Every time AO3 makes an update, there’s a chorus of ‘and can we please please please be able to leave kudos on each chapter pleeeeease?!?!’

In theory, this is a nice idea. We’ve all smashed the kudos button on our favourite fics, bemoaning the fact we can’t give them all the love.

But ya’ll, kudos per chapter would absolutely fucking suck.

For readers, it would suck because it would compound the existing problem of making it hard to find fics that are good and not just long - not that a fic can’t be both! But there are plenty of Pulitzer-worthy one-shots out there that are buried way way down the list when ranked by number of kudos, because they’re beneath a bunch of 50/? fics where the author lost sight of where the hell the story was going 30 chapters ago, but their fic has had 50x the chances to be viewed so has more kudos. It would encourage authors to release their fics in lots of little chapters instead of a few longer ones/one-shots as they might otherwise have done (and as might otherwise suit the story).

And for authors it would especially suck, as it would compound the existing problem of people not commenting. Kudos are very much appreciated, but comments make an author’s day; but so few people bother, and frankly, it’s disheartening. Let people just click a button to show their appreciation for each new chapter? The hits:kudos:comments ratio would get even worse than it already is.

You can already ‘give kudos’ for each chapter of a fic on AO3 - by commenting. Hell you can literally write ‘kudos!’ It will make the author smile, I promise.

I actually never thought about it like this. If you are a fic writer or reader you should definitely read this 👆

You could not make me immortal because even if I faked my own death and left I would not be able to stop using ao3. Ao3 going back 100 years with 5k fics or something

People would accuse you of backposting your fics to seem cool and mysterious but then someone points out there are comments on there which are dated from long-deactivated accounts 100 years ago and it's a whole thing

I would have to be like "yeah it's a thing where I inherited this account from someone dead and he had a whole thing about passing the account on"

So the fannish-next-of-kin feature was really just devised to disguise the existence of vampires.

Ao3 user DreadPirateRoberts

My therapist just told me my problem is that I need to write more fanfiction.

This sounds fake but the logic behind it is actually really interesting? She said obsession with a new fandom triggers quick dopamine release when we consume all this related content--it's easy and addictive.

What we're NOT getting is that 'slow dopamine' that's more sustainable and engaging. That's the kind we get from DOING things that take effort but are ultimately rewarding.

So like, she suggested that writing fic and making fanart are ways to balance the quick dopamine of watching a show/reading fic with the slow dopamine of working at something that takes effort.

Moral of the story is you should engage in the process of creation around your favorite things. You'll feel better for it.

Oh.

OH.

“sorry for the gap between updates, my therapist made me come back to this” would not be in the top 1 million wildest author’s notes on AO3

The rest of the thread is here.

tl;dr: Don’t monetize AO3, kids.  You won’t like what happens next.

read this thread. this is by far the most concise explanation of a lot of different issues that i’ve seen in fandom spaces in a while. cosigning both the linked thread and the thread about aus/uk/can law that’s linked in-thread.

AHDHXHEBSG TWITTER WRITERS DID WHAT NOW???? AND PEOPLE PAID THEM????

If someone has never taken a class that includes copyright law, they may not know this stuff, so I don’t necessarily blame random people for not knowing what copyright is, but like… maybe just maybe it’s something that should be taught????

Just another reminder, because this always drives me crazy, but even if monetizing your fic was 100% unambiguously legal and protected, AO3 would still not let you do it because AO3 was founded and is supported by people like me who want a fandom community that is completely divested from making money off of fic.

Yes, this. Lots of fanworks on AO3 are unambiguously legal. Fics based on Shakespeare plays and fairy tales and Greek mythology and The Great Gatsby and your original character from your D&D game are not violations of copyright, because no copyright applies to those things.

AO3 still doesn’t let you monetize those things on the site, because we don’t want the site to be commercial! Because that’s not what it’s for!

It’s not there for you (generic you) to make money off the efforts of the people who build and maintain the site for free! We aren’t getting paid for the work we do to give you a nice site to use, just like you aren’t getting paid for the work you do to create whatever art you share there. Because fandom is supposed to be a community where we share with each other, and therefore we all benefit.

The deal is, we give you a free, stable, safe platform to host your works. In exchange, you get a site that isn’t covered in ads and tip jars and links to gofundme and “read the next chapter at my patreon”. You get one goddamn place on the internet that isn’t trying to make money off you. And we will defend that space and keep it non-commercial.

If you want to make money off your fics, you can instead post them somewhere like royal Road. “Oh, but Royal Road’s culture is so much more negative and stressful and lacks the supportive norms of AO3!” Yeah, because people are trying to make money there. Half the userbase is treating it as a storefront and hustling is the natural social consequence of that. AO3’s culture can only exist because it’s not commercial.

nothing will ever amaze me the way fanfiction authors do. like, you wrote silly little stories about my favorite little guys? and i can read them?? for free??? that’s fucking wild.

you poured your heart and soul and very being into your writing and then put it out there for anyone to read? insane.

you spend a truly incredible amount of time writing novel-length, high quality stories, again, FOR FREE, that anyone can read, again, FOR FREE??

shoutout to every single fic author in existence, you guys are fucking incredible and i love all of you so much

Context: this is a very common viewpoint on the ao3 subreddit which I very recently stumbled upon, but most people i’m friends with in danmei fandom (twt, discord etc) don’t agree and think negative bookmarks are rude.

I wish each individual chapter of a fic on AO3 had the date when it was posted, rather than just when the fic was first posted and when the last update was.  

That way you can see at a glance how often a WIP is updated, whether it’s fairly regularly or with huge long gaps between chapters; or if the first 20 chapters were posted in quick succession but the most recent couple were posted at long intervals, indicating that the writer is losing interest and may not finish, etc.  

Someone just liked this 10 year old post and tagged it “wishlist” and I feel obliged to add that immediately after posting this, in 2014, I was informed that this DOES exist. So for those of you who don’t know:

————

————

There ya go @oa-trance!

why did I not already know this

[image 1: the buttons at the top of a chaptered work on AO3; the Chapter Index button is circled. image 2: clicking the Chapter Index button displays a drop-down with all the chapters, and the Full-page Index button, which is circled. image 3: the chapter index, which lists the chapter numbers, titles, and update dates.]

is there some way to block someone on ao3? asking for me

If you have an account, there is.

Tap on their username to go to their profile page. There you have your choice of 2 buttons:

Block prevents them from commenting or kudosing on your works or replying to your comments anywhere on the site.

Mute prevents you from seeing any works they post to the site in your search results or filters or when looking at bookmarks.

You can press both buttons if you want.

There is no way to prevent another user from seeing your works (just from interacting with them by using block).

I just spent 2 hours debating and testing and arguing in circles and bitching about library catalogs with two colleagues and I just want to say

AO3’s website is really, really, really impressive, functional and ergonomic and cohesive. the tag system is INCREDIBLE and AMAZINGLY maintained. this is my professional librarian appraisal.

I’ve found 1 library catalog that meets my standards. even the national library of France’s catalog is shitty in comparison to ao3.

praise.

It’s awesome! As a total ignorant, can I ask what AO3 does and library catalogs don’t?

i might actually type out a longer answer but what it really boils down to is: YOU ACTUALLY FIND WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR

ok so here’s the long unreadable (and probs uninteresting to anyone else than me) version:

- the site design and overall look. it’s easy to read, easy to navigate, and easy to notice what you can click on. Makes good use of fonts and text sizes and styles to make important things stand out and be easily found at a glance, and is just overall very readable. The icons with hovertext! The tags! the amount of info that’s readable at a single glance and actually fits on the same page!

this is BASIC STUFF and it is not a given on a LOT of professional library websites i run into regularly and that drives me INSANE. (Mostly bc one of the very popular, cheap, and easy French-language library catalog softwares has a default online catalog design that sucks and which librarians generally don’t tinker with much.)

- again this seems obvious, but the filters when you’re inside a fandom/tag are SO VISIBLE and SO EXPLICIT. The filters menu makes it instantly clear what it’s for, is easy to navigate and understand and use, intelligently suggests the most popular tags first (which also immediately gives you a lot of information).

My library’s online catalog (which uses the default website set-up I mentioned above) has exactly the same thing, but stupidly executed, unreadable and incomprehensible, and somehow completely unnoticeable despite being exactly in the same place on the page. The site design makes very bad use of the space on the page and basically you just don’t even look over there because it’s so far away from where the rest of the information is and it simply never catches your eye, and even when it does, the vocabulary used is so obtuse you don’t realize what it’s for.

IT’S SO… STUPID AND EASILY FIXABLE… but apparently no public library in the french language can afford a website designer, or they’re all horrifyingly bad

- and finally: THE TAGS. One of the biggest issues we have in catalogs is that people use different words for the same thing. In order for you to find books relevant to your search, we have to apply topic keywords to them (basically: tags), but of course there are Norms so that all libraries, or at least all employees in the same library, use the same keywords. Except despite the norm that still doesn’t happen. I don’t know how it goes in the English-language world but for French language it’s all horribly complicated and surprisingly non-functional, despite how easy it seems in theory, and leads me to complain about the Bibliothèque Nationale de France about once a week at least.

Easy example that I’ve complained about today (for the 6th time this year): ADHD. The term used by the BNF, that we are supposed to use, is “Trouble de l’hyperactivité avec déficit de l’attention” (“hyperactivity disorder with attention deficit”). That’s… not only outdated but flat-out inaccurate (according to French’s current stance on it) — the term people actually use nowadays is the opposite way around, “trouble de l’attention avec ou sans hyperactivité” ( “ADD with or without hyperactivity”), commonly abbreviated to “TDA/H”. The BNF’s system does accommodate for various synonyms, but it appears unaware of this one, so if you search “TDA/H” in the keywords, you won’t find anything. You’d have to look in the title, and if none of our books have it in their title, you’ll find nothing at all, and won’t even be redirected anywhere if we strictly follow the BNF system. (WHAT IS THE POINT OF KEYWORDS THEN, one might ask.)

Tl;dr: you look for the word you and most people actually informed about a topic use, and find nothing at all because some rando has decided that’s not the word you should be using. (Unsurprisingly, this problem pops up a looot for keywords related to minorities, mental illnesses and LGBT+ topics.)

It’s like if you tried to search a site for “fluff” and didn’t find anything because the site has decided to continue using “WAFF” instead. Also, the site has decided that hurt-comfort and guro fic are the same thing, makes no distinction between levels of romance and eroticism so there’s no way to tell cute handholding from smut, and believes that the word “furry” means they get a dog.

=> The system of letting people use their words and linking them — making them synonyms — with what other people have used for the same meaning completely blows my mind. I am in awe of the fact that it works, and that it’s still happening, even though iirc tag-wranglers are unpaid volunteers. I couldn’t imagine doing something like that in just our catalog, and AO3 is massive.

The result is: not only do you find what you’re looking for, but if your search accidentally picks up other things too, you know what it’s actually about because you get it in the author’s words.

AO3′s tag system is an incredibly clever and simple solution to a very real and thorny problem that I run into almost every day.

tl;dr AO3 is just generally a perfectly functional and user-friendly site, instantly easy to use in order to tailor your search to exactly what you want (and even more so with the addition of the exclusion operator to the filters sidebar), and on a technical library-science viewpoint, it’s fascinating.

This is taking me back to when AO3 was first born, and I was having a conversation with someone (@icarusancalion, I think?) about how I didn’t think the tagging system was ever really gonna be useful. 

I knew the kind of top-down tagging system that libraries use was often useless for the same reasons you’re describing here: academics like the idea of a priori systems and exclusive classification schemata, but AO3 tagging is useful precisely because tags can be messy and overlapping rather than strict hierarchies. You’ll never get all fandoms everywhere to agree on a common tag family, I said c. 2008. It’ll be outdated before it’s even implemented. But relying entirely on user-generated tags will be a logistical nightmare, past!Maud also argued, because there would be no way to manage synonyms and near-synonyms and typos that would rapidly bloat the system to uselessness. 

Well, 2008!me was right about top-down schemata but wrong about user-submitted tags, thanks almost entirely to the work of the tag wranglers: human curators who take the time to link and nest related tags as they come up, without relying on a pristine (and utterly dysfunctional) a priori system to do so. 

Would real-world academic libraries benefit from tag wranglers? Absofuckinglutely, but I really don’t think most of them would ever implement them for the same reason past!me was skeptical of them. Maybe if they were shown how well it works on AO3 (where the wranglers are all volunteers!) they might be persuaded to hire some workstudies or under-employed PhDs to wrangle for them. And then the world would be a better place. 

I have given talks about our “curated folksonomy,” which is what it’s called, to librarians and archivists! And @cfiesler has done great work re: tags and such!

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...

*white knuckling the bathroom sink* do NOT infodump ppl about the fact that the first spn fic was a wincest one and that it was posted mere hours after the pilot and that the founder of ao3 was a wincestie and that the first fic on ao3 was wincest too and that the omegaverse as we know it was created by wincest shippers for jared/jensen fics *pointing at myself in the mirror with a shaky hand* ppl will think you're weird and off-putting you need to control yourself–

it's fundamental fandom history 😤 and honestly the amount of people who think wincest is an aberration in spn fandom and those that think ao3 shouldn't allow "problematic" content and be fully censored should know these things so they can be aware of where these cultural juggernauts started.

not them asking naomi novik AKA ASTOLAT if she was okay with incest fics of her characters when she was the one in the trenches writing wincest fics and founding ao3 so people could have a place to post their works without censorship. that's absolutely hilarious I have to find that post

YES my brother in christ she WROTE THE PROPOSAL !

May. 17th, 2007

An Archive of One's Own

AO3 was created out of collective effort, and she was the one who started it all. It's incredible to see how many of her ideas in this proposal ended up actually happening. So many things we now take for granted were crazy dreams at first

The deep history and why I shake my head at people who were toddlers when ao3 was conceived think that they'll get anywhere with arguments about fandom purity.

Like, there's a ton of shit on ao3 that I don't bother with because it is very much not my thing but I am deeply grateful that ao3 exists as it does because the things I do like, even the super fluffy g rated fics, would be considered just as "bad" by various religions and governments. And if I want to be able to read sweet gay coffeeshop found family or wish fulfillment time travel fixit featuring complex qpp and gay ships, the best guarantee of being able to do so is a place where everything goes. Because my "non-problematic" innocent fluff is absolute perversion according to some people. I know because they yelled at me before I turned off anon comments. And even the country I live in used to require unhappy endings for queer characters if it allowed them at all in many forms of media.

I absolutely avoid the kind of fic that ao3 was founded on and I am still deeply grateful that it exists.

i dont think anything compares to the joy of getting asks on tumblr or getting comments on ao3

its like, wow. human communication thru the internet. except it feels personal. but yknow, in a nice way, not in an invasive way

its like, you CLICKED on MY account and read thru MY posts and cared enough to leave me a personal message. smth so cute abt that

a non-selective plan for the resurgence of fic commissions

Too many children in the comments like ‘I think authors should be able to share ko-fi links :) it’s just nice’ and ‘OP is just a cop.’ Homie, OP is trying to keep AO3 fully functional without interruption. I will report your ass, too, because I value fic artists and our freedom of expression and my audience and our shared history far more than I value the few bux you wanna make on a commission.

It is not hard to link to your Tumblr or Twitter with a vague message like, “If you’re looking for my other works or other ways of supporting me, go here: link.” I have had people buy me coffees after enjoying my fic and asking where to support me. I threw up a link to my Tumblr and people cared enough to follow it. They were fully understanding when I explained in the comments that they could not commission me and I could not link them directly to any donation platform, but they could go to xyz link to read more. And they did! Nobody has to put AO3 directly on the firing line.

Go ahead and commission independently. Just do it anywhere else except on AO3. And then don’t come crying to the community when you, personally, get a C&D from a massive corporation.

AO3 is our bullet shield. Tumblr will pull your shit down. Wattpad won’t fucking protect you. LJ and FF.net already sold our asses for one (1) corn chip. AO3 is trying to protect us, you goddamn lemmings.

If you cannot follow the rules that protect fanspaces, you do not belong in our fanspaces.

The only people who misunderstand this are doing so intentionally and maliciously. Do yourself a favor and block the infants who think this isn’t a big deal.

Please remember that this ALSO INCLUDES FANDOM CHARITY AUCTIONS.

When you post charity auction fics, DO NOT note that they are commissions in any way. You can note them as “here is my thank you gift to X for such-and-such event” but please please PLEASE do not list them as commissions.

I think a lot of younger people are seeing this as a moral panic by OP. These are NOT being laid out as moral injunctions! This is not about being good! This is about covering your own ass and keeping fandom away from larger-scale legal trouble. No one is saying “If you break the rules you’re BEING BAD!” They’re trying to tell you “breaking these rules is DANGEROUS for yourself and potentially others as well!”

I AM SLAMMING THE REPORT BUTTON ON YOUR SMOOTH BRAIN ASSES IF I SO MUCH AS HEAR A PEEP OF YOU IDJITS PULLING A STUNT LIKE THAT

“We hope this email finds you well” babe, the only emails I hope find me well are the ones from Archive of Our Own

posting niche fic on ao3 is like releasing a small creature into the wild and hoping it survives and finds sustenance

got one whole comment… the small creature may yet survive the winter

As a rarepair writer, hits are so important to me BECAUSE I get so few kudos and comments comparatively. A fic with 5 kudos and no hit counter just looks like 5 people read my fic. A fic with 5 kudos and 64 hits means either 64 people read my fic*, 5 people have each read it 12 times, or some combination of the above.

Even if Ao3 no longer tracked hits or no longer allowed fics to be sorted by anything other than date posted/updated, most readers would not read my fics. And that's fine. My fics find their target audience, that audience is just smaller. But if I didn't have the hit counter, it would be harder to justify posting my fics at all because it's hard to find joy when it feels like you're just screaming into an abyss.

But I can find joy in watching my hits go up because every hit is another reader, or someone coming back to read again

*- We ignore the possibility of people immediately clicking back out because it makes me happier to think of hits as silent readers :D