DC version of AO3 is called Tales of Our Own??

WHY DC MAKING ALTERNATIVE VERSION OF AO3

I finished the Rough Cut for my Archive Of Our Own ad for my Branding Class Assignment! And just in time for OTW's annual donation drive, too~

So I just found out that there are more people making works on AO3 with a million tags on them in protest to AO3 not removing that one fic (you know the one). I would just like to state my own personal opinion about that right up front: if you’re trolling AO3, no matter your reason for doing so, you’re the asshole.

I know we all call it AO3, but the a stands for Archive. It’s a site built on the premise that fanworks deserve to exist and shouldn’t be taken down, unless the author is making that decision for themselves. 

This means that there are lots of works on AO3 that I think suck. There are works that are poorly written or boring or morally reprehensible. And guess what? All of that is protected because it’s not about a single work, it’s about fanworks in general and all of us having a place we can rely on to have our backs. 

The whole point of AO3 is not deleting works just because someone complains about them. The work needs to violate the Terms of Service and if it doesn’t, then it shouldn’t be removed. The rules that protect me protect those other works too. 

The volunteers at AO3 take the site’s goals and premise very seriously. They aren’t going to make snap judgements about a work, not even a work with a million tags. They also aren’t going to make snap judgements about implementing a limit on tags when there hasn’t been one before. 

They need to talk things out and discuss the short and long term ramifications. They need to talk about where to draw the line, and how can they explain why they decided to draw the line there? Will this decision affect works that already exist on the Archive? What do we do about them? Those authors posted before this new rule came into being, so you can’t punish them for a rule that didn’t exist at the time. 

Creating more works with the same issue just means that volunteer tag wranglers have even more work to do. Mass reporting a work that has already been reported just means that Policy & Abuse volunteers have even more work to do. If you fill up their lives with nonsense tags or repeat reports, you know what they can’t do? The thing that everyone (including them) wants them to be doing. 

People who volunteer for AO3 also read on AO3. They are as annoyed about these works as you are. But making more work for them to do isn’t the answer. Being patient is. It’s going to take time for them to make decisions about things like tag limits. It’s going to take time for them to code the limit into the site. It’s going to take time for them to test the code and make sure it doesn’t break anything. And in the meantime:

Filter out the author and bookmark your filter in your browser so you don’t have to enter it every time.

Add the work-blocking code to your site skin so you never need to see that work again, as long as you’re logged in.

There are tools you can use to avoid the things you don’t want to see. Creating a bigger problem isn’t the solution. It’s just a dick move.

Obviously not speaking officially, but:

I’ve got at least half a dozen channels and group messages lighting up, vying for my attention, as a direct result of all this trolling-slash-point-making. What hasn’t been lighting up, however, is the thread where we were already discussing the questions @ao3commentoftheday mentioned.

But the fact that it’s not getting any attention right now might be for the best. Do you really want a decision that will shape the future of tagging on the Archive made by a bunch of extremely annoyed and overwhelmed people who are desperate to make a situation stop? That doesn’t seem like it will end with the best outcome.

Toss a Coin to Your Archive!

the Organization for Transformative Works is an incredibly groundbreaking repository for creators, and the constant scrutiny it undergoes because ignorant children don’t understand that things cost money to maintain, and that their opinions do not represent everyone’s, is infuriating.  so infuriating, in fact, that i decided to rage-create. so there.

this was fun as shit to sing, ngl.

special thanks to Green Noize for providing the excellent instrumental track, and the only one i found that was actually fully faithful to Jaskier’s original. also thanks to alias for the inspiration to write these lyrics, and to my dear friend FilkAeris for instilling in me a fierce appreciation for filks in the first place.

parody lyrics by me.  “Toss a Coin to Your Witcher”  composed by Sonya Belousova and Giona Ostinelli, and sung by Joey Batey for the Netflix series The Witcher. which is awesome and you should definitely watch it if you like gritty medieval fantasy.  and boobs. and swearing. and hot guys wearing leather. and bards. definitely bards. 

and since we know bard is a combat class, this is my stand, and the hill i am prepared to die on.

👊 LONG LIVE THE ARCHIVE 👊  NO CENSORSHIP 👊

SUPPORT THE ARCHIVE OF OUR OWN!  MAKING PRISSY IDIOTS ANGRY IS JUST A HAPPY BYPRODUCT! 

hahaha this is so amazing <3 

A New History of Fandom Purges

On November 24th, 2018, I posted a list of major deletions of sites or of content on sites that stripped fandom of its history. A bunch of pro-shipper blogs had just been deleted, and people were nervous. I suppose I was thinking “All this has happened before…”

On December 3rd, 2018, Tumblr’s Department of Irony announced the NSFW ban. Thanks for providing this salutary lesson to The Youth and a billion reblogs to me, I guess.

Today, we have AO3 for writing. Audio, images, and video are in as much danger as ever, yet fans attack AO3 every donation drive. For those of you who forget our past…

HERE IS WHAT HISTORY HAS TAUGHT US!

This is only a small taste of the many times that:

It’s not always malicious. It’s not always about us. But we lose every time.

Some of these purges hit everyone. Many of them hit m/m content specifically or female gaze-y material in general. This is why antis are dead wrong. This is why anti-fujoshi policies end up being anti-m/m policies. This is why we need clear labeling, not content restrictions.

This is why we need AO3.

And it’s why we need a solution for audio, visuals, and video too.

now that ao3 as a whole is a hugo nominee and has reminded us all that it is an incredibly well-designed, excellently maintained project with an archival system that is the envy of many librarians etc, it is a great time to remember that:

if you can’t donate, spreading the word, congratulating ao3 on the nomination, and thanking the ao3 volunteers for their hard work would also be lovely!!

I saw this post by @astropixie about how it’d be nice to review fics on AO3 as you read. A little while back, because I was so in awe of the Clexa fic writers, I made this userscript (can install on Firefox by using Greasemonkey and on Chrome, ETA: Opera, and Safari by using Tampermonkey) so that I could do just that. It doesn’t have the wattpad or soundcloud functionality, it’s just a little thing added on to a page, not something supported by the site itself, but it’s better than nothing. 

The userscript is available here: http://pastebin.com/vYBCYWu4

ETA: FFN version: http://pastebin.com/addj3Xtm

Tampermonkey tutorial

ETA: User Tampermonkey on Firefox too

Oh, neat! 

The internet could change next week, and not in a good way

You may have heard about the efforts in Europe to reform copyright law. The debate has been ongoing in the European Parliament for months. If approved next week, these new regulations would require us to automatically filter and block content that you upload without meaningful consideration of your right to free expression. 

We respect the copyrights and trademarks of others, and we take all reports seriously to ensure that your creative expression is protected. We make this clear in our Community Guidelines. There’s already a legal framework that works and is fair: Today we take down posts and media that contain allegedly infringing content when we receive a valid DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown request. We also provide clear-cut ways for people to fight back if they believe their removed content was not a true violation. These instances are monitored and reported and live in our biannual transparency report. 

The suggestion to use automated filters for issues of copyright is short-sighted at best and harmful at worst. Automated filters are unable to determine whether a use should be considered “fair use” under the law and are unable to determine whether a use is authorized by a license agreement. They are unable to distinguish legitimate parody, satire, or even your own personal pictures that could be matched with similar photographs that have been protected by someone else. We don’t believe that technology should replace human judgment. Tumblr is and always has been a place for creative expression, and these new regulations would only make it harder for you to express yourself with the freedom and clarity you do so now. 

If you access Tumblr from Europe and want to act, you can find more information on saveyourinternet.eu. 

Please reblog this as much as you reblogged the posts about Net Neutrality. 

If Article 13 is approved, European People might be basically banned from uploading any fan content. 

You won’t get new fanfics from people in Europe.

You won’t get new gifs from people in Europe.

You won’t get new fanart from people in Europe.

Because they’ll be automatically filtered and blocked!

We might leave Tumblr and other fandom pages.

And if we’re getting all our content blocked? 

You might lose some of your favourite followers/mutuals.

You might not get to read the rest of that fic you’re dying to read - simply because the writer lives in the wrong country.

So do whatever you can to help us stop this.

Reblog this.

CONTACT YOUR REPRESENTATIVES TO TELL THEM YOU DON’T WANT ARTICLE 13 TO BE APPROVED IF YOU’RE EUROPEAN! DO IT VIA THE HOMEPAGE

Yes call them. I’ve called mine. But also…

Nerds, early adopters, vidders and other fandom pioneers… we are going to have to save fandom again. We’ve done it before; we can do it again. We’re going to need archivists and devOps and every mod and smof you can rustle up from every dark corner and coffee stained IT basement you can think of.

Get reading the dat protocol, the Solid Pod – spread out and cover as much ground as you can. We’re going to need an encrypted, decentralised social network or two, art posting, video streaming, chat and search. All of these things exist right now but we need to put together some viable, accessible options for the community.

Someone has to be the next @astolat – make it you.

https://beakerbrowser.com/

https://github.com/solid/solid-spec

https://wiki.xxiivv.com/#rotonde

https://neocities.org/about

http://awesome.datproject.org/

yall ever heard about ao3s next of kin policy

..hmmm..

Who wants to be executor of my smut?

…is this supposed to be considered weird? I don’t get it.

I think it’s more that it was an unexpected feature. I’m glad it’s there.

Yeah I actually found it while prepping for brain surgery, and was incredibly relieved that it was a built-in feature and not something I’d have to leave convoluted instructions about or whatever. It’s a bit morbid, sure, but it’s a great feature.

…an unexpected but very appreciated feature.

This is a feature designed by women who’d been in fandom for decades, and who had faced the issue of, “X is dead, and we know she loved fandom, so… can we reprint her stories? Who can decide? Her family knows fuck-all about fandom. Who was her best friend? Do they know if she would’ve liked her story to be reprinted in the Best Of OTP Fic zine?”

Running across that once doesn’t make you think about a policy, but by the time it’s five to ten times, and then you’ve seen people vanish from the internet (might be dead; might just be not interested anymore) and nobody knows whether it’s okay to collect their fic in an archive or transfer it to a new one….

Yeah, the FNoK policy is one of the awesome things about AO3.

On the AO3 all these years later

The tenth anniversary of the OTW and all the AO3 discussion going around this week inspired me to go look at astolat’s original post about creating an An Archive Of Our Own, and found my comment on it:

Eleven years and rather a lot of volunteer-hours later, I stand by every single word.

And then I found my original post on the idea that became the OTW/AO3, which says in part:

I am so pleased to have been proved correct. 

(And also, in the category of “women need to ask for every damn thing they want”? I took those words to heart, which is one of many reasons Marna/commodorified and I have been married for going on eight years.)

ETA: I know some of the links are broken, they copied over from my original post and I didn’t have the energy to either delete them or track them down elsewhere.

Asking for it and doing it!!!

So inspiring. And yes - at the time this seemed such a pipedream, but look at it now!

Yup. I remember saying I’d support it regardless, but it would only really be useful to me as a poster if it allowed every kind of content. Heh.

God this brings it back.  People saying we couldn’t do it, that we would never be able to do it, etc. And then there was the sort of six months later moment where people were like, but where is it? (!)  Dudes, we had to found a nonprofit company first! so we could be legal and raise money and pay taxes and have a bank account and enter contracts - and moreover, the archive was written from scratch: from a single blinking cursor on the screen, custom-designed from the ground up.  I remember that I had the job of tracking wireframes in the early days as the real designers figured out how the flow of pages in the archive were going to go. Amazing.

Anyway,  I want to say that the group that came together around the OTW /AO3 in those first years had a track record like WHOA: so many of those people had been archivists, web-admins, fannish fest-runners, newsletter compilers, community moderators, listmoms (kiddies, you won’t know what this is) or had other fannish roles that gave them enormous experience in working collaboratively in fandom and keeping something great going year after year. And  OTW continues to attract great people–and so also, while I’m blathering, let me say that volunteering for the OTW also provides great, real world experience that you can put on your resume, because AO3 is one of the top sites in the world and TWC has been publishing on time for ten years and Fanlore is cited in books and journalism all the time and Open Doors has relationships with many meatspace university libraries and archives etc. so if you think you have something to bring to the table, please do think about volunteering somewhere. It’s work, believe me, but it’s also pretty g-d awesome.

I tell you what, if it weren’t for Ao3, 2013 would’ve been the last year I ever wrote anything for anyone other than myself. I was so disgusted and demoralized.

The first chapter of “This, You Protect” wasn’t a desperation move, exactly. It was the first time I’d had fun writing anything in months.

Putting it up, and those first few encouraging comments: that was the first time I’d had fun publishing in years.

And man, the people I have met through that place. I am eternally grateful.

So definitely 100% all of this, but I also have a question. And maybe it’s one of those stupid ones, but it’s something I’m honestly curious about. It has to do with this bit:

 "I want to say that the group that came together around the OTW /AO3 in those first years had a track record like WHOA: so many of those people had been archivists, web-admins, fannish fest-runners, newsletter compilers, community moderators, listmoms (kiddies, you won’t know what this is) or had other fannish roles that gave them enormous experience in working collaboratively in fandom and keeping something great going year after year.“ 

 My question is: how do you get there NOW?

 And I don’t mean that like “how do you become astolat or esporanza”- because let’s face it, we only get one of them since they are, in fact, themselves, and I’d much rather people try to be themselves than somebody else- but I mean it as in how do you rack up that record now? Because so many of those roles have vanished or gotten diluted in fandom, like, I genuinely don’t know how you’d position yourself into this, and I kinda want to know if only so that I can see the next wave of such fans coming.

I was going to be like, I don’t know! except then I was like, wait, yes, I do know! IMO, the answer is a Mr. Rogers-type secret, which is that the way to do this is to help.  Be a helper! Help other fans, boost other fans voices/art somehow.  Run a fest or a challenge, do a recs page, reblog stuff, wave your arms in the air, encourage people to make things, offer to beta, make art, do podfics, offer to collaborate - and I’m sure the future will (for better and for worse) provide us new opportunities to help or think about helping each other. But one that comes to mind: help a fan navigate a new platform!  Confused about Tumblr/Twitter/Youtube/Pillowfort - can someone help? Will you hold their hand, tell them they’re wanted, get them to come with us to the new land?  (I HAVE EXPLAINED TUMBLR TO SO MANY PEOPLE).  I remember when I got into fandom, I was posting my stories to a mailing list and I didn’t have a website (because who did?) and MerryLynne came to me and said, like, I like your stories, can I help you host them?  I was SO GRATEFUL. Resonant made me a cheat sheet for html which is how I learned. The initial archives had what were called Archive Elves, people who behind the scenes had to format and upload every story by hand.  So, to me, true fandom is always encouraging of others, it’s COME WRITE FOR MY SHOW, make the thing, try the thing, do the thing, I will help you do the thing!

Aww. Yes, this!

I don’t think those kinds of roles are gone though, just changed. Maybe we don’t have so many people doing extensive Delicious-style bookmarking now, but plenty of fans run tumblrs with meticulous tagging that curate a great feed of a particular fandom or ship. [Thing] Weeks happen all the time. Someone’s organizing each one of those. People on tumblr have started and run fan conventions, most of which did not feature a deflating ball pit. There are zine presses started up through Tumblr!

As with a lot of fannish things, people start by loving something specific. They make their friends through a particular fandom. Pan-fandom meta, history, preservation, etc. are things people usually get into after they’ve been around a while and switched fandoms a few times or seen their single fandom change radically as people and platforms come and go.

If I had to guess, I’d say the next big organized fannish projects will come from circles of friends on Tumblr who started out shipping the same thing and have since moved on to being in different fandoms but still share the same taste in cons or in infrastructure or tools.

Yes to the above, but I will say that social media sites these days DO make community-building harder and less intuitive. 

Partly because of recirculating content (eg on Tumblr, you don’t actually have to follow people for their good stuff, because it gets reblogged, and reblogging actually discourages following too many people in a single fandom because you’ll see the same thing 20 times). And partly because they push unhelpful values on us (making the # of public likes feel more important than a private personal connection, because more #s means more advertising money for them). 

It’s the same underlying problem that made us start the AO3. Just like fanlib and 6A in the days of Strikethrough, the people who own and run these sites don’t give a shit about any of us, they don’t make these sites to use them personally. They’re making them to make giant sacks of money, not to build a community center. 

So they don’t really want us to talk to each other in private-ish nooks in the way that’s necessary to build personal connection. If you post your thoughts on a public reblog, they can use it as an ad vehicle for everyone following you. If you post them to one pal in private, they are paying server costs to host the same amount of content but as an ad vehicle it is much worse. A lot of terrible usability and human choices that social media sites make are based on very sensible financial decisions the owners are making for their personal benefit. 

So you have to deliberately go against what the site encourages you to do, if you want to build community. You can’t just sit there and read your dash and ticky the hearts and squash your own thoughts into tags. You have to make your own content, you have to send messages and chat, have conversations in comments, go to chatrooms, go to cons and meetups, build personal connections. 

If you want to build a thing, the public post where you start the thing is the first bit of the iceberg that pokes up above the water. If you don’t have a whole lot of iceberg underneath, it won’t stay up. 

On the AO3 all these years later

The tenth anniversary of the OTW and all the AO3 discussion going around this week inspired me to go look at astolat’s original post about creating an An Archive Of Our Own, and found my comment on it:

Eleven years and rather a lot of volunteer-hours later, I stand by every single word.

And then I found my original post on the idea that became the OTW/AO3, which says in part:

I am so pleased to have been proved correct. 

(And also, in the category of “women need to ask for every damn thing they want”? I took those words to heart, which is one of many reasons Marna/commodorified and I have been married for going on eight years.)

ETA: I know some of the links are broken, they copied over from my original post and I didn’t have the energy to either delete them or track them down elsewhere.

Asking for it and doing it!!!

So inspiring. And yes - at the time this seemed such a pipedream, but look at it now!

Yup. I remember saying I’d support it regardless, but it would only really be useful to me as a poster if it allowed every kind of content. Heh.

God this brings it back.  People saying we couldn’t do it, that we would never be able to do it, etc. And then there was the sort of six months later moment where people were like, but where is it? (!)  Dudes, we had to found a nonprofit company first! so we could be legal and raise money and pay taxes and have a bank account and enter contracts - and moreover, the archive was written from scratch: from a single blinking cursor on the screen, custom-designed from the ground up.  I remember that I had the job of tracking wireframes in the early days as the real designers figured out how the flow of pages in the archive were going to go. Amazing.

Anyway,  I want to say that the group that came together around the OTW /AO3 in those first years had a track record like WHOA: so many of those people had been archivists, web-admins, fannish fest-runners, newsletter compilers, community moderators, listmoms (kiddies, you won’t know what this is) or had other fannish roles that gave them enormous experience in working collaboratively in fandom and keeping something great going year after year. And  OTW continues to attract great people–and so also, while I’m blathering, let me say that volunteering for the OTW also provides great, real world experience that you can put on your resume, because AO3 is one of the top sites in the world and TWC has been publishing on time for ten years and Fanlore is cited in books and journalism all the time and Open Doors has relationships with many meatspace university libraries and archives etc. so if you think you have something to bring to the table, please do think about volunteering somewhere. It’s work, believe me, but it’s also pretty g-d awesome.

I want to pull this out for a second because I have in fact generally spent much of my life aiming for big unrealistic goals, very few of which I’ve actually achieved, and many of which I didn’t actually want by the time I got close to them. 

The thing about aiming for “unrealistic” goals is that the work you do to achieve those goals doesn’t disappear even if you don’t achieve the goal. We still haven’t accomplished everything on our giant AO3 wishlist. There remains plenty of work to be done (and the OTW and the amazing current team working on the AO3 can always use more help, as Cesperanza says!) 

But because we collectively threw ourselves at this project, there is an archive, and it’s not just good, it’s better than anything else out there. <3

Fight Fan-Unfriendly EU Legal Developments--Time to Act!

It’s time to act! The EU Parliament is voting on fan-unfriendly copyright proposals Article 11 and Article 13 on September 12. Signal boost this to your friends, and click the link to learn more and find out how you can help: https://goo.gl/8yhvDp

Guys, if you’re in the EU, PLEASE click the link and contact your MEPs! 

Thanks to @melannen on DW for pointing this out: The Archive of Our Own was ONE VOTE SHORT of being on this year’s Hugo Awards ballot for Best Related Work.

Normally “related works” are books, but it doesn’t have to be a book; the official rules say, “a work related to the field of science fiction, fantasy, or fandom … The type of works eligible include, but are not limited to, collections of art, works of literary criticism, books about the making of a film or TV series, biographies and so on.”

(when Hugo people say “fandom” they mean not transformative fandom or people who write fanfic, but a much broader spectrum of fans including professional SFF publishing)

It kind of blows my mind that the AO3 as a piece of software and a publishing platform would be eligible, but it makes so much sense; the AO3 is, in fact, a hugely innovative site, the work of hundreds of designers, programmers, database managers, and staff, that benefits the SFF community and writers as a whole in a unique and outstanding way.

It would be so cool to see the AO3 up for nomination next year.

This sounds great, but actually having hundreds of designers, programmers, and database managers would be even better than any award, imo. The majority of OTW volunteers are Tag Wranglers and Translators. AO3 has very few technical staff. If you want to generously calls us wranglers data managers, okay, cool, but we’re still not database managers.

AO3 is always looking for skilled technical staff. If you can program in Ruby or are a Sysadmin with some spare time, please come say hello!

(We’re also looked for tag wranglers right now (September 2, 2018). The skills you need are mostly language and logic skills. If you can use the Post Work form on AO3, you have enough technical skills to become a wrangler.)

I would love to see AO3 be nominated especially as Worldcon is in Ireland and I will be going, and a couple of us hope to do a talk. 

Systems ( we look after the machines, the OS, the networking, the support software, exim, elasticsearch, mysql, redis etc ) is about 5 people right now in total with us all doing different amounts of work. ADT the programmers has 20 people who have had a commit merged this year ( https://github.com/otwcode/otwarchive/graphs/contributors?from=2018-01-18&to=2018-09-02&type=c ) 11 people have had 2 or more commits merged. 

Two people in those two groups are in both systems and ADT.

We have no paid staff, we will need to change that soon but that is the way it is today.

AO3 updated their filters and I’m so shook??? I love this so fucking much, you have no idea. Thank you, AO3. This made my day way better, and my life so much easier.

Your irregular reminder that Ao3 is funded entirely by its users. So if you’re happy with the update, and you have some money to spare, please consider donating to the Archive.