect that. It's unfortunate but probably necessary, and I hope that the anti-OTW guys can put together their old challenge and that there's lots of cross-reccing next year.

*I don't mean "politics" in a pejorative sense, and if I was going to hate on astolat, then surely I could find a better reason than her membership in the OTW. But it has been a major bone of contention in fandom over the past couple of years, and ignoring that would be disingenuous. Again, I don't mean that to be any more than a factual statement; elynross in particular has made comments to the effect that, yeah, the Yuletide mods got that before they proceeded forward.