Posts by xeno
January 2026 Newsletter, Volume 207
I. AO3 STATISTICS ROUND-UP 2025 was a busy year for AO3! The site continued to see rising traffic, with Communications publishing an update on AO3 statistics from 2020-2025. In December, Support received 3,589 tickets, totaling to over 40,000 tickets received in 2025, an all-time high. Meanwhile, Policy & Abuse (PAC) received 6,357 tickets in December, totaling approximately 47,500 tickets in 2025. Check out PAC’s pie chart for more details. Pie chart of the approximately 47,500 Policy & Abuse tickets submitted in 2025, divided by type of complaint. These categories reflect the subject of the complaint, and (with the exception of Offensive Content), do not indicate… Read more
IVD 2025 Volunteer Q&A—Tag Wrangling Spotlight
Last November we asked the community to submit questions to our OTW volunteers in celebration of International Volunteer Day. In this series of posts we will spotlight some of our committees’ responses. The Tag Wrangling committee sorts, organizes, and connects tags used on the Archive of Our Own (AO3) website, according to Tag Wrangling guidelines, to make them more easily filterable by users. They work, for example, closely with the Support committee to handle user requests for sorting and connecting tags, and the Open Doors committee to “map” tags used in other archives. We asked the Tag Wrangling committee for replies to your questions, and… Read more
TOS Spotlight: Commercial Promotion
The Policy & Abuse committee (PAC) is responsible for enforcing the AO3 Terms of Service (TOS). To help users better understand the TOS, we’re posting a weekly spotlight series about the TOS and our policies. We’ll also be reading comments and answering questions on this and our other spotlight posts. For our last post in this series, we’ll be talking about our non-commercialization policy. AO3 doesn’t allow users to engage in commercial promotion of any type, which includes everything from paywalls to tip jars, and quite a lot in between. In this post, we’ll discuss why AO3 doesn’t allow commercialization, what kinds of activities are… Read more
TOS Spotlight: Plagiarism and Copyright Infringement
The Policy & Abuse committee (PAC) is responsible for enforcing the AO3 Terms of Service (TOS). To help users better understand the TOS, we’re posting a weekly spotlight series about the TOS and our policies. We’ll also be reading comments and answering questions on this and our other spotlight posts. In today’s post, we’ll discuss two categories of TOS violations that have a lot of overlap: plagiarism and copyright infringement. Don’t go looking for things to report. Please do not start searching for plagiarized or infringing works to report after reading this post. We know that plagiarism and copyright infringement can happen on AO3, as… Read more
TOS Spotlight: Harassment
The Policy & Abuse committee (PAC) is responsible for enforcing the AO3 Terms of Service (TOS). To help users better understand the TOS, we’re posting a weekly spotlight series about the TOS and our policies. We’ll also be reading comments and answering questions on this and our other spotlight posts. Today’s post from the Policy & Abuse committee is about harassment. As stated in Section II.H of our Terms of Service, “Harassment is any behavior that produces a generally hostile environment for its target. Examples include bullying, threats, and personal attacks by or towards individuals or groups of people.” Harassment is not tolerated on AO3… Read more