Using eFiction to host a Secret Santa archive?

You can set an archive to maintenance mode so that no one but admins can access it. The other two items would require modding the script or some kind of trickery. You could probably edit the skins so that the author names just don't appear, but of course the stories would still be linked to profiles (but if the profiles have no names on them, then that might not matter too much; as long as the links to the browse and author pages, which would display the names, are not present or the files are maybe CHMODed to 000 so they're inaccessible). The recipient could always be added to the summary; if that's not preferred then someone with knowledge of PHP/MySQL would have to mod the files.

Probably, yes.

It might be a bit too much for a Secret Santa project though.

The first and easiest thing to do would be to make sure the archive is set in moderated mode... stories would have to be validated by a moderator/admin before they could show up in the regular archive.

Adding a recipient field would take only a wee bit of coding after that.

Sorry for the late replies (I forgot to subscribe!), but it looks like it can be done... I'd just need a second admin with better PHP knowledge than I have, lol.

You could probably look at the coauthors functionality to base the recipient info on.

One suggestion I might make is that you contact the lovely people over at Archive of Our Own ( http://www.archiveofourown.org ) and ask if their "collections" feature will be going live in time to host your Secret Santa project. I know they're working on a pilot collection project for Yuletide ( http://www.yuletidetreasure.org/ ) at the moment and that project is very similar to yours... It's worth asking about. It would save a lot of time for you not to have to learn all that PHP to make eFiction work the way you want it to...

I wouldn't be opening anything until 2010, so plenty of time.

And I'm aware of Yuletide switching to AO3, I'm a 2nd year participant of that exchange, lol.

Lucky you! I wanted to participate, but I didn't actually know anything Yuletide until after sign-ups. I'm obviously running in the wrong fandoms. XD

Hmm another idea (though a friend of mine who is a member/admin on an eFiction powered site gave me a roundabout method using an "Anonymous" account), is... how does the challenge feature work? Could I use that?

Edit: Also, the AO3 suggestion wouldn't work since I'm planning an exchange for original fiction, which AO3 doesn't host.

I just wanted to throw this out there, but you could also try doing an archive like this with [ http://drupal.org]Drupa[/drupal[/url]l, it has many modules, especially permission ones and it might just be feasible. However, Drupal takes up quite a lot of RAM so it wouldn't work too well on shared hosting (from personal experience).

You probably could use challenges.  Each person requesting a fic would add their own challenge.  Then the person giving the fic would add their story to the archive and respond to the challenge.  There wouldn't be any mechanism to claim a challenge though...and there's no way to limit the number of challenges a person can post if you wanted to do that for the exchange.  I think if I were to do a secret santa that's where I'd start.  Make a copy of the challenges module and then make modifications from there.