Posts in Archive of Our Own
AO3 Celebrates 12 Million Posted Fanworks
We are very happy to share this exciting news with you: the Archive of Our Own has reached 12 million published works! We are incredibly proud of our community for reaching this milestone, and we want to celebrate it with you. We also thought we’d take the opportunity to share a tidbit of information on a topic that has confused some users new to the site. Unlike other sites you may use, AO3 does not have an algorithm! That means that when you post something to the site, it will show up in chronological order both on the Recent Works page as well as when… Read more
The OTW’s Commitment to Safety: Responding to Recent Concerns About AO3
This post hopes to address some claims made yesterday by Rahaeli on Twitter and her site, Dreamwidth, for purposes of clarification. After the illegal attack on OTW volunteers in May, 2022, the OTW took numerous steps to protect volunteers, including hiring an outside law firm with expertise in cybersecurity, working with contractors and firms that investigate and handle security incidents, and comprehensively revising our internal volunteer practices and updating our technological tools, including email systems, as well as making all necessary reports to NCMEC and others. These actions, revisions and updates are ongoing. We also communicated with volunteers, both through personal and organization-wide communications, providing… Read more
AI and Data Scraping on the Archive
With the proliferation of AI tools in recent months, many fans have voiced concerns regarding data scraping and AI-generated works, and how these developments can affect AO3. We share your concerns. We’d like to share what we’ve been doing to combat data scraping and what our current policies on the subject of AI are. Data scraping and AO3 fanworks We’ve put in place certain technical measures to hinder large-scale data scraping on AO3, such as rate limiting, and we’re constantly monitoring our traffic for signs of abusive data collection. We do not make exceptions for researchers or those wishing to create datasets. However, we don’t… Read more
Further Changes to Support and Policy & Abuse Responsibilities
As we continue to work on better balancing the responsibilities of our Support and Policy & Abuse committees, we are shifting two further types of issues from Policy & Abuse to Support’s mandate: Fannish Next-of-Kin This is an option we offer that allows a designated person to manage your account if you die or become incapacitated. To learn more about the Fannish Next-of-Kin program, you can read our TOS FAQ on the subject. Please note that if you have a currently-in-process Fannish Next-of-Kin request, our Policy & Abuse team will complete the ones that they have already received. Going forward, if you wish to set… Read more
The Archive of Our Own Reaches Ten Million Fanworks!
The OTW is delighted to announce that the Archive of Our Own has reached ten million fanworks! After hitting nine million fanworks in March of this year, it’s taken only seven months for our users to post the most recent million works. By contrast, it took just under four and a half years after going into open beta for users to post the first million works to AO3. It’s been a year of milestones for AO3 and the OTW. In 2022 alone, we’ve reached not only ten million works but also five million registered AO3 users, 50,000 canonized AO3 fandom tags, and the OTW’s fifteenth… Read more