For those who use AO3 how DOES it acquire more server space? Do they eventually delete fics that never get updated? Do they purchase new servers? Because wouldn’t it reach a tipping point eventually of too many users to manage if not already there.
I desperately need someone at AO3 to make clearer whether “You (Iron Man)” is supposed to be for a reader-insert or for Butterfingers and DUM-E’s buddy, because whichever way you default to, a significant portion of the stories in that tag are Not What One Might Expect.
if you want to send ao3 volunteers some love, leave messages in the notes
I’ll pass it along to them
If you’ve read today’s AO3 News post you know why I’m reblogging this.
I created this post a long time ago as a way for people to say thanks or generally show support without adding to the messages that AO3 Support has to respond to. If you feel like showing some love to the volunteers who do so much for fandom, you can reply or reblog.
I’ll compile the messages and share them back with all usernames removed for your privacy. Any hate will be removed and those users blocked.
After a year away, I can now present the 2019 AO3 Ship Stats Top 100!
This list shows the 100 pairing tags with the most fanfics posted on Archive Of Our Own as of July 24 2019. There are 69 M/M pairings, 19 F/M, 3 F/F, 5 Gen and 4 Other. (Please note that on AO3, ‘Name & Name’ indicates platonic or familial ‘Gen’ relationships, while ‘Name/Name’ is used for romantic and sexual pairings.)
Of the 200 names on the list, 25 belong to women and 4 to characters of indeterminate gender, compared to 28 and 3 respectively in the 2017 list. There are 46 POC and 8 racially ambiguous characters, compared with 41 and 10 last year.
“The Archive of Our Own has none of these problems. It uses a third tagging system, one that blends the best elements of both styles. On AO3, users can put in whatever tags they want (autocomplete is there to help, but they don’t have to use it). Then, behind the scenes, human volunteers look up any new tags that no one else has used before and match them with any applicable existing tags, a process known as tag wrangling. Wrangling means that you don’t need to know whether the most popular tag for your new fanfic featuring Sherlock Holmes and John Watson is Johnlock or Sherwatson or John/Sherlock or Sherlock/John or Holmes/Watson or anything else. And you definitely don’t need to tag your fic with all of them just in case. Instead, you pick whichever one you like, the tag wranglers do their work behind the scenes, and readers looking for any of these synonyms will still be able to find you. AO3’s trick is that it involves humans by design—around 350 volunteer tag wranglers in 2019, up from 160 people in 2012—who each spend a few hours a week deciding whether new tags should be treated as synonyms or subsets of existing tags, or simply left alone. AO3’s Tag Wrangling Chairs estimate that the group is on track to wrangle over 2 million never-before-used tags in 2019, up from around 1.5 million in 2018. Laissez-faire and rigid tagging systems both fail because they assume too much—that users can create order from a completely open system, or that a predefined taxonomy can encompass every kind of tag a person might ever want. When these assumptions don’t pan out, it always seems to be the user’s fault. AO3’s beliefs about human nature are more pragmatic, like an architect designing pathways where pedestrians have begun wearing down the grass, recognizing how variation and standardization can fit together. The wrangler system is one where ordinary user behavior can be successful, a system which accepts that users periodically need help from someone with a bird’s-eye view of the larger picture. Users appreciate this help. According to Tag Wrangling Chair briar_pipe, “We sometimes get users who come from Instagram or Tumblr or another unmoderated site. We can tell that they’re new to AO3 because they tag with every variation of a concept—abbreviations, different word order, all of it. I love how excited people get when they realize they don’t have to do that here.””
We would like to bring your attention to an ugly situation with unauthorized copying of works posted on AO3.
A lot of works from AO3 have been copied to fanfics.me (we’ll call this site FFM for brevity’s sake) and are still being copied right now, either:
— automatically by a code specifically created by FFM’s owner for this purpose, or
— by unaware or unscrupulous FFM’s users via semi-automatic method (by inserting a link to a work from AO3 into a web-worm on FFM).
All works from AO3 — with a few exceptions (I’ll elaborate on this below) — can end up on FFM without authors even noticing. Even fanarts or podfics.
FFM doesn’t comply with DMCA which means that such reposts endanger fanworks’ creators in case the copyright holder demands to delete the fanwork.
Authors of the copied works do not have any control over them; if the work is edited it won’t be updated on FFM until someone manually updates it.
AdditionallyFFM’s owner makes money out of reposted free fanworks from numerous Google and Yandex ads on each and every FFM’s page by having people go to this site when searching for fics on Google etc. So we recommend using an Ads Blocker when visiting this site in order to prevent the owner from earning more. GhosteryorAdblock Plus work just fine, but you can use any other Ads Blocker that is convenient to you.
Oftentimes FFM even shows up before the original post with the work on Google search results.
We are trying to bring AO3’s users attention to this situation and help authors with taking their works down from FFM.
Briefly about the website and its owner
Let me start from the very beginning as it will bring into the light the nature of FFM and give a good example of its owner characteristic behavior.
At first, some person with nickname Refery created FFM as a web archive where authors — mostly from Harry Potter fandom — could publish their fanworks.
Time passed, the site grew and added some features (blogs, pre-moderation and etc.), and all was good and well up till the moment when Refery decided that it would be a great idea to copy to FFM fanworks published on other Russian fanfiction archives — among them from the biggest and most known site ficbook— without asking authors for permission. Even those works that had “Ask me before posting the story somewhere else” mentioned in its text or summary were copied.
For some time nobody noticed, but when finally and inevitably this came out the authors were outraged. It took a lot of time to finally persuade Refery to at least not to copy fanworks bearing a special tag “Уточнять у автора” (Ask the author first).
But after some time Refery — without giving any notice — violated his own promise and resumed copying to FFM fanworks that had the agreed upon tag. The authors complained again, so very reluctantly and after many painful discussions this feature was reinstalled.
So FFM has been notoriously known, mostly amongst Russian fandom, for claims on re-posting fanworks without the consent of the authors.
We’re mentioning this situation just to give you a detailed portrait of a person we are dealing with here.
Not only fanworks are copied to this website, but original works, too. Even those which were already published. There were all 7 of Harry Potter novels (both original text and translation), The Hobbit: There and Back Again (translation) and Vorkosigan Saga (translation) available for everybody to read and download. They were taken down only recently due to the attention this whole situation had drawn, but nothing ever goes away once it’s posted online and you can access the proof via Internet Wayback machine. We know for a fact there are other books on FFM and some actions have been taken in this regard, but still it takes time to find published books on this site.
Recently Refery decided that Russian archives are not enough for him and started copying all fanworks into FFM without any permission from the authors from numerous sites, like AO3, fanfiction.net, fictionpress.com, fanfiktion.de and likely other web-archives.
Moreover, the authors of these works can not delete their works from FFM and/or manage them. The site is in Russian only and, hence, we strongly believe that non-Russian speaking authors even do not know that their works are reposted somewhere else.
As a Russian fan-community, we have tried to stop such activity of FFM many times; however, we have not been successful in achieving our goal completely. Our most recent achievement is that the FFM’s owner implemented the “Don’t copy to another site” tag created specifically for AO3 (here is the link to FFM’s owner post on his personal blog regarding this tag. Please use Ads Blocker!). This tag should be added to each work presented on AO3 in case the author does not want their works to be copied to FFM.
We are of the opinion that no work should be taken without permission in the first place, but this tag is all we’ve got.
Please note that it seems that some time ago there was similar case of unauthorized copying with other site. Please check this link, they give useful advice.
How to prevent copying from AO3
If you check AO3 you may notice that “Don’t copy to another site” tag has hugely emerged in the recent weeks, but mostly amongst Russian users and there is a good reason for this: the owner of FFM announced this tag only in Russian and only on his private blog, so naturally there is no way for non-Russian speaking AO3 users to know about this — albeit non-satisfactory — solution.
There are no guaranties that the FFM’s owner won’t change the rules again as has already happened numerous times before (few examples we described above) and that works with this tag won’t be reposted in the future, but for now it’s the only quick and working solution besides making your works visible only to registered users, which is not ideal.
This situation is highly unpleasant, but we ask you not to delete your works from AO3, because if the work is deleted from AO3 it will be nearly impossible to delete it from FFM: we won’t be able to refresh it manually and remove the text.
Please note that adding this tag won’t work for texts that have already been copied. Only users who have accounts at FFM will be able to delete them. Each work needs to be deleted manually.
However, the Russian fandom — except for the owner of FFM — strongly condemns reposts without the consent of the author, so feel free to contact our volunteers (through DM or Ask on our tumblr page) providing the links to the works stolen from AO3, so we could delete them for you.
Unfortunately, it is not possible to cover all authors and works manually. So, we contacted AO3’ Technical Team with the aim to bring their attention to this situation and inform about it all AO3 users, and hope that AO3 team will find a general solution to resolve this problem, possibly, in collaboration with the AO3 lawyers.
We are trying to warn as many authors as possible and recently started spreading this information via comments on AO3; but considering the number of works copied to FFM informing all authors will take considerable time, and we can easily miss someone, especially since the copying is still in progress and new works from AO3 are appearing on FFM every day.
Please help us spread the word!
We tried to make a comprehensive FAQ about this. Feel free to ask if anything is unclear!
FAQ
Q: Can I check if my work was copied to FFM?
A: Yes, you can.
FFM makes money on Google and Yandex ads, so we recommend turning on the Ads Blocker of your choice before visiting this site.
Please follow this link, insert the title of your work or your AO3/other web-archive nickname into the field containing the words “insert-title-nickname” and hit “Искать” (Search).
For works rated Mature or Explicit you will be able to see only the caption “Текст произведения доступен только зарегистрированным пользователям старше 18 лет” (“The text of the work is available only to registered users over 18 years old”), but FFM users are able to read and download the story.
Q: My work from AO3 was copied. How can I take it down?
A: First of all add the tag “Don’t copy to another site” (without “ “) to the stories you want to be taken down.
Actually we would recommend adding this tag to all the works you don’t want to be copied.
Contact one of our volunteers (through DM or Ask on our tumblr page) providing links to your works or send an e-mail with your deletion request directly to the FFM owner at [email protected] or at AO3.
There is a third option: to register on FFM and delete the work yourself by hitting the refresh button, but considering that the site is in Russian we do not think it will be very convenient to those who do not speak Russian language.
Q: I got the message that my work has been deleted. How can I check if it is true?
A: You can go to FFM, search for you work, click on its title and scroll down.
After the summary there is a field that should look like this for those fics that have been deleted.
Basically it says that the author of this particular work has forbidden its copying and that only the information on its title, author’s nickname, rating, pairings, summary and the link to original post on AO3 are available.
For works that are still available on FFM this field looks like this (if the work is open for non-registered users).
Q: My work copied from AO3 was deleted, but FFM still shows some information on it. Can it be deleted?
A: Even though the text of the fic is not going to be on FFM anymore after it has been deleted, the fic’s title, author’s name, rating, pairings, summary and link to original post on AO3 will remain there.
The deletion of this leftover information can be done only by the site owner himself.
Some Russian authors tried to make him to delete it, but in most cases the FFM’s owner refused them mentioning that publication of such information is in line with fair use concept and doesn’t violate authors’ rights.
We are yet unsure how to delete this leftover information. In case you need it as well, try contacting the FFM owner at [email protected] or at AO3. Maybe e-mails of a large number of authors will work, but unfortunately we can’t guarantee anything. In case you need it, we can provide Russian text for you to send by e-mail (please contact our volunteers through DM or Ask on our tumblr page).
Q: My work from fanfiction.net/fictionpress.com/fanfiktion.de/other web-archives was copied to FFM. How can I take it down?
A: Unfortunately, there is no possible way for us to delete from FFM the fanworks that are copied from web-archives other then AO3. Only FFM’s owner can delete these works, please try contacting him at [email protected] or at AO3. In case you need it, we can provide Russian text for you to send by e-mail (please contact our volunteers through DM or Ask on our tumblr page).
Please do not delete your works from the web-archive it was stolen from, because if the work is deleted it will be nearly impossible to delete it from FFM.
Also it seems that some time ago there was similar case of unauthorized copying with other site. Please check this link, they give useful advice.
This app, “Fanfic Pocket Archive Library”, is lifting all public content from Ao3 and making it available through a service they profit from.
Your work has been stolen and is being used to make money for a third party.
^above are the ways in which the app makes money off of Ao3 content. The developer is called Simple Soft Alliance. Here’s the app’s Terms and Conditions.
Any fanfiction that can be accessed without a password on Ao3 is already available in this app. Yours, mine, every fan creator’s. Whether this is illegal I do not know, but it is certainly unethical and needs to be fought. Ao3 is a site of unparalleled integrity and shows the utmost respect to creators, so this content grab is an even bigger slap in the face for that reason.
Feel free to contact Ao3 as well to alert them to this issue. Let’s take em down, folks. In the meantime, you can put your Ao3 in private mode to prevent any more data theft.
Please reblog and tag your writer friends. Signal boost this.
Guys!
I may have abandoned writing but that doesn’t mean I abandoned reading fanfics or loving them.
I did NOTgive consent or permission to Fanfic Pocket Archive Library to post my work.
They are profitting off all of our hardwork. This is what AO3 is against.
Check your work! And lock your stories from getting crossposted to their app.
name your Tumblr user pet peeves!! mine is when I’m scrollin thru a tag and there’s about fifty million fanfictions, almost all of them h*rny self insert NSFW, and none of them are under a cut. so I have to scroll through this long ass fanfiction. and no matter how hard I try, every single time I end up readin a lil bit of some freaky ass sh*t.
this has gotta stop. please fanfiction authors, I am begging you. put your work under the cut, or externally and provide links. don’t put it straight out in the open. please
It’s been more than 18 months since I last uploaded a new story to Archive of Our Own, and I’m happy to announce The Saddleman is back with a new light-Whouffaldi short story, “Doctor Who and the Clockwork Squirrel.” A sequel, prequel and sidequel to “Under the Lake” and “Before the Flood.” Very much a tongue-in-cheek tale that I hope you enjoy. (This is also the 75th story I’ve posted to AO3 since roughly this same time in 2016!)
“The Doctor has created the universe’s first and only clockwork squirrel (honest, he checked). When it goes missing under mysterious circumstances, he calls upon his “other companion” to help.”
This blogger remembers when we had to put disclaimers at the head of our fics and pray that someone didn’t take it into their heads to sue us for what we created.
This blogger remembers brilliant artists and writers getting decades of work obliterated on LJ because someone who wanted to tell people what they were allowed to create went running to someone who wanted a profit, and told them the artists and writers had been naughty.
This blogger remembers just how hard the creators of AO3 worked to build the thing we all seem to take for granted now.
This blogger watched friends dive into the creation process so heartily and determinedly that they all but disappeared from the writing/gaming/artistic side of their fandom for YEARS while they worked to make the archive happen.
This blogger remembers the sense of giddy wonder that there would possibly be LAWYERS involved, willing to defend our right to create these works, and not leave us hanging at the mercy of corporate legal teams.
This blogger is aware that she reads between twenty to fifty books’ worth of material every year on AO3, and is never REQUIRED to pay a penny for the privilege of getting access.
This blogger is aware that she will not ever see advertisements on AO3, and that her personal data and reading preferences won’t be sold to advertisers in order to raise the money that AO3 needs to pay for the services they provide.
This blogger is aware that AO3 is, and has always been, a labor of love; by fans, for fans, and not for profiting off fans – and this is what makes it unique in the whole of the media universe.
This blogger has NEVER taken AO3 for granted, and has ALWAYS been damned glad to have access to it. Even in years when this blogger didn’t have the means to support it financially.
All of the above, and:
This blogger remembers the Anne Rice fandom drama.
This blogger remembers Fanfiction.net deleting fanfics because they had been coerced into deleting the nc-17 category.
This blogger is thankful for AO3 and the people who run that website and put a lot of work into it.
I’m not really old enough to remember the above, but I can appreciate just how special AO3 is.
Antis: This fic is disgusting. I hope you kill yourself. I’m reporting this.
Ao3: We’re punishing you because harassment and threats are against our TOS. This properly tagged fic wasn’t breaking the tos, which you agreed to when you signed up for this site.
Antis: Oh my god. This proves ao3 CAN punish their users, they just choose not to!!!
It’s getting weird that people keep posting on Ao3 stories with “when you can tell they came from Wattpad.”
I was invited to make an account on Ao3 when it first launched by the site itself so I’ve been around on Ao3 for a LONG time. It was because of the popularity of my fanfictions on another website (I believe). I never used wattpad. This gatekeeping of Ao3 is ridiculous. The content on Ao3 isn’t “classier” or “better.” Ao3 has its fsir share of dumpster fire fics.
And honestly, we all start out somewhere. Putting people down for what they write is gross. If you want to give pointers in how you think their stories could improve than that’s fine, but to be going around being absolute assholes to people isn’t. Ao3 is meant to be a space for people to post their fan works without any gatekeeping and policing of content. That’s what it exists for. Ao3 was made for us to get away from that and to be a safe place to post works without random deletion of content and to help allow people to express their creativity in all its capacity.
Support people. Stop putting them down. Who cares if they made an account on Ao3 because Wattpad started to delete their stuff. Guess what? Almost all of us original Ao3 users came to Ao3 when fanfiction.net was doing that to us.
You might have seen that ao3 is rolling out the first part of the blocking feature (blocking users from commenting on your works) but they have also added user-IDs to comments and that sent me in a complete and utter spiral!
So, You know that user? the one that leaves you the best comments? the close friend you have? :D you can now color their comments to make them stand out amongst them all!!
I’ve made 5 basic skins (the one you can see above) but in the work itself you’ll find the explaination on how to change the images and the colors and a few other details.
Don’t be a dick in bookmarks, folks. And yes while I made this image, I’m giving free reign. Take it. Spread it far and wide. Because I’m hearing that some readers don’t know that their bookmarks are visible.
Video description: a tiktok video discussing AO3’s new comment blocking feature.
The video begins by showing a tweet from the Ao3_status twitter account. The tweet reads, “Comment blocking is now live! ” and is responding to the tweet linking the AO3 News post announcing that comment blocking is coming.
The narrator then goes to the comments section on one of her works and points out that there is a new button available. On comments from other users, you can now see a button labelled “Block.”
She taps on the Block button and it takes her to a confirmation page. The confirmation page outlines what blocking will do: stop a user from commenting on your works and stop a user from replying to your comments elsewhere on AO3. It also outlines what blocking will not do: hide that user’s works or bookmarks from you, delete or hide their existing comments on your works, hide their comments elsewhere on the site.
She confirms that she wants to block the user and then returns to her comments section. The button that formerly said “Block” now says “Unblock.” She says you can remove the block on a user by pressing that button again or by tapping on your username at the top of the page and selecting My Preferences from the dropdown menu that appears.
On the My Preferences page, there is now a button labelled “Block users.” After tapping that button, she goes to a new page. On that new page, you can see the user she just blocked and a button next to their username that says “Unblock.”
She taps that button and it takes her to a confirmation page which outlines what will happen if she agrees. Unblocking a user will allow them to comment on your work or to reply to your comments elsewhere on the site. She confirms.
The screen goes back to the Blocked Users page found in My Preferences, and the narrator explains that you don’t need to find a comment from another user in order to block them. If you’d like, you can type their name into the text box provided and block them directly from that page.
Not shown: you can also block a user from that user’s profile page.
If you’d like to know more about more blocking and muting features that are planned, read the News post linked above.
Sometimes I manage to convince myself that I have multiple hobbies. Then ao3 stops working and I’m faced with reality; Hobbies are my last resort. Fanfics are an obsession that got out of control.
I would like to cite 2012 Wattpad as the reason for my downfall.
