Archive of Our Own ^beta

In 2020, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) made a commitment to our users, members, and volunteers that we would work towards making our organization and our projects more welcoming and inclusive to fans of color, and preventing and combating racist harassment on our platforms.

We provided an update on this work in 2023, acknowledging that progress had not been as fast as we had hoped, sharing details of the changes that had been made by that point, and laying out the road ahead.

Today we are delighted to share that we have fulfilled the last of the promises we made to you back in 2020. While we celebrate the hard work and dedication to improvement that has taken us to this point, we also regret that it has taken us five years to get here. We are sincerely grateful for all the support we've received from our users, members, and volunteers to complete this work, and we apologize that it has taken this long to do so.

This post lays out both the progress we've made and the specific ways our 2020 promises have been fulfilled, as well as what is coming next and how we will ensure that our work doesn't stop here.

What We've Done

Since our update in 2023, we have completed the following goals to help protect our users and volunteers against harassment:

1. Reviewed and updated the AO3 Terms of Service (TOS) and TOS FAQ. You can read more about this update in the news post announcing the TOS review as well as the accompanying review guide. For some key highlights, we:
   1. Simplified the language and removed redundancies throughout the TOS in order to improve readability for all users, including those who may have English as an Additional Language (EAL);
   2. Generalized the Abuse Policy to provide the AO3 Policy & Abuse committee (PAC) with greater flexibility to determine how to address harassment and other TOS violations; and
   3. Reviewed the existing mandatory Archive warnings and considered new ones.
2. Improved admin tools, particularly for the Policy & Abuse committee so that they can more easily handle Abuse reports.
3. Implemented improvements to AO3 to help curate your Archive experience, including:
   1. Expanded blocking features to cover more situations, including preventing unsolicited gifts from blocked users and preventing kudos from users you've blocked.
   2. Further limiting how guest users can interact with you, such as stripping embedded images in guest comments and adding a preference to prevent guests from replying to your comments on other users' works and on news posts.
   3. Restarted the creation of "No Fandom" canonical additional tags to allow users to more easily filter in and filter out for concepts as they want. Read more about new canonicals in the Tag Wrangling news posts.
   4. Implemented collection tags and improved collection filters.
4. The Diversity Consultant Research Officer completed their internal review, engaged with contractors, and made a culture audit firm recommendation to the OTW Board in 2023.
1. Following that recommendation, the OTW contracted with an audit firm and underwent a months-long organizational culture audit that included interviews with volunteers at every level of the organization and in every committee.
2. The Board, working with the firm and OTW volunteers from several committees, created an Organizational Culture Roadmap of items that need to be addressed and changed to promote a healthier and safer OTW for all our volunteers.
3. To ensure the completion of these goals, we established the OTW Culture Roadmap Workgroup. This is an independent body from the Board so that this work is unaffected by Board turnover. This work remains ongoing and will continue long beyond this update.
5. Made multiple changes to the procedures of public Board meetings and Board communications generally, to improve transparency regarding Board work and OTW progress. This includes:
1. Implemented a new moderation system for public Board meetings, as of the November 2023 public meeting, allowing the Board to address questions raised during public meetings; since the July 2024 public meeting, started addressing questions submitted asynchronously from people who can’t attend the meeting live.
2. Implemented professional customer relationship management tools for Board work and Board email/communication.
3. Released bi-weekly internal updates regarding Board and BAT work to OTW volunteers.
6. Created two new committees and two new subcommittees to better support the completion of these goals and our long-term sustainability as an organization:
1. Internal Complaint and Conflict Resolution: subcommittee responsible for addressing volunteer complaints and conflicts independent from involved committees.
2. News Post Moderation: subcommittee responsible for moderating comments on AO3 and OTW news posts, ensuring they abide by the OTW News Post Moderation Policy.
3. Board Assistants Team: committee assisting the OTW Board of Directors with administrative tasks and project management.
4. User Response Translation: committee responsible for addressing PAC and Support’s translation needs in specific high-need languages.
7. Completed and published a Whistleblower Protection Policy to outline and enshrine the protections for people who make reports about misconduct in the OTW.

What We're Doing

We know that creating a safer environment for our users and volunteers is an ongoing responsibility, and we remain deeply committed to addressing harassment with both urgency and care. While the steps outlined in our 2020 statement marked an important beginning, we recognise that true progress requires continuous effort beyond fulfilling those initial commitments. We are dedicated to building on that foundation with transparency, accountability, and compassion.

We are committed to and already continuing to work beyond our 2020 promises to ensure that this work does not end here. Some examples of our ongoing commitment include:

1. Completing the ongoing project to review the OTW Code of Conduct in full, bringing it into line with industry standards and updating it in collaboration with volunteer feedback;
2. Supporting the ongoing development and growth of the Internal Complaint and Conflict Resolution subcommittee;
3. Working on the 2023-2026 Strategic Plan's Diversifying Spaces goals; and
4. Making AO3 more accessible for EAL users through our ongoing internationalization efforts. We've recently finished preparing all emails for translation and are continuing to work on other parts of the site.

Moving Forward

Looking forward to the future, we want to maintain our progress in this area and continue to improve transparency about changes within the OTW. We will make efforts to share information about updates like these in the monthly newsletter and our quarterly public Board meetings on Discord (you can also find updates from our quarterly meetings in our meeting minutes).

We appreciate your ongoing support and patience throughout these efforts, and we offer our sincerest apologies for the extended time required to fulfill our promises. Although progress has been slower than anticipated, we are very excited to share that our major goals are now complete and we are committed to continuing improvement into the future.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, OTW Legal Advocacy, and Transformative Works and Cultures. We are a fan-run, donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

In the last year, AO3 has seen a rise in "art commission" spambot comments. The bots leaving these comments pretend to be artists who want to make comics or illustrations for a fan's fic. After convincing their targets to contact them off AO3, they scam their targets into paying for that art. Fans have reported that after sending payment, they either received AI-generated art or nothing at all.

AO3 has been working on various methods that we hope will reduce the spam. However, these scammers are persistent and creative about circumventing our protections.

To avoid falling victim to one of these scams, the Policy & Abuse committee recommends:

1. Do not commission art from someone who solicits you by commenting on your work on AO3. Commercial activity is prohibited on AO3. If someone is encouraging behavior that violates our Terms of Service, it’s a good idea to be cautious. They likely do not have your best interests in mind.
2. Do not provide your email or social media contact information to a commenter who asks for it, even if they say they'd just like to discuss your work further. Scammers try to get you to talk to them privately, because it is often easier to deceive or manipulate people in a one-on-one conversation.

Example of this type of scam

This is just one example of how a scammer tries to lure the work creator onto a different platform where they can pressure the creator into commissioning art. These scammers use AI to generate realistic-sounding comments. The comments often contain generic praise or statements that could apply to any work, but sometimes they are extremely lengthy and/or specific. If the creator is suspicious and asks why the scammer wants to move the conversation off-site, they will typically claim that they aren't a scammer and/or that they can explain things better in private.

However, unlike a regular user, a scammer will always do at least one of two things:

1. They will ask you to commission art from them, or
2. They will share their contact information and/or ask for your information (such as an email address or username on a site that supports private messaging, like Instagram or Discord)

If you suspect that you've received a spam comment on your work, don't reply and especially do not provide them with your contact information. Just report the comment to Policy & Abuse so that we can take care of it.

What to do if you encounter this scam

If you receive a scam comment from a guest, you can press the "Spam" button on the comment. This helps train our automated spam-checker to better detect this type of behavior.

If you encounter a scammer that has a registered account, or if you encounter a guest posting scam comments on someone else's work, please report them to the Policy & Abuse committee. To do so:

1. Select the "Thread" button on the scammer's comment. This will take you to the specific comment page.
2. Scroll to the bottom of the page and select Policy Questions & Abuse Reports.
3. In the "Brief summary of Terms of Service violation" field, enter "Spambot".
4. In the "Description of the content you are reporting" field, enter "This is a spambot, their username is USERNAME."

Reporting in this fashion helps us auto-sort your report so that it can be handled as soon as a Policy & Abuse volunteer is available. To help us address reports about these types of bots as fast as possible, please only submit one report per account, and don't include multiple accounts in the same report.

If you encounter a scam commenter on someone else's work, you can let the work creator know the commenter is likely a bot and link them to this news post.

We also encourage you to share this post on social media and help spread the word about how to protect yourself from scammers and reduce spam on AO3.

This year, in recognition of World Password Day, we’re asking all fans to spend a few minutes ensuring that their passwords – and their AO3 accounts – are secure.

Recently, the Policy & Abuse committee (PAC) has seen an increasing number of users who have lost access to their AO3 accounts because they used an insecure password. We'd like to reassure our users that there is no indication that AO3 has experienced a data breach. PAC has been able to determine that all of the affected users' login information had been compromised in other ways, such as by accidentally downloading malware to their devices and/or by re-using the same password on AO3 that they had also used on a compromised website.

In early 2025, several large datasets were posted online, containing hundreds of millions of email/password pairs obtained from malware and compromised websites. It's common practice for scammers to test these compromised email/password pairs on other websites, in case the affected passwords were reused elsewhere. This allows the scammer to access accounts on websites that have never experienced a data breach, such as AO3. After gaining access to an account, the scammer may then change the account's email, password, and/or username, or sell the account information to other people.

AO3 is always free to use, but some people might not understand how to create their own AO3 account. There are many reasons for this, such as language barriers and unfamiliarity with our site. These people may purchase AO3 account information in the mistaken belief that AO3 accounts can be sold legitimately. They only discover they have been scammed once PAC re-acquires the account to give it back to the original owner.

PAC has been working diligently to identify compromised accounts and restore them to their original owners. We have also been working with the victims of the account-selling scam to help them create their own free AO3 accounts. Unfortunately, sometimes these victims, thinking the account they purchased legitimately belongs to them, may delete works or other content posted by the original account owner. While PAC can restore ownership of an account, we are unable to restore deleted content.

Ensure Your Password is Secure

You can reduce your vulnerability to this kind of incident by following internet security best practices:

• Set a unique, secure password for each and every one of your accounts on all platforms.
• Don't ever reuse passwords or share your passwords with anyone else for any reason.
• Use a password manager. This will help you to set unique, secure passwords for each of your accounts without worrying about forgetting them. Many browsers have a free, built-in password manager if you would prefer not to download third-party software.
• Keep your antivirus software and operating system up to date, and set them to scan for malware regularly.
• Check the website haveibeenpwned.com to see if your emails, passwords, and other information may have been exposed in data breaches. Change your passwords for any breached websites and any accounts on other sites where you may have used the same password.

If you are ever worried that your AO3 account is at risk of being compromised, you should do the following:

• Change your password immediately. This will automatically log you – and anyone else accessing your account – out of all sessions on all devices.
  • If you’ve forgotten your password, but you have access to the email address currently associated with your AO3 account, you can log out and reset your password instead.
  • If you’ve forgotten your password, and you no longer have access to the email address you used for your account, please contact Support.
• Make sure the email address associated with your AO3 account is one that you check regularly, as this is where all notifications about your account will be sent. If you need to update your email address, please refer to our FAQ about changing your email.

If you've received an email from @www.ao3.icu saying that the email associated with your account has been changed to one you don’t recognize, and you can't log in to your account, please contact Policy & Abuse. PAC treats compromised accounts as a matter of high priority, and will work with you via email to restore your account. If it's been over a week and you have not heard back from a PAC volunteer about the status of your account, check your email (including any spam, social, or other folders) before replying to our email or submitting a new Abuse report.

Again, we emphasize that there has not been any breach of AO3's servers. We are also developing and implementing additional measures to help prevent unauthorized access to AO3 accounts. However, your account is only as secure as your password and email. We encourage all users to take a few minutes today to ensure that your AO3 password is unique and your email address is up to date.

With approximately 7 million registered users on AO3 and thousands of OTW members, news posts get more engagement than ever. We love when users express their thoughts or concerns regarding the news we publish! However, the comment sections on some of our previous news posts have not been a welcoming or safe space for engagement.

In recent months, we have developed a News Post Moderation policy and recruited a team of volunteers who you may see commenting on posts in the future. We would like to announce the key points of the policies our News Post Moderators will be following when monitoring the comment sections of our News Posts.

Comments on news posts may be frozen or hidden by a News Post Moderator if they contain:

• Spam or unsolicited advertising
• Content about topics outside of fans, fandom, and Internet policy, and which would not fall under the purview of the OTW
• Misinformation (particularly about the OTW) with the potential to harm or mislead others
• Explicit/graphic sexual or violent language
• Attempts to draw negative attention to a specific individual or fanwork
• Insults and personal attacks towards other users
• Inflammatory or speculative language that may result in harassment
• Violations of the site's Terms of Service

Please note that the above is not an exhaustive list of all comments that may be actioned.

In addition, any comments on AO3 News Posts that violate the Terms of Service may be reported to the Policy & Abuse committee.

OTW volunteers will respond to comments using an Official OTW committee account to clarify points of confusion or engage with user feedback. Comments from Official accounts will be clearly marked on AO3 with a bolded (Official) after the username, and on the OTW website with a signature identifying the relevant OTW committee or team. For example, comments from News Post Moderators will use the "OTW_News_Post_Moderation (Official)" account on AO3. On the OTW website, they'll be signed with their name followed by "OTW News Post Moderator".

If an OTW volunteer comments on a news post using a personal account, that volunteer is not acting in an official capacity. Such comments do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW, nor do they constitute OTW policy.

We hope that our users will welcome this policy announcement and find that it improves their experience on the AO3 and OTW websites.

UPDATE: Due to a high number of off topic comments, comment moderation has been turned on. All comments now must be approved by a moderator before becoming visible. If you have any questions about this policy, please contact the News Post Moderation team directly using our contact form on the OTW website.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Although OTW News can be accessed through various social media platforms, today we'd like to announce an additional option. You can now subscribe to get OTW News delivered to your Inbox. This service is being offered both for reader convenience as well as a workaround for issues fans experience, such as the inability to add links to Instagram posts, missing news posts due to algorithm shenanigans or busy days, or not using the social media sites we post to (or any social media at all).

The OTW News by Email service is free and available in multiple languages. There is further information at the link, but please also review the following:

1. Not all OTW News gets translated, and even when posts are translated, they may not be available in every language. If you want to receive a copy of all news posts each month, please choose English in addition to your preferred language(s).
2. Including English, there are 16 languages currently available and it is possible more will be added in the future. We will announce this in the OTW Newsletter should this happen.
3. There are three types of delivery options. By default everyone will be signed up for emergency messages (although you can uncheck that option before subscribing).
4. On average, English language OTW News posts go out 3 times each week. If you would prefer fewer emails in your inbox, choose the Digest option which will email you once at the end of each month with blurbs and links to all that month's posts.
5. If you are subscribed to Individual News Posts, you should receive posts for each language you chose within a few hours of the post going public. Timing for each language post may vary depending on the order in which they were posted.

Should you have problems with the subscription process, please check the following:

1. After you chose your subscription options and clicked on subscribe, did you receive an email to verify your address? (Note: you will be redirected to a webpage once you subscribe, but the button there will not confirm your subscription.) To start getting messages you must click on the link in the email sent to you.
2. Did you receive a confirmation email after you verified your address? If not you may want to try subscribing again.
3. If it's been several hours since a post went out and, despite being subscribed to Individual News Posts you have not received a copy, check your spam folder. Or, if you use Gmail, your Social folder. Make sure to mark our emails as Not Spam.
4. Have you been receiving messages in your Inbox but now they're ending up in spam? Be sure to open an email regularly, even if you don't read it. Many email services respond to your behavior and will assume a sender is spamming you if you receive emails from a certain address often but never open them.

If you have made the above checks and are still having an issue, you can contact the Communications Committee for help in troubleshooting your news delivery.

If you like the OTW News by Email service, please let other fans know it's an option for them to keep up with OTW activities and topics!

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

In 2020, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) made a commitment to our users, members, and volunteers that we would work towards making our organization and our projects more welcoming and inclusive to fans of color, and preventing and combating racist harassment on our platforms.

Today, we'd like to provide an update on what steps we have taken so far to accomplish those goals, and what still needs to be done. But first, we have a duty to acknowledge that this work hasn't been nearly as prompt as we had hoped, and that the main victims of our delayed progress are the people of color who continue to suffer due to harassment and slow action. In May, fans organized a campaign against racism in the OTW, and we want to take a moment to thank everyone who participated. We hear and appreciate the people who continue to reach out to us, to share their ideas and their concerns, and to hold us accountable.

What We've Done So Far

Since the posting of our original plan in 2020, we have completed or made significant progress on a series of goals to help protect our users and volunteers against harassment:

• We implemented the ability to freeze comment threads and turn off comments on your works entirely, giving you more control to moderate interactions on your AO3 fanworks.
• User muting was introduced to help you avoid encountering works, bookmarks, or comments from specific users when browsing the Archive.
• We have implemented comment blocking to prevent specific logged-in users from commenting on your works entirely.
• You can now opt out of receiving gifts on AO3, as well as opt out of allowing your works to be invited to collections.
• We have improved admin tools to facilitate investigations by our Policy & Abuse team.
• Internally, we have updated our Code of Conduct to make it explicit that discrimination based on caste is not tolerated in the OTW.
• We also implemented methods for volunteers to contact and submit feedback to the Board anonymously by introducing a separate feedback form.

We are still committed to working towards giving you more control over how you experience the Archive going forward. To that end, we will be expanding blocking features to cover more user interactions, and further limiting how guest users can interact with you on the Archive.

What We're Working On

We have been reviewing the Archive's Terms of Service to help the Policy & Abuse team address different types of harassment. This review is still ongoing, but we hope to complete it soon. Once concluded, any planned changes to the Terms of Service will be made available for public comment in a dedicated news post.

Alongside this review, the Policy & Abuse team continues to improve and calibrate their internal policies about harassment and hate speech in icons, user names, and other non-story elements. The team strives to remain vigilant and flexible in order to respond appropriately to new harassment vectors as needed.

Internally, back in 2021 the OTW opened recruitment for a Diversity Consultant Research Officer (DCRO). They began their work in 2022, contacting internal stakeholders and researching firms. The DCRO hopes to finish their internal studies by September, and has already begun to investigate potential contractors.

We will keep you updated on how these projects are progressing. Please continue reading to learn more about how we plan to communicate these updates.

Communications Improvements

One of the areas the OTW has been working to improve in is transparency in communication. We know how important these topics are to our users, and we will be trying to better keep you informed about what we're doing to combat and prevent racism in the OTW and on AO3.

One change we have already implemented is to provide quarterly updates on our diversity work during OTW Board of Directors public meetings. These meetings take place on Discord and can be attended by anyone. There are a few ways you can know when a meeting is coming up:

• Keep an eye on the OTW's Twitter account—every meeting is announced at least one week in advance.
• Join our Discord server—as soon as a meeting is scheduled, a notification will appear in the meeting channel.
• Subscribe to the Board Calendar so that new meetings will show directly on your personal calendar.

Additionally, we will be making an effort to include all information discussed in these meetings in the OTW's monthly newsletter. The newsletter will also provide smaller updates between meetings whenever possible.

We understand how frustrating these delays have been, and we deeply apologize. We remain committed to making our spaces more welcoming and safe for all users. We sincerely thank you for sticking with us as we strive to improve. Your feedback on this and any other matters is welcome and valued, always.

The OTW Board of Directors can be reached for direct feedback and further suggestions via email.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

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 have a policy against responsible data collection — such as those done by academic researchers, fans backing up works to Wayback Machine or Google's search indexing. Putting systems in place that attempt to block all scraping would be difficult or impossible without also blocking legitimate uses of the site.

With that said, it is an unfortunate reality that anything that is publicly available online can be used for reasons other than its initial intended purposes. In many cases, AI data collection traffic relies on the same techniques as the legitimate use cases above.

Once we became aware that data from AO3 was being included in the Common Crawl dataset — which is used to train AI such as ChatGPT — we put code in place in December 2022 requesting Common Crawl not scrape the Archive again.

We cannot go back in time to stop data collection that already occurred, or remove AO3's content from existing datasets, as much as we may dislike that it happened. All we can do is attempt to reduce such collection in the future. The Archive's development team will continue to be on the lookout for individual scrapers collecting AO3 data, and to take action as needed.

Likewise, our Legal committee has and will continue to serve the OTW mission of protecting fanworks from legal challenge and commercial exploitation. This includes their position that users should be allowed to opt out from having their works incorporated into AI training sets, a position that they have presented to the U.S. Copyright Office. They, too, will continue to keep pace with this developing field.

What can I do to avoid data scraping?

You may want to restrict your work to Archive users only. While this will not block every potential scraper, it should provide some protection against large-scale scraping.

AI-generated works and AO3 policies

At the moment, there is nothing in our Terms of Service that prohibits fanworks that are fully or partly generated with AI tools from being posted to the AO3, if they otherwise qualify as fanworks.

Our goals as an organization include maximum inclusivity of fanworks. This means not only the best fanworks, or the most popular fanworks, but all the fanworks that we can preserve. If fans are using AI to generate fanworks, then our current position is that this is also a type of work that is within our mandate to preserve.

Depending on the circumstances, AI-generated works could violate our anti-spam policies (e.g. if a creator posts a significant number in a short time). If you're uncertain whether a work violates our Terms of Service, you may always report it to our Policy & Abuse team using the link at the bottom of any page, and they can investigate.

This statement reflects AO3’s policy at the time of writing, as we wanted to be transparent with our users about what our current stance is and what can be done – and is being done – to mitigate scraping for AI datasets. However, these policies are also under discussion internally among AO3 volunteers. If we agree on changes to these in the future, those will be announced publicly; additionally, if there are any proposed changes to the AO3 Terms of Service, they will be made available for public comment as is required of any and all changes to our Terms of Service.

We hope that this helps to make things more clear – this is a complicated situation, and we’re doing our very best to address it in a way that doesn’t compromise AO3’s principles of maximum fanwork inclusivity or legitimate uses of the site. As discussions and approaches evolve, we will keep our users updated.

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 up a Fannish Next-of-Kin, or need to change or activate one currently in place, please contact Support.

Duplicate works

Sometimes, due to a glitch or error, a work may be posted multiple times. This can be reported to our Support team, who will investigate and take down exact duplicates. Please note that works that contain different content (such as a work that is an edited or rewritten version of another work) will not be considered exact duplicates.

If you wish to report works that are exact duplicates of one another, please include links to both or all of the works in question in your report to our Support team. We hope these changes will be helpful by allowing our Policy and Abuse team members to devote more of their time and energy to other issues!