Hello everyone! This is going to be a very short news post just to say we'll be having a brief modcation around the holidays and a bit of a priority shift for a few things in January as the New Year comes around, just to make sure when the holidays start to wrap up, the team can ease back into anything more time sensitive.

Holiday Modcation

The holidays are upon us. This time of year, hopefully many group members are getting a bit of a break, and that includes the moderators. Expect to see group functions halt on all fronts during this Holiday window. If moderators wish to work during modcation there may be some movement, but nothing is being required of the team during this time, so expect most things to not start happening again until mid January! Late January through February will be reserved for a few priority items.

• December 21st-23rd: (Wind down period.)The Moderator staff will be focusing on getting feedback out for non-quest items submitted to some general queues (normal prompts/fully paid design approvals) dated December 20th or older. Ideally if any edits are needed to prompts, we'll get feedback out for those and we'll address things that are resubmitted after Modcation is over. We'll be attempting to get any design approvals feedback out to paid submissions queued before December 20th. This is not a guarantee, but just know things submitted after December 20th or unpaid submissions will continue to be low priority and may or may not receive a response before the break. We'll make a good faith effort here to get feedback out for all submissions, even the unpaid ones, but it is worth noting that there's a few things in our queue with questions from the team that they need confirmation on from Manaberri, so if your submission does not get feedback before the 23rd it might be one of those.
• December 24th, 2025-January 17th, 2026: (Modcation) Moderators will not be expected to work during this time frame. Users can still submit prompts and design approvals, etc. but please do not ask about turnaround times during this window as well. Staff may choose to work if they desire, but it won't be a required thing. We want to make sure the whole team has the space to take a break during this period.
• January 18th-31st: (Wind up period.) All moderators will be slowly coming back. Responses may be slow during this time period but we'll be looking to get back to things at a more regular pace after these initial weeks.
• January 18th-February 28th: (Special Quest Priority Window) Prompt moderator staff will be asked to put priority specifically on Special Quests with claims submitted for the year 2025.
  • For more info on time sensitivity for Special Quests, see the question "My act or claim was soft-rejected! Do I have to have the changes completed within a specified time frame?" in the questing FAQ section.
  • Due to modcation being announced with short notice, we are extending the follow up time for 2025 Special Quest claims to go until February 28th, 11:59pm PST time.
    • This means Special Quest claims for 2025 must be submitted in 2025, but the team will follow up on these starting January 18th. During this time we will aim to get feedback out to group members in advance of February 28th. Any requested quest act edits must be resubmitted with enough time to be fully reviewed and marked complete by the end of February 2026.

We know the wind down and wind up periods make this time seem longer, but moderators will still be working through this period. Just expect that the team may be working through a flood of submissions prior to and after modcation. Please be patient with us, thank you!

Annual Questing Cleanup

In January and February 2026, we'll be looking at handling a lot of questing submissions specifically from the year 2025. January will be focused on addressing special questing submissions, with claims. February 2026 will be spent addressing older questing acts that did not have any claim submitted in 2025 or wasn't being actively worked through in January of 2026.

An important note about older quest acts without claims:

Last year (2024) we noticed an increasingly long list of quest acts submitted without claims. In order to process the acts for a certain quest someone is pursuing, we need a claim submitted to indicate when all of the acts are fully done. Unfortunately, this makes our list of prompts and acts in the back end of the site appear much larger than it is. This list is thankfully a lot shorter this year (2025), but the team would still like to see our queue of prompts and acts reflect more closely to where they are currently sitting around the start of next year (2026).

Starting January 18th, 2026 we'll plan to do an annual clean up for submitted quest acts that are from 2025 that do not have claims actively being worked through in the last month or so (Nov-Dec of 2025). This means, for quest acts submitted without a claim that are much older (months generally without a claim submitted), we will check 2 things and that will determine what we do with the submitted act:

1. If the character featured in a given act no longer belongs to the submitter, we will hard reject the act.
2. If the character featured in a given act belongs to the submitted still, we will soft reject the act with a "cooldown" of 365 days to just bump a reminder that acts need a claim submitted for us to review them. If the act is not resubmitted within that 365 day window it will be hard rejected.

Keep in mind that in both of these cases, you can still resubmit a hard or soft rejected act that was part of an unfinished quest at any time. A hard reject or soft reject does not mean that you can never submit an unfinished quest again. It just might mean resubmitting the acts closer together and submitting the appropriate claim so we know to review them! There will be a generic message to indicate if your quest act has been in the queue too long without a related quest claim submitted.

As mentioned earlier in 2025, this annual cleanup will likely take place in early January in future years as well. We recommend that if anyone has quest acts submitted without claims that are older than 2 months and you want to see them reviewed, be sure to submit a claim before the end of December. Once January starts to hit, during that month, quest acts in the queue from September or older will be either hard or soft rejected depending on the status of the elnin attached to the quest act.

Thank you for your patience with us on this! We just feel some amount of cleanup in this space annually would help us out in getting a clearer view of how much we need to review within a given month.