fernsy
| Fernsy | |
|---|---|
| Joined | April 2018 (site) April 2021 (Discord) |
| Aliases |
|
| Gender | Transgender woman |
| Notable actions/creations | Being an admin |
| Socials | |
| Webpage | fernsy |
| Other general information | |
| Residence | Either Chicago or Oklahoma City; deliberate ambiguity |
| Nationality | American |
| Religion | Irreligious |
| Real name | Lauren Fern[a] |
fernsy, formerly known as yagton or Chatrumor, is an American OWOT user. Since 15 May 2024, she has been one of the Discord server's admins. On 1 July 2024, she came out as a transgender woman.
Name
fernsy is a diminutive of Fern, her post-transition middle name and nickname. This name was chosen as a tribute to a close transfem friend whose middle name is Leaf.
A past name of hers, yagton, is still in collective memory, though not preferred. It is a blend of her former middle name Ashton and the acronym YAGNI ("you aren't gonna need it").[b]
History
Campaign for Discord Admin
"And from what i've seen, Yagton would genuinely do a pretty good job in keeping this server clean, and while he isn't as active as i am – despite having around the same amount of passion as me in desiring this server to be moderated – he definitely is more active than you are, so that's a plus." - AndreiXYZ
OWOT's lack of adequate moderation, on both the canvas and the Discord server, has been a long standing issue within the community. A major source of criticism was that all of the previous admins were appointed purely on basis of being OG users of the site. This older set of moderators were infamous for being uniformly inactive, and left almost all administrative functions to FP, who had to balance his responsibilities with IRL obligations and left many problems to run rampant within OWOT.
In May of 2024 Fern petitioned to become admin on the Discord specifically, putting forth a proposal for ironing out the server's rules. Her qualifications included being a long-time user who had been active in calling out misbehavior within the community.
The push to install Fern as an admin was met with significant support from the userbase, with AndreiXYZ in particular rallying users to private their worlds until a new admin is appointed. FP gave Fern moderator permits on May 15th, 2025, after which Andrei congratulated her and expressed optimism for the site's future.
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Fern's application for Admin. -
Fern's memorandum. -
Andrei congratulating Fern after she is made admin on the OWOT Discord(May 15th, 2024)
Actions as Discord Admin
Miscellaneous Discord Activities
Catposting
IRL
fernsy was born in Oklahoma, in the United States, c. 2005. She first began programming at the age of 11, c. 2016.
fernsy was a user of Edit the Text (ETT), a site operated by the Huang twins. On the site, she made a bot to save a page regularly, reverting any edits made by a certain IP address, though fernsy's adversary eventually created a bot to spam writes to the page, defeating her. fernsy prevailed in the arms race against this adversary by reprogramming the bot to post a frequently-changing link to a random page, until 2018, when ETT shut down.
ETT had no ratelimits or size limits, leading to the strategy of "nuking", where users would simply upload a large amount of text to a page to prevent it from being loaded by users' browsers.
In March 2018, fernsy created her Discord account.
fernsy first joined OWOT in April 2018, later joining the OWOT Discord server in August 2021.
Personal life
fernsy worked at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City, where she once lived.
Sometime in October 2024, motivated by Oklahoma's anti-LGBT laws, she moved to Chicago.
Gender transition
fernsy had been aware of her transgender status since around 2018, but was not in a position to act on it, as her parents were unsupportive and she lived in Oklahoma, a state with several anti-LGBT laws.
AndreiXYZ, a close friend of fernsy, was one of the first to know.
On 1 July 2024, she announced that she was transgender.