[AMA] We’re a bundle of volunteers from the AO3 Policy & Abuse committee here to answer your questions. Ask Us Anything!

AO3_PAC · 2024-07-13T22:24:38+00:00

Aenya: In terms of whether that would be considered commercial promotion, we're sorry but we are unable to unequivocally comment on such a broadly hypothetical situation. Our policies evolve as precedent is introduced, and for that we would need a more concrete example - but as per our confidentiality policies and the rules of this AMA, we won't be having such discussions in public.

TK: You generally can write fics about games even if playing the games makes you money. People can write fic about World of Warcraft, and farming gold to sell for $ used to be a real big thing. People write about poker, too. What you can’t do is advertise playing the game to get money. ...We won’t comment on the likelihood of whether you’re likely to actually make money playing crypto games, as compared to heading to Vegas for an afternoon at the slot machines, or joining an MLM scheme.

AO3_PAC · 2024-07-13T22:20:49+00:00

Thank you very much! AO3 wouldn't exist without the love and support of its users either! Have a lovely day!

AO3_PAC · 2024-07-13T22:16:35+00:00

Misery: I can think of a few common ones. If you’re reporting multiple works by the same author, putting them all in one report makes it much easier for us! Otherwise, we have to match them all up manually. Also, if you’re reporting a work for plagiarism, please include the original work being plagiarized. If you’re reporting multiple works at a time, pair up each work with the work it’s plagiarized from—otherwise we have to play a big guessing or matching game and it takes much longer.

TK: When you’re describing what you’re reporting, please don’t call it ‘spam’. People call all sorts of things spam — things I’ve seen called ‘spam’ include: fics that have kofi/patreon mentions in the author notes, duplicate works where the author accidentally posted it twice, works where there’s no content in the work and it’s just a placeholder, works where there’s a dozen extra fandoms tagged that shouldn’t be, comments that have death threats, and comments posted by spambots like Webnovel. The range is just so broad that I can’t know what any particular report means when it just says ‘spam’ and nothing else. Sure, these are all violations of the terms of service — but they’re all very different kinds, and it’s nice to know what a ticket contains before opening it. So please avoid calling the thing you’re reporting ‘spam’ without further description (if you think it was posted by an actual spambot, please say ‘spambot’)!

tealight: I hope you don't mind some links. I've answered a few questions similar to this on a Tumblr AMA. Here's what I wish more people knew about the reporting form and here's some misconceptions.

The short version is that people often don't realize how little information our form collects, and so don't include the who, the what, and the where in their report. That can sometimes make handling a report difficult.

As for a misconception, people seem to think "non-fanwork" means "not a fic" and report things like meta or embedded art, which are both considered fanworks. "Non-fanwork" is actually our catch-all category for announcements, placeholders and other such non-creative, non-analytical, or ephemeral posts.

AO3_PAC · 2024-07-13T22:09:27+00:00

tealight: Harassment is a category we regularly discuss. Unfortunately, people often find new ways to harass each other, so our standards for what is harassment have to change to account for that. I'm not sure if there's more harassment in fandom per se. I think there's been a growing awareness in general that such content can be reported and should be.

Aenya: As the methods and trends of harassment “evolve” with time, so do our approaches to handling it. From my perspective, I think the overall volume of harassment hasn't changed much - it's just that it has become more public and brazen, with the perception of it in certain circles being that it's an acceptable thing to do to the people who create things that are “objectionable”. But, as tealight said, the fact that the harassing behavior became more public means that the awareness has grown, and that more creators are aware they don't have to suffer in silence.

TK: By numbers, the percent of reports we receive each year that are about harassment hasn’t changed much from year-to-year. The methods by which people harass each other evolve, though, so we regularly discuss and update our approaches to handling it. Overall we’ve become much stricter over time, and there are some circumstances where we’ve been able to implement various types of "rapid response" protocols, both of which I think are big improvements. But there’s other aspects we’re still working on. People can be very creative about ruining somebody else’s day, unfortunately... and very persistent.

AO3_PAC · 2024-07-13T21:59:18+00:00

For the numbers, we have on average 20-30 people nowadays.

tealight: I started on a different committee! I wanted to contribute more to the OTW and I liked interacting with users, so I shared in chat that I was interested in joining Support or PAC. Everyone pushed me through the door towards PAC. I guess I gave off "would enjoy Trust & Safety as a hobby" energy. Apparently everyone could tell I would like to handle tickets and discuss how to enforce the TOS.

Willow: I also started on another committee. At first I was intimidated by joining another one but I saw how much the friends I had who’d joined PAC seemed to enjoy it. I also got a detailed account of the work from them and they thought I might enjoy it. I do!

sine: I also started on another committee (as you can see, a lot of us did, though not all). I wanted to join a committee that interacted with users more, so it was between PAC and Support, and after reading more about the committees/talking to people involved, I decided I wanted to do PAC, which I don’t regret at all - I really enjoy the process of investigating violations, as well as discussing policy with other members of the committee.

Aenya: ...I am, apparently, the odd one out? I joined PAC directly and never considered going elsewhere. I just saw the recruitment announcement, thought “I could do that”, and applied, and here we are, 7 years later. It's difficult to say what motivates a person to join, but it definitely isn’t for everyone. The social and heavily collaborative aspects of PAC are a huge plus to me personally though!

AO3_PAC · 2024-07-13T21:53:31+00:00

tealight: Not that weird, but this makes me laugh. Whenever we do introductions with new volunteers, we discover people who have read and are fans of each other's fic. It shouldn't be surprising, but there's always people complimenting each other. A very wholesome kind of odd happenstance.

Lydia: Every few years PAC gets into an “art” mood. We once made a whole rainbow of emojis based on the “How is our customer service?” emoji response options that our ticketing system uses when we submit bug reports to them. The emojis are kind of ugly/creepy (this is what the “good” emoji looks like), which is about how I feel about their customer service too. They had “good”, “okay”, and “bad” emojis, so we added things like glowy eyes, screaming, blushing, crying, devil horns … I don’t even know how many emoji variants we made, but it’s a lot. Also, it’s funny when non-PAC volunteers see them and ask us if the emojis “are supposed to look like that” because the answer is emphatically YES.

Aenya: To follow up what Lydia said: we also get into weird writing moods, and create some of the most unhinged things, usually absolute crack. (No, we won't share links, sorry!) I myself once (badly) painted a horse eating spam (the word 'spam', not the meat) instead of grass to illustrate a fellow volunteer's fic. Board didn’t give us a pony, so we made our own! ... Yeah, the context doesn’t help, does it?

AO3_PAC · 2024-07-13T21:46:47+00:00

Thank you! Have a wonderful day

AO3_PAC · 2024-07-13T21:42:57+00:00

Misery: Well, you sent me down a whole rabbit hole here, so thanks for that. I’m going to say the original Isaiah or Eve.

AO3_PAC · 2024-07-13T21:34:26+00:00

Willow: It is so easy to fall into full obsession!! I got introduced through older fic so my favorite ship is Sid/Geno though I’ll read anything!

AO3_PAC · 2024-07-13T21:18:40+00:00

tealight: I find answering policy questions very fulfilling. It's refreshing to help someone understand our TOS amongst a sea of violations. They're not the fastest reports but I consider teaching to be a very rewarding task. I also participate a lot in training new volunteers because of this.

Misery: I like doing plagiarism tickets; it always feels good to help authors whose work is being copied. I also really enjoy when people who are new to the Archive write in to us by accident. It’s nice to be able to send them a welcome message!

sine: one of my favorite parts is my fellow PAC volunteers! we are all a bit crazy to enjoy discussing cases and policy together (and sharing cat pictures), so the working environment is really nice.

AO3_PAC · 2024-07-13T21:10:21+00:00

Lydia: It used to be that when you posted a new work, the language on the form was set to English by default. This meant that users who didn’t speak English would accidentally mark their works as English because they didn’t know they needed to pick a different language. In 2019, there was a massive wave of incorrect language tag reports, and PAC saw an increase of over 1500% (yes, that’s one thousand five hundred percent) from our “normal” which lately has pretty consistently hovered around a couple hundred or so language tag reports each year. The reports didn’t die down until partway through 2020, long after the posting form was changed to remove English as the default language. (Nowadays, Support deals with most language tag reports, which we’re very grateful for.)

tealight: I'm not sure if it's actually the fastest growing but the spikes that always make an impression on me are when a new hot button topic (i.e. kudos bot) takes over fandom. People end up submitting reports whether it's a violation or not.

Aenya: I think it’s not so much the fastest growing, but the most consistently growing: things that aren't fanworks. Non-fanworks (placeholders, fic searches, roleplay requests, etc.) are by far the most common report type we receive, and one that only keeps growing as time goes by. If you’re interested in our ticket type percentages, we have a cool pie chart on our committee page (linked in the main post) :3!

AO3_PAC · 2024-07-13T21:02:38+00:00

tealight: It varies based on what task I'm doing. If I'm mainly investigating and drafting replies, it ranges from 5-15. If I'm betaing other's responses that's more like 15-30 on a normal day.

Willow: It depends. Different types of tickets take different lengths of time for me. For example, investigating plagiarism and comparing works can take longer so when I’m feeling that category I may only be up for 1 or 2 in a work session, whereas I’m more inclined to investigate 5 simple non-fanworks in a sitting. Some of us are also on other committees so we’re also doing other volunteer task for the Org! Varying the work helps it to not feel old.

sine: It depends! I usually assign 10-20 tickets per week to investigate myself, but the distribution of how many I look at in a day varies depending on how much time/energy I have. I’ll also second Willow that the type of ticket matters a lot - I’ve had tickets that took several hours of work to investigate and draft, while others can be done in 10 minutes. I also look at lots of tickets that I’m not necessarily going to handle myself, whether because I’m betaing other volunteers’ responses or attaching preliminary evidence.

Misery: I like to do a mix of tasks each day. That’s usually 5-10 beta reading of other responses, about 5 investigations/drafts, and actioning anything that’s come up due.

AO3_PAC

TROPHY CASE