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.

so i was interested in ao3's stats and found a post from 2013 where they were celebrating breaking 200,000 registered users. that number according to the ao3 homepage is now over 7 million! personally my account was founded 10/10/2012, so im curious:

feel free to reblog with your founding date in the tags (can be found in your profile info)

im purposefully making the non registered answers more vague bc bby why... get an account!

people who let me wake up to this get a special place in heaven. firefly_fox how does it feel to hold my life in ur hands....

my favorite thing about this post is that a handful of people have gone "oh wait! this is tangible proof that i don't need to be embarrassed about leaving a lot of comments!! i'll stop being so ashamed!" YES!! ao3 authors basically universally will die for people who comment spam. we love to see it and we do not find you weird or annoying At All.

think about it this way: we ourselves are weird enough to have spent several hours, days, or Months writing down this story. we are weird enough about the content to do that! why on Earth would we be mean and judgmental toward people who care enough to get excited about reading it?? we shared it Specifically For You To Get Excited About!

WE WILL WRITE FOR YOU WHEN YOU DO THIS, TOO.

Maybe if he was a little less fuckable we wouldn’t be in this mess

If AO3 had a slogan

So this is what would happen if I could click kudos more than once

Part 1 for under 450

Are you frustrated you can't leave second kudos on AO3? or third kudos? or whatever-who's-counting kudos?

Well, have I got the html for you!

Plop any of these in a comment (by copy&pasting the code) to make an author's day and show your appreciation!

It will look something like this (and will be transparent with white outline on dark backgrounds):

Feel free to spread and use these as much as you like! (and if you have ideas for other variations, let me know ✌️)

So happy to see people enjoying these and spreading the love 💖

UPDATE with some suggestions from the replies! And bonus: cookie kudos.

HTML codes under the cut.

Love this!

There's also a rekudos converter tool by @honestlyvan if you're interested in that!

I saw a poll about how many works you've published on Ao3 and so then I got curious. So let's try this.

How many WORDS have you published on Ao3???

i'm talking total word count that you can see if you look in your statistics.

Made some fanfic writer achievements, might add more later

Part 2

FUCK YOU DISNEY

Anyways, y’all better start saving your fave fanfics and fanart under the Disney labels cause it looks like they’re trying to curb fair use/fanworks and I’m sure there’s going to be mass panicked deletions even though it’s probably unnecessary cause AO3′s legal team will fight for us.

You know that 400K yall were so fucking mad about OTW raising? Yeah, its gonna pay for the travel expenses and court costs that the legal team at AO3/OTW when they protect your shit from getting C&Ded. DO NOT DELETE YOUR STUFF! IF YOU GET CONTACTED BY DISNEY - GO TO THE ORGANIZATION OF TRANSFORMATIVE WORKS , CONTACT THEIR LEGAL ADVOCACY DEPARTMENT! ASK FOR HELP!! THIS SHIT RIGHT HERE IS *WHY* *THEY* *EXIST*

Note that Disney would have one Hell of a time serving C&Ds to authors at AO3 - because there is no “contact author” option other than leaving a comment.

They’d have to contact the SITE, which is to say, the Organization for Transformative Works, to deliver a C&D order or a DMCA takedown order.

And the OTW is not going to remove fics because someone sent a letter that says “actually those characters belong to me and you can’t use them that way.” The OTW was created to FIGHT that kind of claim. They are ready. 

Don’t delete your fics out of fear. WE OWN THE SERVERS. They can’t threaten the hosts into deleting anything.

And if Disney thought they had a strong legal case against fanfic, they’d’ve shut down the archive a decade ago, when it was penniless and unknown, instead of waiting until it had won several battles in Congress and got worldwide acclaim for a Hugo Award.

This is important!

This is why we say you aren’t allowed Patreon and Ko-Fi links on AO3. Because it gives these parasites their legal back door to fuck your shit up.

Reblogging it for that last point. We can do this because it’s free. Don’t be an asshole and have the fact that you are charging people to write about another organization’s intellectual property out in the open because you can ruin it for everybody.

Some of the nicest things people have said to me ever, literally EVER in my entire life, have been said via AO3 comments.

FUCK YOU DISNEY

Anyways, y’all better start saving your fave fanfics and fanart under the Disney labels cause it looks like they’re trying to curb fair use/fanworks and I’m sure there’s going to be mass panicked deletions even though it’s probably unnecessary cause AO3′s legal team will fight for us.

You know that 400K yall were so fucking mad about OTW raising? Yeah, its gonna pay for the travel expenses and court costs that the legal team at AO3/OTW when they protect your shit from getting C&Ded. DO NOT DELETE YOUR STUFF! IF YOU GET CONTACTED BY DISNEY - GO TO THE ORGANIZATION OF TRANSFORMATIVE WORKS , CONTACT THEIR LEGAL ADVOCACY DEPARTMENT! ASK FOR HELP!! THIS SHIT RIGHT HERE IS *WHY* *THEY* *EXIST*

Note that Disney would have one Hell of a time serving C&Ds to authors at AO3 - because there is no “contact author” option other than leaving a comment.

They’d have to contact the SITE, which is to say, the Organization for Transformative Works, to deliver a C&D order or a DMCA takedown order.

And the OTW is not going to remove fics because someone sent a letter that says “actually those characters belong to me and you can’t use them that way.” The OTW was created to FIGHT that kind of claim. They are ready. 

Don’t delete your fics out of fear. WE OWN THE SERVERS. They can’t threaten the hosts into deleting anything.

And if Disney thought they had a strong legal case against fanfic, they’d’ve shut down the archive a decade ago, when it was penniless and unknown, instead of waiting until it had won several battles in Congress and got worldwide acclaim for a Hugo Award.

This is important!

This is why AO3 does donation drives. While a good chunk of it goes to maintaining servers and keeping the site up and running smoothly, another big chunk goes to a team of lawyers set to fight these battles for us. to protect our fair use and ability to create fan works that we offer for free. This isn’t the first time the AO3 lawyers have had to step up to bat for us. Do not delete your fics, trust in AO3’s ability to continue to protect your rights to write and post free fanfic. THIS is the reason why AO3 was created in the first place. To have a place to post our fanfic where our rights are protected, and our fics won’t be under risk of being taken down suddenly for “breaking a rule” that was made up overnight because some bigwig company decided to throw a threat at them.

Me: gets a comment on a fic.

Me: *excited writer noises*

Here’s how we did it!

Also, I learned in the tags on this post that Windows 10 has an emoji keyboard. Hold down the windows key and press the period key and it pops up. For those of you who read on a desktop and want to comment with emojis 😁

And the Mac one is control+command+spacebar! Thanks @smolstiel! :)