To the people in the OTW Tumblr Inbox asking about how the OTW is responding to the American Election.

This is a separate post (and not a response to a specific message) because we all need to see it.

Folks have been asking Support (through the form) as well as the other social media mods, and we have now been given the following to tell you.

We are continuing to closely monitor political developments that may affect AO3 and the OTW as a whole. First, we want to assure you that there are several factors that tend to protect AO3 and its users from legal risks and challenges. These include that we are a non-profit, do not host images, do not use algorithms to promote or advertise content to users, are not aimed at children, and collect very little user data. The results of the 2024 U.S. election are deeply concerning, but the OTW remains committed to providing an inclusive space for fannish expression and will continue to fight for fans' free expression, both in court and through legislative efforts, in the U.S. and worldwide. We have seen that fans are a powerful force for promoting free expression, and we will continue to inform people about opportunities for their voices to be heard. If a bill is likely to be passed in the future that could impact our ability to provide services, our legal team will be prepared to offer updates, guidance, and legal support to our users. Fans are not alone in this fight. Both the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) (https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/the-aclu-is-fighting-back-against-trump ) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/11/2024-us-election-over-eff-ready-whats-next ) made preparations for this outcome and have developed strategies to combat anticipated efforts to curtail online freedoms. We urge our users to support these organizations and others as they fight for your rights and ours.

<3 Mod Remi

#FYI #signal boost

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ao3org

Guest comments temporarily disabled

Due to an influx of abusive spam comments, we've temporarily turned off the ability to leave comments while logged out. We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope to have guest comments back on soon! (16:06 UTC April 21, 2024)

#fyi

ao3commentoftheday reblogged

ao3org

We're hearing reports from people getting recurring 500 and 503 errors when trying to access certain pages. If you're experiencing this or getting a message that says you've been force logged out, please try clearing your browser cache before contacting Support.

Date: 04:58 UTC December 14, 2023

#FYI #ao3

ao3commentoftheday

When they call it a03

#it's oh three #because there are three O's in a row #fyi

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memorizingthedigitsofpi

iguanastevens

Feedback culture is dead, long live feedback culture!

AO3, fanfiction, and comments: the system isn’t working.

Fic authors have a problem with feedback – or rather, with the lack of it. Fanfiction has a notoriously low ratio of comments to hits, and many of us have expressed our frustration that we can get a hundred, two hundred, five hundred, even a thousand views on our stories, but only a handful of readers will leave kudos, let alone comments.

Unfortunately, this only gets worse for long, multi-chapter stories (aka, the longfics we know, love, and would sell our souls in a second if it meant an update), which also happen to be the stories that authors need the most support to continue and complete. Law of diminishing returns, y’all, and it sucks.

We’re not here to guilt you into leaving comments. We want to address the problem by changing the format, and we need your help to do it.

The goal is to increase the amount of feedback authors get from readers, especially on stories with multiple chapters, and to make it easier for everyone to show how much we love fics. We’re opening a discussion with ao3 to figure out how/if any of these options can be implemented, but first we need options to present!

Some of our current ideas:

Ability to leave a form of kudos on every chapter, instead of only once on the entire story: this lets authors know that you’re here and you’re reading their updates, so their hard work isn’t getting tossed into the internet void.
Comment templates: suggested comments that can be customized or posted as-is. Many of us draw a blank or get nervous when we try to think of a comment, so having pre-made options will both increase the total level of feedback and serve as practice, making it easier to leave more in-depth comments in the future.
Upvoting/leaving kudos on comments themselves: positive reinforcement makes giving feedback more fun and rewarding, and it lets the author know that readers are present and agreeing with other comments, even if they don’t leave one themselves.

We’ll contact AO3 to discuss the possibility of adding any of these as native features, and if that won’t work, we’re looking into creating and sharing a user script.

What you can do to help:

As a reader, what would you like to have? What would you be most likely to use? New ideas, opinions on ideas that are listed here, they’re all good.
As a creator, how would you feel about each of these options? Can you think of other ways of receiving or encouraging feedback?
Pros and cons of these (note: our thoughts on this are discussed in this google doc)
GET THE WORD OUT! Reblog this post, send it to your friends, link to it from your stories. We need as much input and support as possible to get this off the ground.

Feedback makes for happy authors. Happy authors make for more stories. Let’s keep this part of fandom alive!

More details about our thoughts, discussions, and ideas can be found in this google doc.

thelastpilot

wow, changing the format itself to facilitate comments! and interesting and rad way to go about helping authors

#FYI #the original poster seems to be gone from tumblr?#so I'll link my reblog on my main