Legendary horror manga artist Junji Ito loved the Barbie movie (x)

AO3 Etiquette

It would seem a whole new kind of AO3 reader/writer is emerging and it is becoming clear not everyone quite understands how the website community works. Here is some basic guidance on how most people expect you to go about using AO3 to keep this a fun community archive that funtions correctly:

• Kudos is for when the story was interesting enough to make you finish reading. If it sucked or was badly written, you probably left. If you finished - you kudos.
• If you liked it, you should comment. It can be long and detailed or a literal keysmash. Writers don't care, we just love comments.
• No critisism unless the author has specifically asked or agreed to hear it. Even constructive critisism is a no-no unless an author note tells you it's okay. Many people write as a fun hobby or a way to cope with, among other things, insecurity. Don't ruin that for them.
• Do not comment to ask the author to write/update something else. It's tacky and off-putting and will probably have the opposite effect than the one you want.
• There is no algorithm, it's an archive. Use the search and filter function to add/remove the pairings/characters/tropes etc. you want to read about and it will find you the fics that fit the bill.
• For this to work, writers must tag and rate stories. This avoids readers finding the wrong things and missing the stuff they want. I don't care how cringy that trope is in your eyes - it gets tagged.
• Character A/Character B means a ROMANTIC or SEXUAL relationship of some kind. Character A&Character B is PLANTONIC, like friendship or family.
• Nothing is banned. This is an implicit rule because banning one thing is a slipperly slope to banning another and another, until nothing is allowed anymore. Do not expect anyone to censor for you. Because of the tags system, you are responsible for your own reading experience.
• People can create new chapters and sequels/fic series any time after they "complete" a story. So it's considered perfectly normal to subscribe, even to a finished story. You can even subscribe to the author instead just to cover your bases.
• Do not repost stories or change the publishing date without an extremely good reason (like a complete top to bottom rewrite). It's an archive, not social media. No one cares what's the most recent, only what fits their tag needs.
• Avoid deleting a story you wrote if you hate it - orphan it so others can still enjoy it, without it being connected to you anymore.
• This is a creative fanfiction archive. No essays on your insights or theories please. There are other places for that.

I KNOW there's plenty more I missed but I'm trying to cover most of the basics that people seem to be struggling with.

I invite anyone to add to this, but please explain, don't berate.

People are so entitled in the comments damn like no you writer don’t have to put up with you being rude they wrote you entertainment for free

To the people in the notes who are insisting that they have the right to leave negative feedback on AO3:

What you’re not understanding is that fandom is not a service, it’s a community. I saw someone compare leaving a comment on AO3 to reviewing a product on Amazon - if you didn’t like the product, you’re going to say so. But fanworks are not products and you didn’t pay money for them. They were shared with you.

Leaving un-asked-for criticism in AO3 comments isn’t like reviewing a product you were disappointed with. It’s like going to a friend’s house when they’ve cooked a meal and telling them all the things that are wrong with the food. Sure, you can do it, but it’s rude as hell and they are probably not going to invite you to dinner again.

("Can you leave crit in comments” has been a debate as long as I’ve been in fandom, but 20 years ago the argument was “I’m helping the writer improve!” and not “I am a consumer with a right to complain.” Fandom has gotten more creepily capitalistic over the decades but jerks are evergreen, I guess.)

The last bulletpoint is incorrect, though. It's also a site for meta. Meta is a transformative work. You can absolutely post essays about your theories and insight on AO3 as long as they're tagged correctly as meta. In fact, in the event that Tumblr or Twitter goes down, you SHOULD preserve any meta or "notfic" (informal, often bullet-pointed or Twitter threaded fic) you're particularly proud of on AO3, which is an archive for preserving fanworks.

This be old and the update has not gone as viral unfortunately

Please for the love of god, if you value whatever media or whatever you're creating a wiki for:

DO NOT USE FANDOM WIKIA

Not just because Fandom wiki is just straight up adware. But because they will happily take all your rights as a wiki owner away and give it to a corporation in the name of profits, like they did to the McDonald's wiki or y'know, completely destroy LGBTQ+ wikis on many identities (including removing nearly every aroacespec labels including demisexual, greyromantic, and many other labels, including many more I used!) all without the permission or consent of the admins of the wiki to "make LGBTQ+ identities easier to understand" and replaced the admins with their own chosen ones, of which iirc were very questionable in their behavior.

"What are alternatives then?"

Fandom Wikia runs off a FREE open-source software known as MediaWiki, it's the same thing Wikipedia, Bulbapedia, and many others use.

This means that you can host your own wiki, or use any other wiki farm such as Miraheze, which is what the wiki I help run uses.

The best part about WikiMedia is that something made on one wiki can be cross-compatible with another. We often use and base our templates off of other wikis, and it makes it somewhat easier to transfer from FANDOM if necessary.

Stop FANDOM's monopoly over wikis, they'll stab you in the back as soon as it's a choice between the user or profits.

I’ve noticed lately that it’s often Americans who leave tags like “I don’t even care if it’s made up” on posts I make that are not particularly unbelievable, but are pretty specific to my way of life or corner of the world (like the one about the cheese vendor). It reminds me of that tweet that was circulating, that said Americans have a “medieval peasant scale of worldview”—I mean, if you don’t want to be perceived this way by the rest of the world maybe don’t go around social media saying that if a cultural concept or way of life sounds unfamiliar it must be made up?

It’s the imbalance that’s annoying, because like—when I mentioned having no mobile network around here I had people giving me info about Verizon to fix my problem. I post some rural pic and someone says it must be somewhere in the Midwest because the Southwest doesn’t look like this. My post about my postwoman has thousands of Americans assuming it’s about the USPS. On my post about my architect there’s someone saying “it’s because architecture is an impacted major” and other irrelevant stuff about how architecture is taught in the US. This kind of thing happens so so so often and I’m expected to be familiar with the concepts of Verizon and the Midwest and impacted majors and the USPS and meanwhile I make a post about my daily life and Americans in the notes are debating like “dunno if real. it sounds made up”

Going online for the rest of the world means having to keep in mind an insane amount of hyperspecific trivia about American culture while going online for Americans means having to keep in mind that the rest of the world really exists I guess

The thing op is talking abt:

Source

conducting a new experiment called maintaining a normal conversation. i'll let you know how it goes

brought up the eel sex discovery again :/

speaking of: did you guys know that the mystery of eel breeding has finally been discovered??

the reproduction of eels has been a mystery since ancient fucking greece and they JUST discovered how they do it. scientists followed european eels that migrated thousands of kilometers from freshwater streams and rivers to the Sargasso sea (which is by north america) where the females released millions of eggs into the water and the males fertalized them and then the eels just died. because appearantly thats the end of their lifespan.

its insane. its bonkers. ALL european and american eels reproduce IN THE SAME PLACE. european eels swim across the north atlantic ocean just to reproduce. these eels live for about 20 years and go through multiple complex life stages but they begin and end their lives in the same place, despite how far they travel. and god dont get me started on other species of eels-

Ha I wonder how many strokes the most complex Chinese character has like maybe eightee-

Has a Chinese son, names him bèng-dá, and he hates me

My beloved son 䨻龘 just trying to write his name in kindergarten

I slept in and just woke up, so here's what I've been able to figure out while sipping coffee:

• Twitter has officially rebranded to X just a day or two after the move was announced.
• The official branding is that a tweet is now called "an X", for which there are too many jokes to make.
• The official account is still @twitter because someone else owns @X and they didn't reclaim the username first.
• The logo is 𝕏 which is the Unicode character Unicode U+1D54F so the logo cannot be copyrighted and it is highly likely that it cannot be protected as a trademark.
• Outside the visual logo, the trademark for the use of the name "X" in social media is held by Meta/Facebook, while the trademark for "X" in finance/commerce is owned by Microsoft.
• The rebranding has been stopped in Japan as the term "X Japan" is trademarked by the band X JAPAN.
• Elon had workers taking down the "Twitter" name from the side of the building. He did not have any permits to do this. The building owner called the cops who stopped the crew midway through so the sign just says "er".
• He still plans to call his streaming and media hosting branch of the company as "Xvideo". Nobody tell him.

This man wants you to give him control over all of your financial information.

not that i didn't want to believe you op, but i had to check that er thing out for myself, bc that just seemed too cartoonishly stupid to be real

but holy shit

Just wanted to let everyone who isn’t aware yet know

-The amount of dms you can send on Twitter per day is now limited unless you have Twitter Blue, I can’t tell if it’s a 24hr period or if it resets at midnight but I ran out of “allowed” dms to my friend at 2:30am last night

-Elon has decided to rebrand Twitter to “X” and “get rid of all the birds”, completely removing the massive brand recognition Twitter has

-Tumblr is apparently trending in technology on Twitter right now

Also Japanese Twitter is having a field day because the rebranding would result in Twitter being called “X Japan”, which happens to be the name of a very famous Japanese rock band that’s been around since the 80s

x japan's founder has already posted a thinly veiled legal warning because apparently not only would it be hilariously stupid to make twitter japan "x japan", but the band owns the trademark, so they can't

man the site that used to be full of people horny for the onceler now getting really hyped about tree law is some serious poetic irony

love how antis love to call ppl ‘porn addicts’ as an insult even though

1. porn addiction as a concept has been debunked as porn is not in and of itself addictive and people who considered themselves porn addicts actually consumed similar amounts to non addicts, they just felt shame about it where the non addicts didn’t

2. if porn addiction WAS real, then it would be, yknow, an addiction. the mental illness that holds no inherent moral value. like i thought we were past the point of thinking that the simple act of being an addict is a moral failing.

3. they call people ‘porn addicts’ in response to people who post exclusively about nsfw on their nsfw accounts. like they don’t exist outside of one specific account. this just in if you post exclusively about fandom on your fandom blog than you are a fandom addict.

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.

Here is information on how to become a voter for OTW

From the site:

In order to vote for members of the Board of the Organization for Transformative Works, you must be a fully-paid member of the OTW by June 30 of the election year. Please note that your donation receipt will be dated in US Eastern Time, so if your donation is listed after 19:59 on June 30 on the receipt, you won’t be eligible to vote.

If you are a member here is how and when to vote

Dates: August 11-14

The OTW 2023 Board of Directors election will be held on August 11-14. It will open at 12:01am UTC on August 11 and close at 11:59pm UTC on August 14 (What time is that for me?). If you are not available during this time, please find someone who is willing to serve as a proxy for you (who you trust) and contact the Elections Committee no later than 11:59 pm UTC on August 1 (What time is that for me?) with the email address of your proxy. Please send all proxy requests through our Contact Form.

Here is a Twitter thread with links if you want proof before making judgements about a person.

(But if you don't care, suffice to say that if you like your smut smutty and your internet uncensored, Audrey Richard's is probably not the candidate for you.)