Happy birthday to AO3 🎂🎉

How am I only just learning this!?

[ID: a cropped screenshot of the AO3 Exclude filter section, reading "Other tags to exclude". "*/reader" and "*/you" have been selected. End ID.]

Wait

[ID: cropped screenshot of the ao3 include filter, reading "Other tags to include:" with "*/James "Bucky" Barnes" selected. /end ID]

IT WORKS

Is this new???? I've been wanting wildcard relationship search for YEARS 😍😍😍

My multishipping ass is about to go ham...

helpful info for those who need it

"This fic was ai generated—" Cool, so lemme block you real quick

i immediately thought of this

AO3 is open source.

If you don’t like AO3′s core, founding mission–a fan-run archive where you can host your fanwork without having to worry whether it will get yanked when someone decides it’s objectionable–or if you’re upset that they aren’t interested in budging from that mission even when it comes into conflict with values that you, personally, hold dear…

All the code is on Github. You want an archive with all the fandom-tailored bells and whistles that AO3 has, but with a moderation policy for content you find objectionable/offensive/injurious to public morality/in unforgivably poor taste? Nothing’s preventing you from copying the software that runs AO3 and setting up your own archive with it. Well, nothing but the resources and technical skills required to host, deploy, and maintain a complex Rails app. Which isn’t anything to sneeze at, but if having a space free of the shit you’re objecting to is important enough to mobilize like-minded folks for vigilante enforcement via assorted charming forms of social coercion–shaming, harassment, ostracism, smear campaigns, doxxing, suicide-baiting, etc–surely it’s important enough to mobilize like-minded folks to contribute money, volunteer hours, and technical skills towards building the kind of space you actually want to see. The kind of space where you don’t need to resort to the vilest depths of social coercion to enforce a content policy in line with your values, because it can be enforced quietly and civilly by the mods with a few mouse clicks.

And if that’s too high a barrier–if your fandom is awash in stuff you find intolerable and you need a moderated fanwork archive now now now but the technical side might as well be sorcery–five bucks a month and an afternoon of point-and-click setup will get you a Wordpress install on shared hosting. Wordpress ain’t AO3, but it can be bent into almost any shape you want via plugins, and even a bare-bones default install comes with categories, tags, user accounts, comments, and moderation options. That’s all you need for a basic archive. Wordpress.com will even host a small one for you for free. If it fills a need, and people put a fraction of the energy and social capital into promoting it as they currently put into witch-hunting transgressors into submission, it won’t take long for it to hit critical mass within a fandom.

You want a strictly-moderated safe space? The bad news is, AO3 is never going to be that space. You don’t get to demand that the people who sink a bunch of time, skill, and effort into providing it to you (for free–actual free, not “selling your most sensitive data to advertisers” free) throw the entire carefully-considered purpose of their work under the bus whenever that purpose can’t be fully reconciled with the values you think deserve precedence. You want an archive with a different ultimate purpose and a different set of values that override competing considerations, you’ll have to contribute your own time and effort to building it.

But the time and effort required is by no means prohibitive. Fandom has been DIYing shit since forever, and right now the tools are more powerful and accessible than they’ve ever been. So the good news is, if AO3 isn’t doing it for you… it takes less heavy lifting than ever to build an archive of your own.

Censors, fandom police, purity culture diehards… put your money where your mouth is.

But, but … that involves doing actual work besides yelling at people!

In fairness, it would involve a lot of work. I kind of blew it off in the original post as “nothing’s preventing you… well, nothing but the resources and technical skills required to host, deploy, and maintain a complex Rails app.” But from what I understand, the actual infrastructure side of installing and deploying the Archive app doesn’t lend itself to easy replication. There certainly aren’t a bunch of AO3 forks and clones running around out there like there were for LiveJournal.

However! Most of the anti-AO3 grumblers’ use cases don’t require anything near the scale of the Archive. If what you want is an archive for one fandom (or even a handful of related fandoms) where you don’t have to worry about stuff you find objectionable, it is really and truly possible to build that with Wordpress on shared hosting for less than $10 a month. Point-and-click, no coding required. Install Wordpress, from the Wordpress admin panel install Writeshare and a security plugin like Shield, be sure to enable auto-updates, and you’re done.

Hell, let me make an offer: I know I’m a filthy degenerate who’s written and–even worse!–defended all sorts of depraved fic, but I’m also of the opinion that if antis want an archive they can moderate to their standards, they deserve one. Having control over the spaces they frequent instead of having to duke it out over the community standards of a general-purpose, lightly-moderated platform like Tumblr or AO3 might ease some of the pressure driving these conflicts. So. If you want a fic archive for your fandom that’s free of problematic ships, underage, noncon, abuse, etc, I will build and pay for it. I will shell out up to $10/month for shared hosting. I will handle as much of the technical end as you trust me to handle: server, database, domain name, Wordpress install and plugins, security. All I ask is that you and/or your friends run the site yourselves and not involve me in any of the moderation decisions (which you wouldn’t want me involved in anyway), and that you crowdfund anything above $10/month if the site gets huge. That’s it. You can even lock me out of the Wordpress admin panel if you’re comfortable maintaining and updating WP yourselves.

Fine print: The offer to pay for hosting is only for one site. Anyone after that gets the technical setup offer but not the $10/month. No real-life identity or contact info will be exchanged: I don’t want yours, and I definitely don’t want to share mine. I will do my best to trick out your Wordpress install however you like it, but no guarantees that all the features you want will be possible. If either of us wants out after the site is up, I will hand you a full backup of the database/filesystem so that you can install it elsewhere, plus a static HTML archive of the site that you can put up on a free webhost.

Go ahead and reblog this if you want to. I’m curious to see if anyone will bite and be serious enough to get a site up. I know I’m dead serious. I may be a degenerate with terrible opinions, but I’m a professional techie who’s hosted/run/modded a lot of sites in my time and never pulled untrustworthy shit with admin access. I will lock myself out of whatever you want me locked out of. Just let me put my money where your mouth is, because I figure it’s in everyone’s best interests if those who want a safe alternative to AO3 can build one.

I know this is months old, but have any antis taken you up on this?

If they did, I bet I know exactly how it would play out.

If they just set simple broad rules like “no explicit works with characters under 18” and “no explicit works between characters who are canonically close relatives” or some such, and just stuck to that, it could work fine.

But they won’t. We already see ships between two adults called “pedophilia” (including some involving people in their 30s and 40s) and ships between people who aren’t related at all called “incest” (no childhood sweethearts allowed - if they knew each other as kids it’s pedo AND incest even if the characters are full-grown now) The goalposts never stay still for an instant. The definitions of what isn’t allowed will get fussier and fussier, until eventually you’ve got a group of no more than 50 or so people deemed pure enough to be allowed to use the archive (and probably far fewer than that who will WANT to).

Why? Because the act of finding reasons why something is problematic is so rewarded with social capital in those circles that people are highly motivated to keep finding new reasons why something popular is bad. Even if they have to straight-up make it up. And they do, oh they do.

After the number of people allowed and willing to put their work there drops down to tiny clique size, the mods will turn on each other, because this mindset can’t function without convenient enemies. It’s completely incapable of the compromises and good-faith trust you need to make any group project sustainable in the long term.

Let’s just say I doubt they would ever have to worry about AO3′s problems of scale.

This was just a thought exercise based on the premise that purity wankers are actually interested in doing  any unglamorous hard work that doesn’t provide the quick energy rush of shouting at people and calling them names. I don’t believe this premise is actually true - what they really want is to be like the cuckoo bird that lays its eggs in the nest somebody else built, and kicks the original residents out.

Once you play God...

“Do you know each other?” Steve asked, his head cocked. “I saw you talking and it seemed as if you knew each other but I thought Fury said…”

“I was there in Puente Antiguo when Thor arrived on Earth,” Clint said before Thor could respond. Both men scrutinized him but then Thor nodded.

“My father had taken away my powers,” he said. “And I tried to get to Mjölnir.”

Once you play God... Chapter 3

“I should warn you, though,” she said. “Loki's brother is here, too.”

“Thor? What does he want?” Clint asked and Nat shrugged.

“Seems he’s pretty pissed at all the mess Loki made here and he said he wants to bring him back to Asgard,” she said.

Once you play god... - Chapter 2

He sighed. Coulson’s been right. This job at Project Pegasus was boring as fuck.

He went to the lockers, got his gear and went to watch over the scientists.

Once you play God...

Clint has built himself a life within SHIELD, with his best friend Natasha and his friend and handler Phil and everything is okay… but then Thor appears and he's confronted with his former life! And then Bucky appears and everything will be complicated.

AO3 works being stolen and posted on rivd.net

What is happening, and what you can do. Check for edits with additions at the end of the post!

We've posted these infos in our Discord server, but want to make them accessible for more of you AO3 and fanfic folks out there. What is happening? A user called "Fanfic Books" on the site https://rivd.net is posting over a million of fanfics since May 18th (account creation time of that user), all of which seem to be stolen from AO3 users. You can check if your works were stolen by searching your AO3 username on that site. Reporting this on the site is tedious, and contains so much requested data and personal (sensitive) information about you that is just seems sketchy and like they want to grab your data to sell it off again. (See this for more on that.) That a virus called "rivd" apparently also exists does not help their case. Since the person posting the works is also listed as Moderator of the website, chances of successful reports are, by our estimation, very small to non-existant. (As you can look up here.) Creating an account on that site is also tedious - after trying it, the feedback was that a moderator needs to approve of my account creation request. How long that is supposed to take is not known. What can you do? We deduced - through admittedly rushed, because we felt like time was of the essence, and and sparce, checks - that people who have their works locked on AO3 have not been affected. (At all/as much is not to say, it's our best hope and theory rn.) We advised our server members to lock their AO3 works for the time being, as that currently seems like the only prevention method available. A great tutorial for how to lock all your AO3 works at once has been posted here. Kudos to this X/Twitter post that seemed to have started the spread of information, and others relaying the infos (like e.g. r/AO3 on Reddit). Edit (0,5h after initial post):

With permission of the author on AO3, here are screenshots from when I checked if their works (unlocked on AO3) were stolen. Searching for works of the FFL Discord server's admin, who has them locked on AO3, resulted no matches on the rivd site - hence the theory/recommendation that locking your AO3 works helps.

Edit 2 (4h after initial post):

There also seems to be a new occurrence that the fanfiction tab has been emptied/does not contain (publically displayed) fanfics anymore. What this means and if the fanfics are really taken down is unclear, but given that the anime fanfic category that once existed is seemingly completely gone, something is being done. Rumor is that a mass report of DMCA at Cloudflare caused this - it feels like a win either way!

Yet another AO3 bot situation - please spread the word!

Hi, it's me again, the person who wrote that viral post about fanfiction plagiarism! Today I'm here to warn you about abuse perpetrated by bots who have stolen AO3 usernames.

There's currently an epidemic of bots going around leaving (apparently random) horrible, hateful comments on people's fics. This isn't the first time bots have invaded AO3, but the big problem with this wave is that they're using real AO3 usernames to do it.

I learned about this when another writer contacted me after receiving the following comment on their story:

Now, while that is my username, I DEFINITELY did not leave this comment (and anyone who would leave something like that on a fic should be slapped! What an awful thing to post). This fic is in a completely unrelated fandom that I have never participated in, nor has that author participated in any of my fandoms, so the probability of it being some intentional fandom drama thing to make me look bad is also low.

The writer whose fic the comment was left on enlisted the aid of some friends and tracked down other guest comments with unrelated usernames attached, which is pretty strong evidence that they are being left by bots at random.

The TL;DR: If you receive a cruel comment from a (Guest) with an actual AO3 username attached, it's most likely from a bot. Please do not lash out at or dogpile the AO3 user who owns that name, and who in all likelihood has no idea that their name has been hijacked for evil.

If finding this kind of comment on a fic, even left by a bot, is likely to upset you, I would recommend changing your comment settings so that only users who are logged in can leave comments. To do this, edit your story settings, and under "Privacy," select the radio button that says "Only registered users can comment," as shown below.

Please spread the word to other AO3 users! And if you see mean guest comments on other fics, maybe let the author know that it's probably from a bot and not a real person who thinks their writing is bad.

you know i have never heard a convincing arguement as to why AO3 should not moderate the content that is posted to their website and i think a lot of the arguement against moderation on AO3 boils down to, terminally online people thinks community moderation is the same as government censorship and personally sending the cops to someone’s house to arrest them irl/

Just because you don’t agree with an argument doesn’t mean it’s a bad one. When it was founded the people made a promise to its users. “We will host all transformational works(fanfic) allowed by US law.” This promise came about after other sites had routinely purged fanworks without warning. Not just the same things people call for moderation on now but far more reaching and random. Like FF.net purged ALL mature/NC17 fics from their site, they also purged and banned the ENTIRE genre of songfics(written equivalent of fan made music videos made by putting song lyrics between paragraphs of story prose)

Ao3 bringing in any sort of content moderation or limits on what fics they will host would be breaking that initial promise to their users.

I guess if you’ve never woken up and found chunks of your fave fandom, some fanworks you yourself created just gone, because whoever was hosting it decided to change the rules on you, you wouldn’t understand. And unless you primarily read fics at sites other than Ao3 because of their determination to keep that promise you won’t have to.

see that is the thing that i really do not get, Like the thing that i cannot understand about this arguement is that bad moderation means no moderation should be allowed? It’s ok for AO3 to host racist fanfics and child porn, because the alternative is just random deletions? Like why is the alternative to no moderation bad moderation? Why do AO3 defenders keep on acting like the only options are either no moderations at all, or else it will be fanfics deleted without rhyme or reason? Like why is the argument always in black and white extremes?

One. Ao3 does not host child porn. You can stop with that lie right the fuck now. Child porn(or the more correct term Child Sexual Abuse/Exploitation Material) is when someone has a child under their control and forces them to perform sexual acts and either photographs or films it. It is a recorded documentation of abuse and is in fact illegal(and therefore not allowed to be hosted on Ao3) It is wrong, immoral, and illegal because a real live, breathing child with thoughts, and feelings is being hurt and will have to live with the memory of their abuse for the rest of their lives.The term does not apply to non-photorealistic fanart, or to written words depicting events that did not actually happen(meaning there is no victim and no-one has to live with the memory of the events).  Treating either fanart or fanfic as the same as  real life abuse is an insult and dis-service to every single child that has ever been sexually exploited because you think their suffering is equivalents to lines on paper.  That you think the immorality of CSEM is because it makes you feel “icky” and not because they were being hurt and exploited.  People writing fanfic of two teenage characters making out is in no way equivalent to a real life child having their rape recorded, but I routinely see people calling for moderation on Ao3 acting like it is.

Two. As for the racist(and every other kind of bigotry that can be depicted) I’m going to be honest. I don’t trust the various fandom communities to make a set of standards that aren’t just one group of fans forcing their will and preferences onto the rest of fans. I don’t know what fandoms you’ve been in, but I’ve seen fandoms with interracial ships where if you have the black character top you’re being racist because it’s playing into racist mandrigo tropes. But at the same time you would have people claiming that having the black character bottom you’re also being racist for making the black man submissive. So are both depictions/options racist, are neither of them, or are people just trying to make their personal fic preferences/interpretations some sort of moral issue and force people to cater to them?  I’ve been in fandom communities where the admin/moderators refused to let anyone post fics that didn’t match their preferences(despite claiming to be friendly to all fics) So it’s very much coming from a place of experience that says trying moderate Ao3 based on racism, or any other problematic metric/rubric you want to use will just end up being used to silence people(including other fans of color)

Racism exists in fandom because we live in a racist society and that will filter into ALL media, including fanfic. Trying to remove so called racist fanfic won’t make society any less racist. All it does is give a tool for bullies to try to control and harass people. Everyone has their own personal biases some conscious, some only in their subconscious that they haven’t bothered to unpack  Trying to moderate content based on standards like racism, homophobia, xenophobia, etc… will inevitably lead to the moderators own personal biases leaking through resulting in uneven, inconsistent moderation resulting nothing but hurt feelings and fighting. 

Third. I would just like to mention just how heartless and unempathic you sounds when you act like random mass deletions and purges are no big deal. You have no idea how much it hurts to wake up and find something you created just gone. To find large swaths of fics that you enjoyed again and again, that you found comfort in, deleted never to be recovered. To say nothing of when Livejournal caved to a bunch of right-wing christian evangelical trolls and deleted a bunch of users and communities. People were devastated. people lost support communities and were frantically trying to find the friends they had made in those communities.

I know it may be hard to believe but fiction and art do not cause harm just by existing. A story that may be upsetting and triggering for one person, may bring healing and comfort to another, because everyone brings their own set of experiences and persepctives into every story they read, and therefore each takes something slightly different from it.  But you and every other person calling for moderation on Ao3 act a story causes harm to everyone, again just by existing.  It’s an insane perspective that makes no sense to me. A story I am not forced to read can’t hurt me any more than someone practicing a different religion can hurt me.

There are several ways that you can moderate AO3.

If you read a story and have strong opinions on it, e.g. you think it’s racist to write Adeline as a bully when she’s such an amazing hero character in the source material or you think that author CerseiFan69 writes such creepy stories that you never want to interact with them ever, it’s great that you’re thinking for yourself and trying to do some critical analysis.

You deserve the power to control your own reading experience, which AO3 gives you. However, I don’t trust you to tell the difference between a badly written story by a young writer who is black and wrote Adeline as a bully because Adeline’s accent reminds her of her real life high school bully, versus a badly written story by a writer who’s actually horrible. Likewise, you shouldn’t trust me to tell you which authors you should read as spine-chillingly excellent takes on dark content versus authors who make you want to scrub out your brain with steel wool.

I love the freedom of AO3, where I might write a bad story but at least I know that some moderator won’t judge me harshly and take it down.

Listen. The 11th Commandment is not “Thine beliefs are codified and just”. It’s “Don’t like, don’t read.”

You have no right to censorship. Period.

About the AO3 "No Guest Comments for a while" warning

If you're not following any of AO3's social media accounts you might be in the dark as to what kind of "spam comments" have engendered this banner at the top of the site:

These spam comments have been posted about a great deal on the AO3 subreddit for the past couple of days. Initially they comprised a bunch of guest (logged out users) bot comments that insulted authors by suggesting they were using AI and not writing their own fics. Some examples, from the subreddit:

But it then escalated to outright graphic porn images and gifs being posted in comments, again by logged out 'Guest' accounts. Obviously, I'm not going to give examples of those, but between these two bot infestations, AO3 has clearly decided to act and has temporarily closed the ability to post comments for users who are not logged in with an AO3 account.

Unfortunately, this means that genuine readers who don't have an AO3 account won't be able to leave comments on fics that they enjoy.

If you are a genuine reader who doesn't yet have an AO3 account, I strongly suggest getting yourself on the waiting list for one. More and more AO3 authors are now locking their fics down to registered users only - either due to these bot comments or concerns about AI scraping their work - which means you're probably missing out on a lot of great stuff.

Hopefully guest commenting will be enabled again at some point soon, but I suggest not waiting until then. Get yourself on that list.

Wait times are going to be longer than usual at the moment, due to the current Wattpad purge [info on Fanlore | Wattpad subreddit thread], but if you're in line, then your invite will come through eventually.

Update: There's now a Megathread about this on the AO3 subreddit.

I had some spammy ones a while back, one set used an identical comment in several fics, the only thing that changed was the title of the Self Help book they had a link to purchase, the other was on several of my fics that was stuff about how painful and anger-inducing fanfic writing is so I should quit. At the time, I deleted them, warned some fellow Tumblr users I knew posted to AO3, then warned my discord groups (I'm in a couple for Fanfictionists). Now I'm thinking that might have been an opening salvo.

I'm still just gobsmacked that this is what people do with their one precious life.

What do AO3's Archive Warnings mean?

Archive Warnings can be confusing to new users, both readers and writers alike, so let's take a moment and break them down. We'll start at the top of the list - which is ordered alphabetically.

Creator Chose Not to Use Archive Warnings - when AO3 was being designed (by fans, for fans) there was a debate about requiring warnings. At the time, they were not a standard expectation, so some people didn't want warnings to be mandatory on every individual fic on the Archive. Other people did.

This warning - stating that the author was making a choice not to provide a warning - was a compromise. A creator could choose not to apply a warning to their fic and readers would then know to be wary because it would be possible that any of the warnings might be needed, or multiple of them, or none of them.

This warning (which I'll abbreviate to CCNTW from here on out) is also a good catch-all for other things that a creator might want to warn for that don't have a specific Archive Warning. Authors can also provide warnings of different kinds in the Additional Tags on a work, so it's a good idea to read those carefully as well.

You can read up on more of the history of this warning on Fanlore.

Graphic Depictions of Violence - This applies to stories where the descriptions of violence are very detailed and probably gory. The violent scenes will likely be brutal and easily imagined. This warning is generally accompanied by a rating of either M or E - meaning that the content in the work is aimed at adults only.

Some authors find it difficult to decide whether the violence in their fic is graphic enough to warrant using this warning, so they use CCNTW instead. For some fandoms, the source material is already full of graphic violence and so they might also use an Additional Tag to give more information such as, "canon typical violence"

Major Character Death - This can be interpreted in different ways. It might mean:

It is possible that the character who dies does not stay dead in the fic, in which case the author may decide to use an Additional Tag like "temporary character death" to provide more information.

It is also possible that an author will decide to use CCNTW instead because they want to avoid giving spoilers for the story.

No Archive Warnings Apply - This means that none of the other warnings in this list apply to this fic. The fic may still be given a rating that indicates it is for an adult audience.

Rape / Non-Con - This refers to different scenarios in which a character does not consent to sexual activity.

Non-Con is short for non-consent, which is a term from role-playing communities in which not giving consent is part of the sexual game. Non-con can also refer to the fact that in a fictional story, we might see a character verbally state that they don't want to have sex and then read their inner monologue in which they express that they do.

The various interactions and interpretations involved in consent can get very complex and nuanced, and some creators might use CCNTW because they aren't sure if what they're writing rises to the level of this warning.

Underage - This warning refers to stories that describe sexual activity (more than just kissing) between characters who are under 18 years old. This one is also up for interpretation when it comes to creatures, monsters, mythological beings, aliens that live for thousands of years, etc.

---

All of the above warnings will be used a little differently by different creators and by different fandoms, and as you read more on the site you will likely notice these differences.

However, if you see a work on the Archive that should have one of these warnings but doesn't, you can report that work to the Policy Questions & Abuse team by scrolling to the bottom of the page and clicking the link to their reporting form.

To help the volunteers who manage these reports, you can give them some additional information. If it's a multi-chaptered work, let them know which chapter to look in or give them a keyword or phrase they can search for to find the relevant scene(s). If the volunteer decides a warning is required, they'll contact the creator and ask them to add it. If they decide that it doesn't, they'll let you know.

If the work has Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings on it, that includes all other warnings and that fic shouldn't be reported for missing one.

@Fanfic writers:

My friend send me this link, is a series on a profile on Ao3 (tumblr) that has different tutorials to insert things to fanfics via html code, I thought I would share bc it’s really cool

Lists of tutorials:

This is a tutorial/live example on how to make large images fit on mobile browsers but remain normal size on desktop browsers.

This is a tutorial/live example on how to mimic the look of letters, fliers, and stationery (as well as other forms of written media) without using images. For all your epistolary fic needs.

This is a tutorial/live example on how to create a "Choose Your Own Adventure" fic. While this has been explained before (see here), this particular tutorial shows you how to use a work skin to hide the next parts from the reader until they click through to get to them.

This is a live example of how an author can create linked footnotes in their work with only a little bit of HTML and no workskins required. This is best viewed by clicking "Entire Work". While I've included the actual coding in bold and italic once you click "Hide Creator's Style", there's a more detailed explanation here.

This a tutorial/live example on how to have text change or appear once a cursor is hovering over it. Helpful for pop-up spoilers, language translations, quick author's notes, etc.

Anonymous on tumblr: do you have a skin that would mimic the author’s notes and review/kudos buttons section from the end of a fic? the desired effect being that the fic could go on after the “end” of the fic, so after the author’s notes and review/kudos buttons

Here's a tutorial/live example to do just that, with some of the buttons actually functioning. I'll explain more inside!

This is a tutorial/live example on how to align images to the left or right of the screen and have text wrap around them.

This is a tutorial/live example on how to mimic email windows on AO3 without the need to use images.

This is a tutorial/live example on how to mimic iOS text messages on AO3 without the need to use images. There's also a chapter on how to have emojis displayed on AO3 as well.

Bored with the default page dividers? This is a tutorial/live example on how customize your page dividers with no images needed (though I do show you how you could use images if you wanted to do such a thing).

This is a live example how to make invisible text that can only be seen by highlighting the text. Tutorial is included in text, and you can always leave comments about questions you may have.

MOBILE USERS: Sadly, this probably won't work for you, since highlighting in a mobile browser is different than web. I've tried correcting this, but have yet to find a solution.

Original coding and design is from layouttest. I make no claims for it, just tweaked it so it will work on AO3.

This is a live example of my AO3 skin that allows the author to recreate the look of lined notebook paper in their work. To learn more about it, you can find the tutorial here.

This is a live example of my AO3 skin that allows the author to recreate the look of sticky notes (aka Post-Its) in their fic. To learn more about it, you can find the tutorial here.

This is a live example of my AO3 skin that allows the author to recreate the look of Deadpool's thinking boxes in their fic. To learn more about it, you can find the tutorial here.

This is a live example of my AO3 skin that allows the author to recreate the look of a newspaper article in their work. To learn more about it, you can find the tutorial here.

This is really useful and I'll always reblog it.

Types of AO3 Summary

Option 1 - The Excerpt:

The quickest, the easiest! Find a section of your fic that contains the main premise of said fic and also showcases your writing. Copy paste that into the summary box. BOOM! Done.

Best used for any fic, unless it's so short the excerpt would be the whole fic.

Option 2 - The No Frills:

Just a description of the fic. No need for drama. No need to complicate matters. Keep it simple, keep it safe.

Best used for short fics, poems and fics where the style/format is more important than the plot. Or fics that tie directly into a scene/episode from canon or another fanfic.

Option 3 - The Hook:

Draw the reader's interest by giving them a set up with no conclusion. Introduce the main character(s), introduce the status quo, describe an inciting incident, leave a question in the reader's mind.

Best used for mid to long fic where there's a strong premise and follow through. Especially good for AUs. Can be expanded for more complex plots or used multiple times in one summary for multiple characters or subplots.

Option 4 - The Sitcom One-Liner:

"The one in which [over simplified description of one of the main plotlines]" This is essentially 'boil your plot down to the very simplest statement you can, oversimplify if possible. The more bizarre or unhelpful the better.

Best used for fics with at least a little humour in them.

Option 5 - The Rule of Three:

Three is a magic number. Find three key moments in your fic and just list them. That's it. Often ends with 'not necessarily in that order' if used for comic effect. If it's an AU, establish that quickly (i.e. 'Star NHL player Blorbo…').

Best used for anything, really. Three is a magic number. The human brain loves things that come in threes.

Option 6 - The Trope Lure:

Why bother describing the plot? We all know AO3 readers are here for the tropes. Similar to The Sitcom One-Liner just using tropes instead of plot. Often followed by the phrase 'that nobody asked for'.

Often tacked on to the end of The Hook or The Excerpt as a tl;dr.

Best used for fic that plays its tropes straight with no shame or second guessing.

Option 7 - The Pre-emptive Strike:

(Not recommended) You just wrote this fic, the self doubt is consuming you. You feel the need to apologise profusely for your existence for no apparently reason. You feel cringe, you think the fic is cringe, you want everyone to know that you think the fic is cringe in case they don't like it and judge you for it.

Best used for no fics ever. I cannot stress this enough.

(Seriously, I am begging you, don't do this. If you're planning to use this option, rethink it and do one of the others. I guarantee you more people will want to read your fic.)

Sometimes added on to any other summary as a strange disclaimer. (srsly. don't.)

Option 8 - The Unapology:

Embrace the mayhem, embrace the deep dark depths of your soul. The opposite of The Pre-emptive Strike. A combination of The No Frills and The Trope Lure that truly gives no fucks.

You have committed crimes and you are proud of them. You know what your USP is and you're going to make sure your target market finds you. Look upon my works, ye readers, and despair!

Best used for fics with controversial/polarising tropes with all relevant details already clearly stated in the tags.

Option 9 - The Interrogation:

What if you wrote a summary entirely in questions? What if your readers had to read the fic to discover the answers? Who knows what will happen if you do this?

Best used for... I honestly don't know. This style of summary does not vibe with me. Mystery fic maybe? Sorry guys.

Option 10 - The Multipack:

Got a bunch of shorter fics in one work? No way of summarising them all without a wall of text larger than the Great Wall of China? This one is similar to The No Frills in that you're not describing the plots themselves and similar to The Trope Lure in that often broader genres and tropes are mentioned. What links those fics? Are they all in the same fandom? The same pairing? The same challenge? Just slap that right in the summary. A chapter list with 1-2 word trope/pairing summaries can be included or not.

Best used for (obviously) works that are compilations of fic.

Option ? - The Void:

I said The Excerpt was the quickest and easiest summary to do. I lied, well... I didn't exactly lie. What is quicker and easier than not having a summary at all? After all, that's what the tags are for.

Best used for... nothing? Write a summary, guys. Please?

Reblog and put your rare pair in the tags/comments! I want to see the depths people will go to create, for the most random two characters in the most obscure media.

There are exactly 4 Clint Barton/Obadiah Stane stories on AO3 and 3 of them are mine and the 4th is from the dude who inspired me to write this pairing :D

Can you help feed my curiosity? How many words have you posted across all pseudos and fandoms on AO3? Reblog to paint a pretty picture!

*Bonus points if you include how long you’ve been posting on AO3 in the tags.