One odd complaint I’ve seen is that “AO3 hasn’t changed”. First, if something is well designed and working, it shouldn’t need to change constantly (does anyone actually like it when Tumblr makes random changes to things? no.)
Second, even at a cosmetic level, it’s just… not true? Not unless you haven’t been around very long.
AO3 in 2008 – the first decent cap from the Wayback Machine.
AO3 in 2009. Still in closed beta. About 5500 works.
AO3 opens for general signups! 2010. Also, our logo makes its appearance :3
2011 – the tabs appear at the top of the page. Things looking generally more tidy and less squished.
2012 – a more chipper intro page. Things shifted around a bit as well.
2013 – looking a little more classy now. Tweets available on the main page.
2014 – some more subtle changes, including adding the number of works and fandoms in a prominent place. 1.2 million works at that point…
2015 – look how much it’s changed! The categories move to the front page for ease of access. Recent news updates also on display. Nearing 2 million works…
2016 – I admit I picked this one because of the news update about buying a new server “after holding together mail with sticks and strings”. Nearing 2.7 million works.
2017 – cosmetically few changes but look at the works number – 3.3 million works. This was just about a year ago (October 2017) and the current number today is about 4.2 million. You can also see from the news post that this was when we were in the middle of upgrading to HTTPS, which was a difficult but important process.
And here we are at more or less the present – 2018 (September to be precise). I agree fully that if you joined the site in the last 3 years, you might not have seen a lot of cosmetic/interface changes, but that’s because people – volunteers – spent the previous 5-6 years hashing those out to get them into their present state.
More importantly, you might not have noticed the under the hood changes that necessarily come with going up by roughly a million works a year. You might not have noticed the updates to site security that came with HTTPS, and maybe you didn’t even notice the huge changes to searching and filtering over the past few months. I get that it’s easy to say “nothing has changed”. That’s because there’s a team of volunteers who are working hard to make sure pages keep loading quickly, downloads keep working as expected, searches find you what you’re looking for, and downtime is kept to a minimum. Without them, I guarantee you would notice a lot more changes at this rate of growth, and not for the better.
like, u know there is a degree of moderation there, right? someone has to order the books to stock in the library. a library that lets any old creep stash their hastily scribbled shota pwp in between the shelves is a library that’s going to be shut down p quick. by the police. for providing ppl with child porn. (and yes if a picture of a tree or a description of a tree can make someone experience a tree, then the same can be said about a picture or description of a child in a sexual situation ffs)
I mean there’s like a million other logistical differences, and idk who checks erotica out of a library, but hey ppl can be wild abt these things
Hooboy. Well, as a librarian who has worked in many varieties of libraries, let me… try to… respond to this from a library and librarian perspective.
1) It is true that libraries have a process to go through for accepting materials, and that there is a degree of selectivity involved–this is because libraries have limited budgets, limited physical space, and limited staff to process and manage materials.
So, yes, any random junk written and left in the library would be thrown out. Not because the library would be concerned about its liability if anyone should see it; because we like to keep the library clean and organized, and leaving stuff on the shelf is not how we add things to the collection (how would they get CATALOGUED and LABELED???) And, of course, any adult attempting to show pornography (or, say, themselves) to actual children would be Removed From The Library because this would involve actual children being harmed by an actual adult in direct contact with them. Police do not shut down the libraries where this happens. They arrest the people harming the children.
Meanwhile, libraries spend VAST SUMS OF MONEY and ENDLESS STAFF HOURS to keep copies of Fifty Shades of Gray on the shelves where children actually can find them quite readily (and have them checked out on their library cards if mom’s has too many fines). Same with Last Tango in Paris and Flowers in the Attic and Year’s Best Erotica collections. (And Bibles, which get stolen at a ridiculous pace. I don’t know why, we were just forever having to order more of them.)
In an online space, which has effectively unlimited space, where adding new material costs nothing, and where the process of organizing that material and making it available is fully automated and what labor is involved is taken on by the contributing author, literally none of those constraints apply, so more content is more content! It’s catalogued and labeled as soon as it’s posted! It cannot be misshelved. Perfect!
2) This is not to say that no physical library has handwritten erotica in its collection somewhere. Many, many libraries collect rare local works such as self-published zines, and unique items like the personal papers of notable people (San Jose State University, for instance, holds the papers of the Kensington Ladies’ Erotica Society; The University of Iowa Zine Collection includes fanfic zines with erotic content; UCLA has the personal papers of Anais Nin), and doubtless some of these zines and personal papers include erotica. Because this handwritten material would be unique and its value would be presumed to lie mainly in the fact of its authorship, it would be properly collected, not in a library, but in an archive or special collection, where some archivist would dutifully folder it and make a note of what it was so future visitors to the collection could readily access it.
The main goal there would be to protect the material, not the person who might potentially view the material.
I worked in a public library which had an extensive collection of Playboy on microfilm, for instance. We kept it behind a desk where it had to be requested and checked out with a library card before it could be viewed. This was partly to prevent children viewing material inappropriate for their age–just as, say, the AO3 clearly marks adult material as such–but mainly to prevent vandalism of the material by people who disapproved of it. Several of the images on the film had been damaged by people trying to scratch them out; for the safety of the microfilm, we restricted access to it. This is also why the AO3 doesn’t allow people who dislike a fic to force it to be taken down.
This is also why most libraries celebrate Banned Books Week by eagerly higlighting works which people have ATTEMPTED to force to be removed from libraries–including work like Lolita, which is read by many as a titillating pedophile love affair. Librarians are not celebrating Lolita. They are celebrating the principle that they will not be stopped from collecting materials of interest and making them available to readers.
3) From your description of a library where children can freely access anything on the shelves, you seem to have only one conception of a library–a public library with open stacks, or perhaps a school library. There are, in fact, many kinds of libraries, with academic libraries being the most obvious foil to your description.
In an academic or university library, all authorized users of the library are adults who take adult responsibility for what they find in the library, much like when adult internet users indicate on a website that they are choosing to view adult content.
When I worked in a university library, I asked one of the librarians what do when a guy was sitting at a computer very obviously watching porn while a young woman, sitting next to him doing something text-based, seemed like she might be uncomfortable. I was told in no uncertain terms that the library’s policy was to relocate the person who was uncomfortable. The library was a repository of information and a place to access information: any kind of information, including the erotic. Under no circumstances would we curtail a library user’s access to that information.
(Unless he got his own actual dick out where people could see it, then we could call the campus police. Because, again: actual humans directly involved.)
Duke University Library Erotica Collection, 1940s-1960s (”An archive of original illustrations, sketchbooks, and erotic stories, depicting transgressive sex acts including (but not limited to) lesbian and heterosexual sex, incest, pedophilia, sadomassochistic behavior, and copulation with objects as varied as sex toys, produce, and household appliances. The stories and illustrations appear to be the work of a single individual, with nearly all narrative told from a female’s point of view. Also includes some amateur pornographic photography and magazine clippings.”)
Why are people still up in arms about AO3 needing donations to run? Their budget is publicly available. You can go onto the website, right now, and read it. If you donate more than a certain amount (pretty sure it’s more than $10), you can vote in their elections, because you’re considered a member, and that’s how memberships work.
It’s a free site to use, but not to run or to maintain, especially not with all these net neutrality battles.
Y’all gotta understand that it’s not just fanworks, there’s a lot more that goes into archiving.
Signal boosting this because it’s important af. OTW is a nonprofit organization, specifically a public charity as classified by the US tax code. That means they file a 990 tax report each year that lets you see all of their finances – what they’re spending money on, where their money comes from, etc. You can see their 2016 990 here if you’re so inclined.
And if you’re not sure about how OTW is using their donations? Ask questions. Get involved. Even if you’re not comfortable with or not in a position to donate, there are lots of opportunities to give your time; it’s an all-volunteer organization that recruits regularly. I know for a fact that I get more value out of what OTW provides than most, if not all, my other paid services combined, so $10 to be a member is more than worth it.
ao3 is routinely used as an example of an excellent digital archive in library and information schools – they’re not just a fansite; they’re held in high regard by people across the industry. they run initiatives to preserve old fansites and groups, in addition to the day to day work of hosting all of our work ad-free to ensure maximum creative freedom. ao3 is not just a place to post your fic; it catalogues and preserves our history and culture.
People keep asking “How can anyone have a problem with AO3 doing fundraising!”
And I’m just like…. Have people not noticed all the virulent anti-AO3 hate on tumblr propagated by the anti shipping community? Antis have a problem with AO3 raising money because they hate the fact that AO3 won’t allow them to censor content they don’t like and doesn’t tolerate bullying. That’s who is putting out these posts like, “how can this nasty site raise so much money?” Read between the lines.
And for all the people who are just like, “If they don’t want AO3 to to raise money why don’t they just not donate?”
Because antis are incapable of saying “this isn’t for me so I won’t support it but I don’t care if other people support it. They have to actively discourage other people from supporting the thing. At the same time, they also won’t stop using AO3 because 1) they’re a bunch of fucking hypocrites who want readership and that’s where the readers are and 2) they’re too lazy to put together their own archive using AO3′s open source code because that would require doing coding and buying servers and doing all the moderating they want, which is hard, and they just want to engage in empty virtue signalling, which is easy
Anyway, my point is, people need to be aware that these people are out there and they hate AO3 and they want it to go away even though they’re actively using the platform. They’ve even said they want AO3 to fail so something “better” (re, something they control) can take its place. Some of them are blatant about it, calling AO3 a cesspit of pedophilia, and some of them are subtle about it, saying more innocuous things like ‘Does AO3 really need 130K a year?” “Shouldn’t you give your money to individual needy people doing gofundmes for stuff that’s more more important?”
But all of these people have the same end goal, which is the destruction of the archive, and the way they’re going about it right now is to try to discourage people from donating.
So instead of asking, “Why do people object to AO3 raising money?” start telling people “Hey there are people out there who hate AO3 and want to destroy it and we have to protect the archive from them.” And donate, if you can, and signal boost, if you can’t.
80 of the tags that some of AO3′s tag wranglers have encountered between March-April, in a mega-sized post, separated in groupings of 5 for easy reading. Most of these are freeforms (also known as the ‘additional tags’ field), but some are character or relationship tags.
Due to the sheer number of tags I haven’t bothered to add fandoms. Sorry!
You can find the list in text format below the cut/read-more.
Welcome to … edition #10 of Adventures in Wrangling! We’ve hit the double digits now, isn’t it exciting? This edition has a bunch of draft tags and tags that were deleted, but I liked all of them too much not to include them.
As always, many thanks to the brave wranglers and browsers who shared tags they’d found on the archive.
I think we, as a general community, need to start taking this little moment more seriously.
This, right here? This is asking for consent. It’s a legal necessity, yes, but it is also you, the reader, actively consenting to see adult content; and in doing so, saying that you are of an age to see it, and that you’re emotionally capable of handling it.
You find the content you find behind this warning disgusting, horrifying, upsetting, triggering? You consented. You said you could handle it, and you were able to back out at any time. You take responsibility for yourself when you click through this, and so long as the creator used warnings and tags correctly, you bear full responsibility for its impact on you.
“Children are going to lie about their age” is probably true, but that’s the problem of them and the people who are responsible for them, not the people that they lie to.
If you’re not prepared to see adult content, created by and for adults, don’t fucking click through this. And if you do, for all that’s holy, don’t blame anyone else for it.
If you don’t like AO3′s core, founding mission–a fan-run archive where you can host your fanwork without having to worry whether it will get yanked when someone decides it’s objectionable–or if you’re upset that they aren’t interested in budging from that mission even when it comes into conflict with values that you, personally, hold dear…
All the code is on Github. You want an archive with all the fandom-tailored bells and whistles that AO3 has, but with a moderation policy for content you find objectionable/offensive/injurious to public morality/in unforgivably poor taste? Nothing’s preventing you from copying the software that runs AO3 and setting up your own archive with it. Well, nothing but the resources and technical skills required to host, deploy, and maintain a complex Rails app. Which isn’t anything to sneeze at, but if having a space free of the shit you’re objecting to is important enough to mobilize like-minded folks for vigilante enforcement via assorted charming forms of social coercion–shaming, harassment, ostracism, smear campaigns, doxxing, suicide-baiting, etc–surely it’s important enough to mobilize like-minded folks to contribute money, volunteer hours, and technical skills towards building the kind of space you actually want to see. The kind of space where you don’t need to resort to the vilest depths of social coercion to enforce a content policy in line with your values, because it can be enforced quietly and civilly by the mods with a few mouse clicks.
And if that’s too high a barrier–if your fandom is awash in stuff you find intolerable and you need a moderated fanwork archive now now now but the technical side might as well be sorcery–five bucks a month and an afternoon of point-and-click setup will get you a WordPress install on shared hosting. WordPress ain’t AO3, but it can be bent into almost any shape you want via plugins, and even a bare-bones default install comes with categories, tags, user accounts, comments, and moderation options. That’s all you need for a basic archive. WordPress.com will even host a small one for you for free. If it fills a need, and people put a fraction of the energy and social capital into promoting it as they currently put into witch-hunting transgressors into submission, it won’t take long for it to hit critical mass within a fandom.
You want a strictly-moderated safe space? The bad news is, AO3 is never going to be that space. You don’t get to demand that the people who sink a bunch of time, skill, and effort into providing it to you (for free–actual free, not “selling your most sensitive data to advertisers” free) throw the entire carefully-considered purpose of their work under the bus whenever that purpose can’t be fully reconciled with the values you think deserve precedence. You want an archive with a different ultimate purpose and a different set of values that override competing considerations, you’ll have to contribute your own time and effort to building it.
But the time and effort required is by no means prohibitive. Fandom has been DIYing shit since forever, and right now the tools are more powerful and accessible than they’ve ever been. So the good news is, if AO3 isn’t doing it for you… it takes less heavy lifting than ever to build an archive of your own.
Censors, fandom police, purity culture diehards… put your money where your mouth is.
But, but … that involves doing actual work besides yelling at people!
In fairness, it would involve a lot of work. I kind of blew it off in the original post as “nothing’s preventing you… well, nothing but the resources and technical skills required to host, deploy, and maintain a complex Rails app.” But from what I understand, the actual infrastructure side of installing and deploying the Archive app doesn’t lend itself to easy replication. There certainly aren’t a bunch of AO3 forks and clones running around out there like there were for LiveJournal.
However! Most of the anti-AO3 grumblers’ use cases don’t require anything near the scale of the Archive. If what you want is an archive for one fandom (or even a handful of related fandoms) where you don’t have to worry about stuff you find objectionable, it is really and truly possible to build that with WordPress on shared hosting for less than $10 a month. Point-and-click, no coding required. Install WordPress, from the WordPress admin panel install Writeshare and a security plugin like Shield, be sure to enable auto-updates, and you’re done.
Hell, let me make an offer: I know I’m a filthy degenerate who’s written and–even worse!–defended all sorts of depraved fic, but I’m also of the opinion that if antis want an archive they can moderate to their standards, they deserve one. Having control over the spaces they frequent instead of having to duke it out over the community standards of a general-purpose, lightly-moderated platform like Tumblr or AO3 might ease some of the pressure driving these conflicts. So. If you want a fic archive for your fandom that’s free of problematic ships, underage, noncon, abuse, etc, I will build and pay for it. I will shell out up to $10/month for shared hosting. I will handle as much of the technical end as you trust me to handle: server, database, domain name, WordPress install and plugins, security. All I ask is that you and/or your friends run the site yourselves and not involve me in any of the moderation decisions (which you wouldn’t want me involved in anyway), and that you crowdfund anything above $10/month if the site gets huge. That’s it. You can even lock me out of the WordPress admin panel if you’re comfortable maintaining and updating WP yourselves.
Fine print: The offer to pay for hosting is only for one site. Anyone after that gets the technical setup offer but not the $10/month. No real-life identity or contact info will be exchanged: I don’t want yours, and I definitely don’t want to share mine. I will do my best to trick out your WordPress install however you like it, but no guarantees that all the features you want will be possible. If either of us wants out after the site is up, I will hand you a full backup of the database/filesystem so that you can install it elsewhere, plus a static HTML archive of the site that you can put up on a free webhost.
Go ahead and reblog this if you want to. I’m curious to see if anyone will bite and be serious enough to get a site up. I know I’m dead serious. I may be a degenerate with terrible opinions, but I’m a professional techie who’s hosted/run/modded a lot of sites in my time and never pulled untrustworthy shit with admin access. I will lock myself out of whatever you want me locked out of. Just let me put my money where your mouth is, because I figure it’s in everyone’s best interests if those who want a safe alternative to AO3 can build one.
FWIW, if you want a safe space following whatever rules you want, you can do that INSIDE the AO3 with zero coding work or hosting cost whatsoever. You don’t even have to convince anyone to cross-post to your site.
1. Recruit people and figure out your moderation standards. (You DO need people who are willing to review stories that might NOT meet those standards to make sure they fit, but you need that no matter where you do it.)
2. Make an AO3 collection and make your recruited people mods (Optionally: make a subcollection for each fandom you have someone to mod.)
3. Each mod looks over whichever new stories you want to review, and then bookmarks the safe ones (Optionally: with whatever tags or description you want), putting the bookmark in the appropriate collection.
4. People who only want to read works that match your moderation standards can just browse that one collection.
This is part of the purpose of bookmarks and why they have tags and notes, so people could follow specific bookmarkers who curate and/or provide the level of information they want to know about stories even if not all authors provide the level of info they want.
Steel Phoenix Studios 
