Happy birthday to AO3 🎂🎉

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

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

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

<3 Mod Remi

The midjourney stuff just reminds of when we were trying to find a new platform to host the ao3 donation form, and companies kept trying to tell me about all their "ai" features that would track donor engagement, and figure out the optimal pattern to email individual donors asking for follow up donations, and all the ways they suggest we manipulate people into staying on our websites. It was a great way to filter out who either wasn't listening to us when we described our ethics and donor base, or just didn't believe us.

Now granted ao3 is a unique case based on a) the amount of page views we get in any given time period and b) the fact that most donors absolutely do Not want to be identified as such anywhere, (the default "list of recent donors" module got nuked Immediately) but it surprised me some that the concept of "donors who value their privacy and would be furious at even the whiff of AI" is unique. Some of us really are just existing in different worlds.

Op's tags

#I just started dropping '2.5 Billion page views a month'#into conversations as early as possible bc they would Not believe me otherwise#it was right up there with having to say 'csam attacks' to get them to take my compartmentalization of information concerns seriously#turns out those are the magic words#otw#op

The last part was kind of insane, honestly. When we started changing platforms for the donor database, I kept telling them that yes I was aware we already had an account for the volunteer database, and no that could not be connected to the donor database. And they said yes fine sure and then connected them anyway. And I called them back and said, excuse me, I'm confused, I can see both databases. And they said, well, yeah, but it's only you, someone has to be able to see both databases to give other users access. The other users can't see both. And I said, no, we have been asking for a completely separate database. I should not be able to see both. And they said, you are one organization, one organization can't have two databases. And I said, last year someone used our volunteer email list to commit approximately one thousand felonies. Please feel free to imagine how much worse it could have been had they had a way to use volunteers' email addresses to get their legal names. We do not want this to be something anyone can do no matter how much we trust them. Let me describe those felonies to you in more detail. And they emailed me two hours later and said, you can have two separate databases.

This post feels like watching an iceberg go by in clear water. The amount of stuff going on beneath the surface of AO3 just astonishes.

(ID in alt)

Approximately one THOUSAND felonies

I am incredibly serious right now when I beg you all, please, and if you have Twitter or Tiktok or whatever to please spread the word: click on an author's profile on Ao3.

You want to know if an author has written more? Want to know if they're still writing? Want to see more from them? Want to know if they've written a trope or kink or sex scenario you enjoy?

Click on their name. And look at their profile.

I cannot tell you how many times in the last six months someone has read a new or newer fic of mine and said they (a new reader who has read nothing else I've done) "can't wait to see what you do next!" I've written 50+ fics and over a million words already.

"I don't know if you're still writing..." click on my profile. I am. I literally wrote a 128k+ fic for that ship last month.

"Would you ever do X?" "Please do Y!" I already did. Click on my name and look at my works.

Archive of our Own is a library. It's an archive. Not social media. It is your responsibility to fight back against the laziness that corporate algorithms have trained into you.

Click my author name. Just click it. Just click it.

Before you demand more, or ask if a writer will do XYZ, or wonder if the author still writing, or anything - click on their profile. Click on the author's profile.

I'm not trying to be mean or condescending or anything like that. I'm just exhausted. It's disheartening and frustrating to repeat myself ad nauseam, because someone couldn't take thirty seconds to do the tiniest bit of work to see if I've written lately, if I've written more for their ship, or scan my works to see if I've written what they're asking for. Please. Please. I'm begging.

Click the author's name, and explore before you ask.

Do people not click through on the authors? It's such a gold mine from more fic from people you like! it's just common sense? When you read something you like, you find other things that the author has written, and read those too! That's not even an internet thing, that's like basic awareness on how to read stuff!

Hell it's basic awareness on how things work? I like thing. Thing is made by person. See if person makes other things I like? That applies to fiction, and art, and food, and furniture, and any other thing?!??

Clicking the author's name is the first thing you do after you finish a great fic (well, the first thing you do after you leave a comment, right? *pointed stare* Right?). You want to see whether the author has written anything else in your fandom, or one of your other fandoms, or, if they're really good, any fandom at all. And then you can hit the subscribe button and get an email alerting you that the author has published something new!

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!”

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.

so im hearing @astolat is god??? what's your 10 commendments my liege

My best stab! lol

If you get an error message about a security breach on a work with embedded audio or video, don't be alarmed! The embed is hosted on the Internet Archive, which is under attack by hackers. AO3 is not affiliated with the Internet Archive and has not been directly affected.

Posted: October 11, 2024 03:42 UTC

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.

thinking about that post of people assuming ao3 has an algorithm and also about how bonkers persistent the view is that ao3 is social media lite. like with startling regularity I get comments saying something along the lines of "it's probably weird to comment on a fic this old--" no it isn't!!!! this is an archive I am literally just assuming you searched for a selection of specific tags or sorted by kudos or looked back on my pseud or any other number of completely normal ways to use an archive site ?? kill the tiktok ghost in your brain and comment on old stuff it's NOT weird

the other day i saw someone refer to fic from 2022 as “really old” and how they were reluctant to comment on it bc they didn’t want to be a creep, and my heart just shattered in my chest. did y’all know there was a whole internet for like 20 years before social media took over everything? and we talked to each other on it! there are other ways to do all this, please don’t let corporations trap you in the for-profit cycle of endless rapid fire consumption and churn because they make it so hard to realize how anti-human it is and hard to find any of the the other options. and also, comment on old fic, a year old or five years old or twenty years old, there is a human being on the other end who put it there on purpose for you to enjoy!

I might not reply because I forget and let it get awkward, but I promise you, people who leave comments on the stuff I wrote when I was youngish and prolificish make my day in ways that are the opposite of creepy.

What’s happening here is people are applying the ethics of scrolling way back on an Instagram profile to scrolling back on an AO3 profile, without understanding the key difference that IG creeping is usually voyeuristic (looking at people’s pictures of themselves and their lives) so dropping a like on a 2022 pic is weird, but scrolling back on an AO3 profile is like getting books from the library and authors literally have their stories posted to an archive to enable readers to, you know, read them.

I don’t like wading into Ao3 debates, but I want to give my professional opinion on Ao3 with regard to archives vs. libraries.

I am a professional librarian (MSLS) and I have worked in both archives and public libraries and a lot of the confusion and concern I see surrounding Ao3 is a fundamental misunderstanding of How Archives Work.

An archive is a collection related to a subject. That subject often a person but sometimes a field or concept or project. And the purpose of an archive is to keep everything. And I mean everything. I was going to say “short of biohazards” but since I know there’s a sealed R. Crumb Devil Gal chocolate bar in the UNC Chapel Hill archives, we really do mean everything.

When a collection of materials–which are usually unique and original and can be photos, manuscripts, letters, recordings (audio and/or visual), notes and notebooks, objects, published books, whatever–on and/or from the subject arrive at the archive, they are examined, preserved for longevity, accessioned and cataloged (added to the archive’s records), and added to the archive. You measure collections in linear feet. As in, once it’s all preserved and boxed and secure, you note how many feet of shelf space it takes up. And some of y'all on Ao3 have a lot of linear feet to your name (and I’m proud of you).

This is an archive: it is designed to preserve the original materials related to a subject. That is its purpose. Archives are how we have the original scroll manuscript of On the Road, for example, or the Lomax recordings of American folksongs, or Tijuana Bibles, or James Joyce’s loveletters to Nora.

Now you, a member of the public, can access some archives. Some are easier to access than others. The one I worked in was open to the public; good luck getting into the British Archives without a good reason.

So now apply this to Ao3–which is an archive both in name and in purpose. It is intended to preserve fan-created content long term. And this means everything, whether you personally like the materials or not. It is a repository for as much as possible.

And the “whether you personally like the materials or not” is important, hence why I mentioned Jim’s loveletters and Tijuana Bibles in particular. (RIP Jim, you would have loved pegging.)

If it’s made by fans and it exists, we should keep it to document the history and progression of fandom. That is the point. We have lost enough materials related to the subject of fans of media and we don’t need to lose any more.

The fact of the matter is that Ao3 is only one facet of the OTW, which preserves other fan-related materials (convention booklets and zines, for example). Somehow Ao3, an archive on the subject of fanfiction, has been divorced from the rest of the project, mostly by way of “purity culture” and panic over “dangerous” fiction.

The fact that you can go through an archive and find interesting information is the other side of archives. No, they shouldn’t be like the banker’s box of old letters stuffed in my closet. Yes, they should be organized and as accessible as is appropriate for the state of the materials.

It’s really, really cool to find stuff in an archive, I’m not even going to lie. I have done it before and I will do it again. And yet there are other items in an archive that I might not want or need or be interested in at all–but they’re still there. That’s the cataloging and accessioning: to keep up with what’s there, to stay “on topic” with collecting, and to be able to find things in that archive. Bless the tag wranglers who are doing the cataloging at Ao3.

The pearl clutching seems to come from 1. the creation of “dangerous” fanworks and 2. public access to those “dangerous” fanworks. These are issues of “purity culture” and opinions on censorship and should not involve Ao3.

Ao3, under the umbrella of the OTW, is a documentation and preservation project first and foremost.

Meanwhile: libraries.

We’re all basically familiar with libraries, right? A collection of materials designed to be used by the people who use the library. That’s the basics.

And that is not the same as an archive.

Library books, especially public library books, age like milk. I cannot tell you what a relief it has been to throw away dirty, smelly, stained, damaged, sand-in-the-covers books when a replacement comes in. I know there’s a Cult of the Book around here, but books are not all that inherently precious. The latest James Patterson novel is not a survivor of the Library of Alexandria (which was more of an archive anyway).

If a book is so rare that it cannot be replaced, it should be in an archive or a rare book collection and not a circulating library.

The first rule of libraries is “know your user population.” To use the example of public libraries, you need to know what books the people want to read (among other things).

Libraries, generally speaking, are more apt to adjust their collection to suit their users. A library in, for example, a prison is likely to have a lot of books on law. A church library will likely have a lot of religious books and, depending on the church, may not have any books by LGBTQ+ authors. These collections reflect their users (and also the controls or limitations placed on those users but I digress). A public library bookmobile taken to childcare centers will have a lot of children’s books. I have packed a bookmobile for that project so trust me on this one.

The news is full of challenges being laid against certain books in libraries–especially school libraries and public libraries. In some cases, the challenge may be valid. In most current cases, it’s really about exterting political and/or religious control over public institutions but couched in concerns about “the children.”

And, quite frankly, that’s what the “concerns” about what Ao3 contains feel like to me.

An archive with open and easy access to the public has been mistaken for a circulating library. A circulating library might adjust its collection to suit the wants, needs, and concerns of its user population. Ao3 is not a library. Ao3, Archive of Our Own, is an archive. It is designed for preservation and you, the user, can make use of its cataloging tools to examine the contents of the archive. It is not a circulating library. Things you don’t like or don’t want are going to be in archives.

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.

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.]

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!

nothing pisses me off more than when i see a fic on ao3 talking about reach. "this ship isn't here but i added them for reach" "this fandom tag isn't necessary but i'm adding it for reach" "reposting for reach" STOP IT!!!! this is not tiktok this is not twitter this is an ARCHIVE this is not how it works!!!

i will not deal!!!! that is not how any of this works!!!!

if you see people doing this shit, report it. its against the terms of service.

genuinely. copy the link to the fic or series, and then scroll down to the bottom of the page:

click on policy questions & abuse reports which takes you to this page:

if you scroll down, youll be able to report the fic right there but you can also check for yourself that its against ToS

all you need to do is explain that theyre deliberately mistagging things which is just not a thing on ao3 because its an archive.

by posting your fic there, ao3, has the right to manually recategorise tags. its in the ToS:

you cant deliberately mistag stuff on ao3; it is an archive. you cant tag for reach, and this is likely gonna get pat tag wranglers because they deal mostly with form not content of tags and if theyre tagging for reach, its gonna be the more popular tags.

so report the fuck out of them for it. most likely, their fic will just have tags adjusted and their account will be fine.

and if they keep doing it and get suspended for it, its their own damn fault.

also thats not even getting into the fact that mistagging fics is kinda antithetical to their goal of reaching more people because youre not reaching the people who want to read your fic?

also to anyone doing this? tag baiting for engagement? not only will you get reported, but now, *every single person* who only saw your fic bc you tagged it "for reach" will at best mute you

if you're unlucky, they'll get in your comments and make you regret it first

if you're more unlucky, they'll screenshot you onto reddit and twitter and start a real dogpile

Okay, you know what? After reading this post, I jokingly said we should all just make a pact to reblog it five times a day forever. So I'm gonna do this louder for the people in the back:

AO3 WAS CREATED BY FANS, FOR FANS

AO3 IS RUN BY FANS (VOLUNTEERS, NO LESS)

AO3 IS PART OF THE NON-PROFIT, ORGANIZATION FOR TRANSFORMATIVE WORKS

AO3 IS NOT OWNED BY ANY COMPANIES AND DOES NOT EARN REVENUE

AO3 OPERATES ON DONATIONS FROM FANS

again:

AO3 WAS CREATED BY FANS, FOR FANS

Ao3 is like the one space left where I don’t feel like I’m drowning in capitalism. There’s no membership fee to access, I’m not assaulted by clickbait ads covering every inch of my screen. Writers are generously gifting their stories. They aren’t beholden to anyone’s schedule but their own, there’s no algorithm to feed or jump through hoops for. They write about the fandoms that inspire them, expanding on worlds or deep diving into character studies. They experiment with tropes and language and style and genre, no matter how “marketable” it is.

In a world where everything is increasingly commodified and regulated and restricted I cherish this little corner of the internet more fiercely.

I desperately wish people would start actually reading the AO3's TOS before confidently making 'user guides' to the AO3 that are just blatantly, flatly wrong.

Yes the AO3 has banned content. They do not allow anything that's illegal under US law - though US law, importantly, does not ban fictional depictions of things - and they do not allow any commercial content. That includes your ko-fi link, or mentions that you do fic commissions. If you do post fic commissions to AO3 and want to mention the commissioner, the fic is a 'request' from the commissioner. This protects the AO3 and you from copyright law.

No the AO3 is not 'a creative fanfiction archive'. It is a fandom archive. Your meta, insights, and theories are absolutely welcome and encouraged there. AO3 also encourages you to post other types of fanworks, like fan videos, podfics, and art, but unfortunately isn't able to natively host those like it does text, so fic has kind of become what it's known for. That absolutely does not mean that other types of fanwork aren't allowed, or are discouraged by the site culture! Anybody who tells you otherwise is just plain wrong!

And another thing:

IT’S AN ARCHIVE - A STORAGE SPACE

THERE IS NO ALGORITHM

IT’S A LIBRARY, NOT A SOCIAL MEDIA SITE

So… (sigh) TAG YOUR FICS APPROPRIATELY AND PEOPLE WILL FIND YOUR STUFF.

That’s it.