(((I Will Outlive)))

fanworks aren’t “content.” they’re pieces of joy and wonder. 

content is a placeholder word used by social media sites to talk about the pieces of flotsam and jetsam that keep people using the site so they can be advertised to. 

I want to get back to talking about stories and paintings and videos. talk about the art that people are creating, fueled by their passions and interests. 

when I write a post, I’m not “creating content.” I’m not filling a box for other people to to “engage” with. I’m sharing a thought for other people to consider. they can agree or disagree with it. they can share it or ignore it as they see fit. 

“content creator” is a generic term created by corporations to describe a vast and multi-faceted group of people by the thing they do to benefit the corporation.

“consumer” is a generic term created by corporations to describe a vast and multi-faceted group of people by the thing they do to benefit the corporation. 

“engagement” is a metric that corporations use to determine whether a “content creator” is “consumed” enough to be worth running ads next to.

I want fandom to be full of writers and artists and fans, and I want the focus to be on joy and creation and celebrating each other. fandom isn’t a business. it’s a community.

Excellent question in the notes about what we should call people instead. Personally, I just call people “fan” - it’s what we all are, no matter how we express it. 

Some fans write. Other fans draw or paint. Still others create playlists or moodboards or cosplays or gifs or RP threads. A rare few even organize cons or create and maintain websites or servers. And many enjoy the things that others do without creating things themselves.

Instead of having separate terms that divide us up into categories, I like thinking of us as a collective. A community, like I said above. Because the thing is, your role changes throughout your time in fandom (as a general concept) and in different fandoms (connected to different canons)

I’ve been a writer, an artist, a podficcer, and volunteer. I’ve also been a lurker, a reader, a commenter and reblogger. Throughout all of those different things that I did, I was a fan. Just like I’m a person first and a professional second. 

I’m valuable because I exist, not because of what I can contribute. I belong because I want to be part of a community, not because of what I do within that community.

This is my most common type of block too. I have the idea and I'm excited about the idea, but when I have time to write I want to do anything but that.

Sometimes it's: I have imagined this so thoroughly that it feels overwhelming to write it down. I'll never capture the depth and breadth of this scene in words. How do I convey the scenes in my head in a way that people will see what I'm seeing. My solution for that is starting a "word tree." Pick a word to describe the scene and then start listing synonyms coming off in branches. Then what the character is feeling, sensing, short descriptions of what is going on. This also helps with blank paper syndrome or not knowing how to start a scene as some replies have already mentioned.

The other issue I have is in a similar vein, I get overwhelmed at how long I think this project is going to take. I start thinking it's going to be months of writing. I'll never finish. What if it's not worth all the effort? While I'm working on this story, I won't be able to work on something else. Or if I do take a break to work on something else this wont get finished. What if I get in a good writing groove but then I can't write again this week and I forget what I was trying to say?

Then it's about taking the pressure off. Figure out why there's that pressure or what is causing the most stress. That can be giving your permission to take a break or work on something else. It's could be a reminder that the time is going to pass anyway so you might as well write it rather than worrying about how long it's going to take.

Write something really low stakes. Like a few tumblr tags about the expression of the character's faces during this scene and what might have been going their head. That is one of my favorite ways to break the block

About evolving as a writer over the course of a fic that takes a long time to write.

*puts hand up* hi, I've done this a couple of times in the decades I've been writing fic. And what I've noticed is, nobody but me cares. Because everyone who is reading it is there for the story. They were happy reading it at Chapter 1 competence level, and they're still happy reading it at Chapter 50 (or whatever) competence level, because they are in it for the story, and you are the one telling it.

The very few times I've actually had a conversation with a reader about it, they thought it was cool to see me grow as a writer. Which is pretty much how I've felt about it as a reader when I notice another writer's growth, too. :-)

While you can report incorrect tags on AO3, the Policy & Abuse team will only investigate reports about the required tags:

If an author has tagged one of those incorrectly, PAC will reach out and explain the issue and give them time to make the change. If they don't change it by the deadline, PAC will remove tags that don't apply to the fic. The only tag they will ever add is "Author Chose Not to Use Archive Warnings" - and that only happens when the work has no other warnings left.

PAC won't do anything about ship tags, character tags, or additional tags. Reporting them won't do anything except make volunteers spend time telling you that they don't deal with those issues.

If there are authors you don't want to see in the tag, you can mute them. If there are individual works you never want to see again, you can block them.

Other than that, you can explain how tags work and what Wranglers are and how AO3 doesn't have algorithms. Different websites have different cultures and expectations, and not everyone realizes that on their own.

Support (iirc) will investigate "wrong fandom" and "wrong language" report also.

Thank you! yes, I forgot to add language to the list of required tags. I'll edit the original post to reflect that.

this year, I'm going to do the opposite of NaNoWriMo: None-vember. it's where I don't write anything for a month because I'm actually very tired and I just want to nap

If someone online requires you to share personally-identifying information in order to interact with them, you’re better off not interacting with them.

I keep hearing about fandom spaces requiring photo ID in order to gain access, and I can’t emphasize enough how bad that is.

Giving someone your ID, even with everything but the date of birth blacked out, is still giving them information.

Government-issued ID is still identifiable based on fonts, colours, backgrounds etc. That means someone could use your ID to track you to your country or region. People who are determined could then use other information that you’ve shared to track you further.

The issue isn’t just them being able to show up at your house (or send someone else), either. It’s the fact that they could sign up for credit cards in your name and trap you in thousands of dollars of debt that impacts your whole life. They could steal your identity.

Anyone who wants some kind of “legal protection” against minors seeking out NSFW materials should just do what the porn sites do. “By checking this box, you acknowledge that you’re 18 years of age or older.” Much simpler and safer for everyone involved.

Anyone you provide personal information to needs to be able to both protect that information and reliably destroy it.

In the words of Gandalf, “Keep it secret. Keep it safe.”

to be perfectly honest, my mood when it comes to fandom creations these days is basically:

I don't care if it's good. I don't care if it's finished. I don't care if it's cringe. I don't care if someone else did it first. I don't care if no one else cares at all. What I care about is whether or not I cackled with glee while making it.

The Zero Comment Challenge is a way for readers to find new stories and reach out to authors they want to encourage. 

Every fandom has stories that get lost in the shuffle. Maybe they were posted during a busy time and didn’t get much attention. Maybe the author didn’t tag as effectively as they could have to get their story in front of the audience it was intended for. Maybe the fandom is just really shy so they leave kudos instead of comments. 

The Zero Comment Challenge is meant to find those authors and give them some love. Go to the AO3 search and filter by comments, then look at the fics that don’t have any comments at all. Find one that looks interesting to you and let the author know what you thought. They get to meet a new reader and you get to find new fic. Everyone wins!

credit to @polizwrites for originating the idea and @copperbadge  who wrote the first post I can find about it here. 

If you or someone you know is getting spam comments from guests (rather than logged in users), you don't need to send in a report. You can just use the Spam button located at the bottom of every guest comment. The button will only be visible to the logged-in owner of the work.

If the volume of these spam comments is overwhelming, you can also edit a single work or edit multiple works to restrict commenting to only logged in users.

If you're a twitter user, I recommend following AO3_status over there. They're always on top of updates about site downtime and other issues.

Since there are a lot of new people on tumblr these days, I'm going to start this whole thing off by saying that this is my personal blog and while this blog does have AO3 in the name, this is in no way official or affiliated with whatever OTW might have to say on this subject.

Yes, I've seen the reddit post  about the GPT-3 bot scraping AO3. Yes, I'm aware that Sudowrite.com are using the data from that bot to generate text.

A few things I've learned as I've looked into this:

1. Bot scraping is legal. If a website is publicly available on the web (does not require a user to login in order to see its contents), then they don't have grounds to try to stop a bot from doing what anyone can do. Here's an article by the Electronic Frontier Foundation about why this is the case  and also why it could be considered (on balance) a good thing . For example, scraping websites helps academics and journalists do their work.

2. Elon Musk doesn't own GPT-3. He's listed as one of the founders of OpenAI, the group who created GPT-3, but he resigned in 2018. He could still be a donor, but he has no official capacity in the organization.

3. Sudowrites is a tool that generates text, but it is a writing assistant not an AI author. It can not structure a story and develop a plot independently. It can not do research. It is meant to assist a human author by giving them prompts or ideas, helping them find a word or a phrase. But anything created solely by the bot would be at least somewhat incoherent and also in danger of committing plagiarism. For more information, I recommend this article.

What does this all mean? First of all, just because it's legal doesn't mean you have to like it. I'm not a fan of it, myself. but I also know that Google scrapes AO3 in order to provide search results for fans trying to find fic so I've kind of resigned myself to it.

Second of all, there's nothing AO3 or the OTW can do about it, really. There's a technical fix they can implement to prevent scraping by one particular bot (the one mentioned in the reddit article), but that's about it.

You, as an author on AO3, could lock your works to the Archive (restrict access to only logged in users). This might or might not protect your works from scraping. I don't know enough about these bots to give you an answer one way or the other. This feels gross. I understand that. I feel it too. Do what you need to do to feel better.

The original reddit post author states that they contacted the OTW Board, so there's no need for you to write in to AO3 Support. They're already aware of the situation.

If you are getting ready to post a work to AO3, but you haven't finished writing it yet, do not post a placeholder saying something like, "I'm going to write a fic about..."

AO3 is an Archive. It is meant to be a safe location for creators to house their fanworks, long-term. A title and tags alone aren't a fanwork, and posting a note about what you plan to post is against the Terms of Service and could end up getting you a warning on your account if you're reported.

Not to mention, when you edit a work that doesn't change the date on it. So if you post a placeholder today and then edit it next week to put the story in it, it won't go to the top of the tag. You'll annoy readers now without getting readers later.

Instead, I recommend either creating your work in another location (such as google docs or scrivener or other software of your choosing) and then moving it over into AO3 when you've finished your chapter/fic.

If you're like me and you prefer drafting in the AO3 window, then you can save your work as a draft. This allows you to create the placeholder without actually posting it for everyone else to see.

To save a draft, hit the Preview button at the bottom of the work posting form. Then, scroll down the preview to the bottom of the page and hit Save Draft. Drafts are saved for up to 30 days before automatic deletion. You can access your drafts from your Dashboard, under the link Drafts.

For readers, please do not go out of your way to search out these works and report them. That will bury the Policy & Abuse team in reports. However, if you see these while normally scrolling through the Archive, you can report the works by clicking on the Policy Questions & Abuse Reports link at the bottom of every page of AO3. If a work has already been reported, there is no need for you to report it again.

And if you're participating in a ship war, know that these works will not actually stay on the Archive. They will be removed for breaking TOS. The number of works that a particular ship or character or fandom has on the Archive is not a system you should try to game. Instead, enjoy the content you prefer and let others do the same.

I want to start off by stating that PAC deals with more than “serious” or “major” infractions of the TOS. Our wheelhouse is all TOS violations big and small. We also answer any questions about policy anyone might have. I actually really enjoy explaining “what is and is not allowed” and those are some of my favorite kinds of tickets.

Here’s what happens when you a submit a report. First, it creates a new ticket. The ticket has the time you submitted the report, and all the info you put in your report. (Please give us information about the work. Things like who posted it, what about it is against TOS, what chapter we need to look at, and so on. If you don’t do this, it makes it a lot harder for us to investigate. Also double check what link is filled in. You’d be surprised how many times we get the TOS page or our own contact form reported to us!)

New tickets are sorted into categories depending on what they’re about. Some categories like harassment are higher priority and we try to handle those sooner. Others can be harder and tend to sit until someone has the spoons to deal with it. Also there’s just a lot of tickets to get through and we are a relatively small team, even ‘easy’ tickets might still sit for a long time before anyone gets to it.

Someone will eventually take the ticket and investigate whether what’s being reported really is against TOS or not. If so, they’ll do all the administrative stuff like recording whether it’s the user’s first time doing it, saving evidence of the violation, and so on. After that, they’ll draft any emails that need to be sent out. If the email is to a user who violated the TOS, it will explain what is in violation and why. It will also say what needs to be done about it, by when, and what we will do if they don’t fix it. If the email is to the person submitting the report, it will explain whether the content is or is not against TOS.

Another volunteer will review the entire case before it gets sent, both to check the drafts for things like spelling errors and also to sign off on the decision. PAC volunteers do not work alone and we do not make decisions on our own either.

After the case is fully reviewed and checked, the letters get sent. If there was a deadline given to a user to do something, we’ll check after the deadline to see whether they did it. If they didn’t do it, we will do whatever we told them we’d do in the original letter. Then we record the outcome on the ticket and before closing send any replies as needed.

— Guest mod tealight

Disclaimer: I am speaking for myself and not behalf of AO3 or PAC. While I can answer general questions, I cannot tell you if a specific work or user is breaking the rules. If you want to file a report or otherwise need an official PAC response, you can find PAC’s contact form by clicking on the “Policy Questions & Abuse Reports” link on any AO3 page.

Reblogging this for visibility (though I sort of doubt anyone who follows me really needs to hear this), because I see a lot of tags on AO3-related posts to the effect that they think reporting things is “mean” or “overkill,” and that’s just not true, and I think it’s a carryover from dealing with other sites where reporting someone can have unpredictable and sometimes completely disproportionate consequences.

tldr - The AO3 Abuse team (PAC, apparently) IS NOT the same as your unfriendly neighborhood Big Social Media Banhammer!!

Reporting someone, or some fic, is not going to result in an algorithmic instaban, or automated “points” against the user in some sort of “three strikes” system, or anything like that. (It is my impression that a history of violations can add up to more serious consequences over time, but that’s not the same as “X number of reports = consequences.”) Any violation you report will be analyzed by a human being for accuracy and legitimacy! Two human beings, in fact, per the above! So if you’re wrong about whether something’s really a violation of the TOS, the most that will happen is that two volunteers spent time on something that ultimately turned out not to be against the rules. Frivolous reporting is bad and wastes people’s time, but reporting edge cases isn’t actually a problem or something you should try to avoid as a matter of politeness or community norms. You’re not hurting the object of the report by submitting it.

↖ This user appreciates likes just as much as reblogs. They understand that likes are used to show support and to mark posts for later reblogging. They know that people have more than one blog and that likes are assigned to the main blog even when reblogs occur on sideblogs. 

This user is fully aware that reblogs are important in order for a post to reach a wider audience, but they still appreciate getting a ❤ because it means someone saw and acknowledged their post and making that connection with another person is important, even if the post doesn’t go any further than that. 

This user knows that sometimes a like is all of the interaction you can manage with a post, and this user wants you to know that that’s totally okay. You keep scrolling, you funky little tumblrite. 

This user hopes you have a great day.

if someone tells you that your OC or your fave is a Mary Sue, tell them they shouldn’t complain about a character when they can’t even get their name right

when they try to explain that a Mary Sue is an unrealistically powerful or capable character, tell them that you think the term they are looking for is “main character” and that all forms of storytelling have abundant examples of them

if they’re still going at that point, just block them because they are clearly incapable of taking hints

I've been avoiding tumblr because October is OTW (and AO3) membership drive time, and I didn't want to deal with the inevitable wank. But now that it's all over, I did want to make one point, as an OTW volunteer myself (graphics designer for Fanlore):

I do not want to get paid.

I volunteer because the OTW has a mission that I believe in: to provide access to and preserve the history of fanworks and fan cultures.

I volunteer because I want to help an organization that helped me immensely in my life. I continue to volunteer because the people I have met while volunteering at the OTW are wonderful human beings that I want to spend more time with.

If I wanted to get paid, I wouldn't have applied for a volunteer role.

I have a job. Fandom isn't it. I do not want fandom to be it. Fandom is something that I do for me, in my free time, to express my creativity and to connect with a community. If it was work, I wouldn't love it nearly as much.

Video description: a tiktok video discussing AO3's new comment blocking feature.

The video begins by showing a tweet from the Ao3_status twitter account. The tweet reads, "Comment blocking is now live! 🍾" and is responding to the tweet linking the AO3 News post announcing that comment blocking is coming.

The narrator then goes to the comments section on one of her works and points out that there is a new button available. On comments from other users, you can now see a button labelled "Block."

She taps on the Block button and it takes her to a confirmation page. The confirmation page outlines what blocking will do: stop a user from commenting on your works and stop a user from replying to your comments elsewhere on AO3. It also outlines what blocking will not do: hide that user's works or bookmarks from you, delete or hide their existing comments on your works, hide their comments elsewhere on the site.

She confirms that she wants to block the user and then returns to her comments section. The button that formerly said "Block" now says "Unblock." She says you can remove the block on a user by pressing that button again or by tapping on your username at the top of the page and selecting My Preferences from the dropdown menu that appears.

On the My Preferences page, there is now a button labelled "Block users." After tapping that button, she goes to a new page. On that new page, you can see the user she just blocked and a button next to their username that says "Unblock."

She taps that button and it takes her to a confirmation page which outlines what will happen if she agrees. Unblocking a user will allow them to comment on your work or to reply to your comments elsewhere on the site. She confirms.

The screen goes back to the Blocked Users page found in My Preferences, and the narrator explains that you don't need to find a comment from another user in order to block them. If you'd like, you can type their name into the text box provided and block them directly from that page.

Not shown: you can also block a user from that user's profile page.

If you'd like to know more about more blocking and muting features that are planned, read the News post linked above.

FYI to all it looks like this to the people you have blocked:

thank you to @izhunny for the help! more info here: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/izhunny/686868603279130624

[image description: screenshot of the buttons and kudos left at the bottom of an AO3 work. Where the comment box would usually be, there is a blue infobox that reads, "Sorry, you have been blocked by one or more of this work's creators."]

thank you so much for checking this out and sharing with us!