#ao3 psa

[ao3-shenanigans]

How do I search on ao3? Ive just been putting in the fandom I want and hitting go but I have to scroll through like dozens of pages before I find something in the theme/ vibe (? Word idk? I hope you know what i mean) I want

Hi! Great question! This will be a longer answer, so I’ll include a cut:

Ao3 uses a Tag Filtering system, wherein authors include tags on their work and readers can use the website to sort and filter through them to show what they may or may not want to read.

These are tags on a work:

But how do we get there? If we start with just a generic fandom search, we’ll find a button at the top of the page labeled “Filter”. This guy will be our best friend, click it.

By clicking “Filter” a sidebar pops up titled “Search and Filter” it has two main sections to it with several subheadings. These two sections: Include and Exclude achieve similar results but function slightly different.

By clicking on the drop downs under each, a list of common tags will pop up and you are presented with the option of Including or Excluding them from your search.

Include:

- by selecting a tag under Include, you are telling ao3 that you only want to see fics with that tag on it, every fic shown for this search will have that tag

- this is good for narrowing down a lot of fics very quickly, especially if you have something specific in mind

Exclude:

- by checking a tag under Exclude, no fan works with that tag will be shown in your search results

- this is good if you want to browse a larger selection of fics but want to avoid something you’re not fond of 

Selected tags in the Warnings dropdown of the Exclude section look like this:

There is a third section of this sidebar called “More Options” which includes sidebars to set preferences for crossovers, fic completion status, word count, and date updated. It functions much the same as Include and Exclude.

Lastly, make sure to click the “Sort and Filter” button at the bottom of the sidebar so that your selections will be put into effect!

Additional note:

This “Sort and Filter” function can be used when looking at an overall fandom page, or a more specific page like one for a ship paring or an alternate universe!

Hoped this helped and happy fic hunting!

[cryptidpandas]

hey yall, it might NOT be the best idea right now to be constantly refreshing Ao3 or trying to open it every few minutes

the staff will let us know when things are working again, and until then, the site is gonna go in and out. Whenever it comes back up, everyone's flooding back there and it goes down again

So, maybe just try to leave it alone for a lil while? Let the volunteers do their work without the extra traffic ❤️

[chemicalarospec]

Ao3 and AI

They made a short blog post here and I dearly hope you read it, but the most important thing is:

1. Most AIs are trained off one dataset, the Common Crawl dataset.

2. Common Crawl can be be blocked in two lines of code.

3. Ao3 implemented that code in December 2022.

4. Fics that were already scraped will remain scraped and there's nothing we can do about it, but any fics posted after they put in that code will not be used to train AI unless the AI-makers make a new data-scraper.

5. Ao3 has also put code in place to slow down scrapers and they check their traffic for signs of abuse.

In short, you do not need to set your fic to members-only to stop it from being part of the Common Crawl dataset, though it will add another layer of protection for other scrapers if you feel really strongly about it. Please note that the blog post says locking your fic "will not block every potential scraper."

[thai-drama-ao3-stats]

Thai Drama Stats Special Edition:

The Great Archive Lockdown 🔒

Hi folks! In case you weren't aware, there are various scraping bots that trawl through AO3 and use the data for AI training, content mill sites, or other vaguely nefarious purposes. One site, "Fanfic Books", is essentially creating an unauthorized mirror of AO3. Here are some posts about it.

To combat this, many users have recently chosen to "Archive Lock" their fics.

What is Archive Locking?

An archive locked work, or "restricted" work, is only visible to users who are logged into AO3. This prevents anonymous users (and bots that aren't using login credentials) from reading your fic or finding your fic in searches. This doesn't block all scraping bots, but it should keep most of them out.

What does this have to do with fandom stats?

The AO3 scraping I do doesn't use login credentials, so I can't count archive locked fics. That's totally fine! I am in no way telling you to stop archive locking! Lock or unlock to your hearts content!

It does, however, mean that the data I pulled from my Thai Drama AO3 Trends Dashboard this week (July 1 - July 7, 2024) are looking especially strange.

Holy moly! We actually have negative growth. More fics were locked than posted, which is why the Net New is negative. I'd estimate that about 1% of all previously public Thai Drama fics were archive locked this week.

This matches trends on all of AO3. This week, the total number of publicly available fics actually decreased by 0.7% -- and that's including all the new fics being posted!

When did this happen?

The timing for both Thai Drama fandom and all of AO3 is pretty consistent.

For Thai Drama fandom, most of the locking happened on Friday, July 5, but there was also some locking on Sunday.

When we look at all of AO3, it seems like most of the mass-locking happened on July 5th as well, with additional locking happening all throughout the weekend.

Which Thai Drama fandoms were most affected?

When we look at sheer numbers, KinnPorsche, of course, has a lot of newly-locked fics. 3 Will Be Free, My Engineer, and Dark Blue Kiss were locked down a lot as well.

When we look at the top fandoms by negative growth, The Player saw almost all of its fics vanish overnight. 3 Will Be Free was cut neatly in half.

This data is cool I guess, but... so what?

If these numbers are accurate, it represents another sudden and massive shift towards archive locking on AO3.

According to @star-grazing's stats about archive locking in December 2022, the total number of archive locked works on AO3 increased by 70% in just a couple weeks after a reddit post went viral about AI bots scraping AO3 for machine learning material.

Those stats show that in December 2022, 5.79% of AO3 fics were archive locked. When I checked the numbers again today, 9.37% of all works were archive locked.

Using rough estimates, from the last few days of AO3 data, I'd say that the total number of archive locked works increased by 8% since last Thursday (7/4). And trends seem to indicate that the great lockdown is still going!

Anyway...

Thanks for sticking with me! This is a really fun time to be collecting AO3 stats :) If you have more questions, feel free to reach out. I also put some more details under the cut! Thanks y'all!

Are we sure it was archive locking, and not some other data issue?

Er, good question. It's my best guess, and I've tried to rule out other potentially culprits. The AO3 Fandom Trend Analysis Dashboard, which has data about all fandoms on AO3, doesn't seem to show anything amiss. Their data uses login credentials, meaning they can count archive locked fics.

I also went through several tags manually while logged in and logged out to compare numbers from this week to previous weeks. It doesn't seem like there was a mass deletion or retag that I could see.

I also used the "restricted:true" search operator to search for archive locked fics while logged in. A lot of those missing fics pop back up!

I absolutely welcome other theories though, if you think of one!

Is this still happening?

Seemingly yes, for Thai Dramas at least! When I checked the "All Thai Dramas" AO3 search this morning, the total number of Thai Drama fics had dropped below the 40K mark - lower than when I first started keeping track a month ago!

We probably have a lot more archive locking in our future!

How do I archive lock my own fics?

There's a really good tutorial over here.

Help! I don't have an AO3 account, so I can't read all these archive locked fics anymore.

Please message me! I have some spare invites.

Which fandoms are the most "locked down"?

I'm not sure, but there is a Fanlore article about Hockey RPF and the Fourth Wall which provides some comparison stats. Hockey fandom has traditionally been one of the most locked down fandoms; less than half of hockey rpf fics are publicly available.

You can also peruse this AO3 search to see all archive locked fics.

[ekat-fandom-blog]

Is something up on Ao3 rn? Cuz no matter what part of the site I go to, I keep getting the Error 500 message. I checked the Ao3 support page, and still got the message. Went to their twitter and nothing's been posted since last year. And I can't find anything official saying what the problem is or when it might be fixed.

The only things I could find was Downdetector which tells me that other people are having the same problem.

[whumpthefuck]

Sharing this because I've heard of way too many writers finding out someone dislikes or even HATES their fic because of this exact sorta situation.

REMEMBER fic writers create content FOR FREE!! You don't have to like what we post, you don't have to read what we post. Just be a decent person.

hey do people know that like. notes that you leave in bookmarks on ao3 are visible? because i was looking at the bookmarks on one of my fics and someone left a kind of crazy comment, and then when i looked at the rest of that person’s bookmarks they were also kinda… not awesome. and there were some that i know would have hurt me if i saw them on one of my fics.

like idk i just think if you’re gonna leave comments that critique a fic, or say that you’d like it more if it was by another fic writer, or call a fic ‘mid-range, 6.8/10’, there’s a private bookmark button that you can hit. and then you won’t be putting down fic writers who are writing for free, taking time out of their day to share their work with you, purely out of love for the characters and the media. it just feels like the least you could do is show some kindness and not leave negative remarks where anyone can see them.

anyways TL;DR your bookmarks are visible. fic writers can see them. either be nice or make them private.

[cryptidpandas]

LATEST UPDATE!!!!

Please remember that Ao3 is run solely by volunteers, who at this point have been working on fixing the site for 12 HOURS

[sheinthatfandom]

Ao3 hate bot is going around leaving nasty messages. If you get a comment like this mark it as spam. According to comments it seems to be going to most recent not fandom specific.

[watcher0033]

Y’all, the Archive admins are made up of VOLUNTEERS. And they have been working for 12-13 HOURS STRAIGHT.

I better not hear any complaints when donation period comes around. OR ELSE.

cosplay by @woahchriswoah on Twitter

EDIT: How do we show appreciation to the volunteers? For me reading these deep dives on OTW issues u guys apparently it's been said multiple times that one of their objective statements is to have paid staff for ao3 and there's a surplus of donations they haven't used up or the other community solutions that needs to address. For those more financially literate feel free to analyze, snipe me or add to the discussion etc. linked here by deepa. They’re cool and these yearly analysis they did aint no joke.

But Seriously what can we do for these volunteers? The probable burn out from this entire fiasco would be no joke. @ao3org

[soulless-bex]

the world is going to shit and i hate it

PSA: bot comments are taking over ao3

The above examples have been provided with the authors' permission to demonstrate what these look like.

Basic rundown:

They are all 3 sentences long

Perfect grammar, capitalization, and punctuation

Like absolutely flawless English teacher-style writing with only a single exclamation mark, ever

No mentions whatsoever of character names, settings, situations, or anything that could be tied to the story

The usernames may be identical to people who exist on ao3, but the name is not clickable, and no profile is associated with it EXCEPT when you directly search for that name. What this means: the comments come from an unregistered (not logged in) reader, bots scrape the site for real usernames, attach that to the comment, and post

Please spread the word about this so authors can filter comments and report them accordingly

There has been some speculation about why this is happening at all, and the best guess is that this is a feature that AI-training story-scraping tools are implementing to try and make their browsing traffic look legitimate

[ekat-fandom-blog]

AO3 PSA

If the reader or an oc is a main character in your fic, please tag them as characters. It is literally impossible to filter out every platonic or romantic pairing.

I don't mean "I added an oc into the fic but they're only brought up once or twice as a side character." Most people wouldn't blink twice at adding an oc as, like, a cashier or someone the main character talked to for a few moments. I know some people add characters from other shows/movies/comics/etc without it feeling out of place or needing it to be tagged because the character is only relevant for maybe a few paragraphs at most.

I mean "Reader/oc is the main character" or "Reader/oc is part of the main group and is plot relevant."

I understand almost everyone tags their fics as "character/Reader" or "Original Character(s) & canon character" and that does help with filtering, but it's not enough.

The tags "Reader", "Reader-Insert", "Original Character(s)", "Original Female Character(s)", and "Original Male Character(s)" exist for a reason. Please, for the love of the universe, please use them when it's relevant.

[5ummit]

AO3 Ship Stats: Year In Bad Data

You may have seen this AO3 Year In Review.

It hasn’t crossed my tumblr dash but it sure is circulating on twitter with 3.5M views, 10K likes, 17K retweets and counting. Normally this would be great! I love data and charts and comparisons!

Except this data is GARBAGE and belongs in the TRASH.

I first noticed something fishy when I realized that Steve/Bucky – the 5th largest ship on AO3 by total fic count – wasn’t on this Top 100 list anywhere. I know Marvel’s popularity has fallen in recent years, but not that much. Especially considering some of the other ships that made it on the list. You mean to tell me a femslash HP ship (Mary MacDonald/Lily Potter) in which one half of the pairing was so minor I had to look up her name because she was only mentioned once in a single flashback scene beat fandom juggernaut Stucky? I call bullshit.

Now obviously jumping to conclusions based on gut instinct alone is horrible practice... but it is a good place to start. So let’s look at the actual numbers and discover why this entire dataset sits on a throne of lies.

Here are the results of filtering the Steve/Bucky tag for all works created between Jan 1, 2023 and Dec 31, 2023:

Not only would that place Steve/Bucky at #23 on this list, if the other counts are correct (hint: they're not), it’s also well above the 1520-new-work cutoff of the #100 spot. So how the fuck is it not on the list? Let’s check out the author’s FAQ to see if there’s some important factor we’re missing.

The first thing you’ll probably notice in the FAQ is that the data is being scraped from publicly available works. That means anything privated and only accessible to logged-in users isn’t counted. This is Sin #1. Already the data is inaccurate because we’re not actually counting all of the published fics, but the bots needed to do data collection on this scale can't easily scrape privated fics so I kinda get it. We’ll roll with this for now and see if it at least makes the numbers make more sense:

Nope. Logging out only reduced the total by a couple hundred. Even if one were to choose the most restrictive possible definition of "new works" and filter out all crossovers and incomplete fics, Steve/Bucky would still have a yearly total of 2,305. Yet the list claims their total is somewhere below 1,500? What the fuck is going on here?

Let’s look at another ship for comparison. This time one that’s very recent and popular enough to make it on the list so we have an actual reference value for comparison: Nick/Charlie (Heartstopper). According to the list, this ship sits at #34 this year with a total of 2630 new works. But what’s AO3 say?

Off by a hundred or so but the values are much closer at least!

If we dig further into the FAQ though we discover Sin #2 (and the most egregious): the counting method. The yearly fic counts are NOT determined by filtering for a certain time period, they’re determined by simply taking a snapshot of the total number of fics in a ship tag at the end of the year and subtracting the previous end-of-year total. For example, if you check a ship tag on Jan 1, 2023 and it has 10,000 fics and check it again on Jan 1, 2024 and it now has 12,000 fics, the difference (2,000) would be the number of "new works" on this chart.

At first glance this subtraction method might seem like a perfectly valid way to count fics, and it’s certainly the easiest way, but it can and did have major consequences to the point of making the entire dataset functionally meaningless. Why? If any older works are deleted or privated, every single one of those will be subtracted from the current year fic count. And to make the problem even worse, beginning at the end of last year there was a big scare about AI scraping fics from AO3, which caused hundreds, if not thousands, of users to lock down their fics or delete them.

The magnitude of this fuck up may not be immediately obvious so let’s look at an example to see how this works in practice.

Say we have two ships. Ship A is more than a decade old with a large fanbase. Ship B is only a couple years old but gaining traction. On Jan 1, 2023, Ship A had a catalog of 50,000 fics and ship B had 5,000. Both ships have 3,000 new works published in 2023. However, 4% of the older works in each fandom were either privated or deleted during that same time (this percentage is was just chosen to make the math easy but it’s close to reality).

Ship A: 50,000 x 4% = 2,000 removed works Ship B: 5,000 x 4% = 200 removed works

Ship A: 3,000 - 2,000 = 1,000 "new" works Ship B: 3,000 - 200 = 2,800 "new" works

This gives Ship A a net gain of 1,000 and Ship B a net gain of 2,800 despite both fandoms producing the exact same number of new works that year. And neither one of these reported counts are the actual new works count (3,000). THIS explains the drastic difference in ranking between a ship like Steve/Bucky and Nick/Charlie.

How is this a useful measure of anything? You can't draw any conclusions about the current size and popularity of a fandom based on this data.

With this system, not only is the reported "new works" count incorrect, the older, larger fandom will always be punished and it’s count disproportionately reduced simply for the sin of being an older, larger fandom. This example doesn’t even take into account that people are going to be way more likely to delete an old fic they're no longer proud of in a fandom they no longer care about than a fic that was just written, so the deletion percentage for the older fandom should theoretically be even larger in comparison.

And if that wasn't bad enough, the author of this "study" KNEW the data was tainted and chose to present it as meaningful anyway. You will only find this if you click through to the FAQ and read about the author’s methodology, something 99.99% of people will NOT do (and even those who do may not understand the true significance of this problem):

The author may try to argue their post states that the tags "which had the greatest gain in total public fanworks” are shown on the chart, which makes it not a lie, but a error on the viewer’s part in not interpreting their data correctly. This is bullshit. Their chart CLEARLY titles the fic count column “New Works” which it explicitly is NOT, by their own admission! It should be titled “Net Gain in Works” or something similar.

Even if it were correctly titled though, the general public would not understand the difference, would interpret the numbers as new works anyway (because net gain is functionally meaningless as we've just discovered), and would base conclusions on their incorrect assumptions. There’s no getting around that… other than doing the counts correctly in the first place. This would be a much larger task but I strongly believe you shouldn’t take on a project like this if you can’t do it right.

To sum up, just because someone put a lot of work into gathering data and making a nice color-coded chart, doesn’t mean the data is GOOD or VALUABLE.

[echochqmber]

psa to ao3 writers #1

before tagging a character in your fic, ask yourself, if you were filtering specifically for that character, would you be pleased with your fic in that character’s tag?

so a fic from Character A’s point of view of trying to set up B and C would probably be fine to tag with “Character A”. But a fic from C’s point of view with one small scene where they go to A for advice probably wouldn’t be very appetizing to people filtering for Character A. people filter for a character because they want to read fics about them, not fics where they make a brief cameo!

“but some people might not want to read a fic with Character A period, no matter how big or small their role is!”

then put “character a also featured but not in a big enough role to tag” in your additional tags, or some variation of that.

[ultraviolet-ink]

An Important Warning:

On November 1, 2024, I received the below comment on one of my fics. I had replied to it, believing it to be in good faith. This person, Leaona Colin, as seen by the Ao3 comment chain and discord profile below, directly messaged me under the guise of discussing my fic, and the conversation was normal for the most part

The conversation started to change into an attempt to strong arm me into commissioning them directly (something that unfortunately does happen through a desperate measure) for an animation project. I had believed, in my naivety, that this was just two artists workshopping ideas until they had mentioned this being a "paid collaboration". Please note that I at NO POINT made any indication of wanting to make a commission or anything of the like. For the full context, I will link our discord conversation in its entirety

At this point, the conversation started to change to the commission, and in my own personal awkwardness/fear of being perceived as rude, I played along because I honestly did not know what to do next. The way that this person has approached me feels like a MUCH bigger red flag than the insane price they came up with. It would be one thing to come into my direct messages and say "hey, I'm an animator and I'm wondering if you'd be interested in commissioning me to draw [scene] as a paid commission", however what I went through was a bait and switch. I had gone into this thinking I would be entering a casual conversation about my fic, about the story, and about my writing process, but that pretense was very quickly dropped after the above polite small talk

Mind you, THIS is the animation that they seem to be requesting between 1800-2200 USD for:

I had debated whether or not I should include the video, but I feel that it is important to bring up due to the insane price and the information that @baratrongirl helped provide me with due to her husband's own experience in this industry (thank you SO much Richard!!)

I have reported the comment to Ao3 and I have reported the profile to Discord itself. This is a warning to fic authors and other fan creators to please, please, PLEASE, be on the lookout and to stay safe. I have also learned of a recent scam in Ao3/FFN comment sections where a wave of commission scammers use stolen or ai art to promote themselves and either make of with the money or send some sort of ai art. There hasn't been any mention of anything for animation, but it is very much possible that the scam is evolving, more info about this can be linked below r/FanFiction: PMs on Fanfiction.net offering me commissioned art r/AO3: Great, the art scammers are now being registered users r/AO3: These comments are starting to be an annoying trend

[antis-delete-your-blogs-pls-thx]

Yeah, no, heads up, we've got a Republican Christian Karen type, Audrey Richards, running for the AO3/OTW board. I love how the US has devolved to the point where we risk Christofascists in our fucking GAY FANFICTION WEBSITES. I think a Republican party candidate whose main platform is literally "think of the children" is the absolute antithesis of everything AO3 stands for, but that's just me.