Posts in Content Policy

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

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

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

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. Last week’s post was on ratings and Archive warnings. This week, we’ll discuss the other kinds of tags that we enforce, as well as the ones that we don’t. At the end of this post, we’ll provide details on the info that we need included in an incorrect tag report in order to be able… Read more