crashmargulies | Reading

If you follow me on Comradery (or Patreon), or elsewhere, you may have heard me mention a tedious-to-work-on current project that I’d be sharing soon. Well! I’m serialising another book!! The tedious parts were doing an edit and breaking the book up into nice chunks (and queueing it). Starting June 21, 2026, I’m serialising The Consoling Divide! You may remember (or have been signed up to get the emails for) The Audacity Gambit, this is both a sequel to TAG and also a story that can stand on its own.

If you’d like to know more about this upcoming story, check out the info page here! Also please, enjoy the cover and a blurb:

The cover for The Consoling Divide. Shadowy layered trees circle the edges, and a light brown arm holding a sword thrusts up from the bottom of the image, slicing the word "Divide" in half.

Here’s the blurb:

Five years ago, Emily Anderson of Royal Oak Court Trailer Park was declared the Chosen One and sent on a quest to the Sidhe realm to end the exile of the adults who raised her. She succeeded, because that’s what Chosen Ones do, but the aftermath left her alone and in charge of the rest of the children in the trailer court.

Since her return, they’ve all found a kind of peace and stability, but nothing can stay the same forever. When Emily learns she has to plunge back into the fairy world she gladly left and reopen emotions she’d even more gladly bottled up, her reluctance is met by the one thing she knows is true: she can only rely on herself. One of the children Emily raised needs her, but first she needs to find them. The world she’s returning to is a different one than what she experienced as a hopeful teen, and even when it is familiar her place in it is no longer as clearly defined, the path not so easily followed.

I had fun going back and getting this ready to serialise, I hope all y’all have a nice time reading it. In case this is a blog post and not just an email (I am writing this ~ in the past ~ oooOOOhh ~ here’s a signup for getting The Consoling Divide delivered to your inbox. Of course, as always, you can as easily add it to your RSS, which is very sexy too.

If you were signed up for updates for TAG, I’ve (I believe) set up things so that you either start getting emails for the new story as before and can also easily unsubscribe from TCD updates if you prefer. Please let me know if you have trouble with it! Goodness knows its been a bear from my side.

The intent is to be annoying (ie: somewhat regular, rather than easily distracted) about promo’ing this one, I have promo images and everything. So expect to keep hearing about this for a bit! It may not start until mid-June, but hey, I’ve got plenty of other stuff for you to read until then.

genderjumper

I follow

addme , though I haven't engaged with it much yet. But I like its prompts and never posted an intro so here's one based on their template:

Age: Xennial. I have dialed a rotary phone (but not often) and find TikTok a little overwhelming; I've been online over 30 years, but never really an early adapter. My experience of age is also colored by intersections of USian whiteness, working class background (with some cheat codes along the way), undxd autism and hypermobility, queerness, genderfluidity, and having virtual no experience in corporate workplaces.

I mostly post about: practicing my memoirs, my dynamic disability and ongoing precautions against COVID, processing work and personal challenges, nonmonogamous relationships, caring and building interconnectivity, chosen family, and metaphysics that are hard to name. I'm perhaps a little too nostalgic about confessional blogging.

My hobbies are: writing, listening to music, human connection, our relationships with time, illustration, singing, road trips, my work in community care (lol)

My fandoms are: almost non-existent. Janelle Monáe, music history (especially the permutations of jazz as dance music), Star Trek I guess. Disability Justice. Finding hope in revolutionary times.

I'm looking to meet people who: protect themselves and others from ongoing pandemics, listen more than they speak, write to inform and inspire without needing to center themselves, don't put all of their hope in the revival of failing institutions (especially the Democratic Party), hold space for others, love to communicate but know we need more to improve the world.

My posting schedule tends to be: uneven. I'll post daily for a while, then vanish for weeks sometimes. 2-3x a week on average, let's say.

When I add people, my dealbreakers are: expecting perfection out of yourself or others, compartmentalizing and ranking human worth, inability to listen when held accountable, TESCREAL apologism, using AI uncritically/without labeling, willful illiteracy or incuriosness.

Before adding me, you should know: I've been a sex educator, a caregiver, and a witness to violence on micro and macro scales and I sometimes don't realize what will faze others. I do my best to include alerts for adult or heavy content (which itself will be behind a cut, of course), but let me know if anything catches you off guard. I am shy about sharing some of my writing outside existing connections and filter judiciously (but the bar to connecting is very low: be a real human being who is not looking to steal my writing or otherwise exploit our conversations). If we ever connect beyond this space, I strongly prefer a short, clear goodbye to being ghosted.

flamingsword

[Edit: my stepmother has died of cancer. She and I were not close, but Sister C has asked me to reach out to Dad. I have been plotting for his mental health.]

Okay, so (my and other folk’s) ideas for getting Dad to process his grief in productive ways( are as follows: )

If you have an arguably toxically masculine, undiagnosed autistic man in your life whose behavior you can predict, throw me a comment if you have good ideas for directing grief into healthy outlets.

genderjumper

It's not just that I've been trying to get back into writing here and get used to putting words on the page again; some of the bittersweet stories I've wanted to record have been building to something, a story too big to tell all at once, and I needed some practice to even fathom the stepping stones that would get me there.

As many of my stories start with a title, sometimes these stories only come to me once I've thought of a perfect alias for the person. One that encapsulates something about their personality, might make them identifiable to a select few, but that would in no way make them recognizable to most.

While mapping out "nearby towns" from our finalist cities in my GTFO project, I had some music playing and I remembered an alias for the biggest story, the one that will be hardest to tell. It points directly to the last project in her life where she fully let me in, and what's better she chose it for herself AND YET she never used it.

Her name is MOWRS, pronounced "mou" as in "mouse" and then just the RS: mou'rz perhaps. I'm not a linguist. Anyway, this familiar song came on and reminded me:

Now the world is small, remember how it used to be

with mountains and oceans and winters and rivers and stars.

( A very short preview of the story to tell )

I'm not sure the pain will ever go away, but I can tell you it took a global pandemic before I could accept that it had happened, and maybe even for a reason. Even our break-up and my waves of heartbreak and acceptance have stories upon stories, but here's the last thing I do know: on her fiftieth birthday, she was not walking the Appalachian Trail. There were no Mountains or Oceans or Winters or Rivers or even Stars.

MOWRS went indoor skydiving.

And now that she has a name, I can start to tell you her -- our -- stories.

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Location: Up too late
Current Music: Funny the Way It Is -- Dave Matthews Band

liminalovertea

Spring and the extended daylight that follows really gives me energy and motivation I just can't muster in the winter months, so I've been getting back into personal projects and getting through my TBR.

For writing, I'm working simultaneously on a couple long-term projects I've been wanting to get down on paper for years. I'm also just trying to foster a writing habit through journaling (which is regular now), keeping a notebook with me when I go out and just making sure that I write down what comes to mind as I think of it, instead of waiting until I get home to put it to page.

For reading, I just finished up as much as I can from V.E. Schwab's Shades of Magic series and the start of the following series in the same universe (Fragile Threads of Power). I'm obsessed, and I can't wait for Schwab to release more after FToP!

In the meantime, I'm catching up on my owned TBR. I'm currently in the middle of reading Torn by Rowenna Miller. I got this book over a year ago as an early annotation project, but it kind of sat in my disorganized stack up until now.

The writing is good! Not sure how much I relate to the MC, but it's refreshing to see female characters who--in a fantasy world based on the past--have genuine, educated interest in politics and entrepreneurship in very day-to-day context. It was written in the 2010's, and I can feel it from how heavy the emphasis is on certain topics. The world-building, for a fantasy book...is about as interesting as flat LaCroix, I'm not going to sugar-coat it. I feel like Miller was not trying too hard to differentiate a fantasy world from real-world historical past, and I'm a little disappointed.

Anyway, I'm not too far into it, but I'm trying to get a chapter in a day, at least.

Work has been annoying (it's fine...it's just chaotic, new quarter and all that), so...more reason for me to lean into hobbies until things settle down a bit.

Current Mood: focused
Current Location: Home

flamingsword

Woke up with a migraine, but took stuff for it as soon as I realized it wasn’t just a sinus headache. Now I get to drive to work and work a whole day and drive home with a migraine hangover. Yesterday sucked, and today is not looking much better.

I’ll be okay, later, but today I’m just kinda hanging on.

Thanks to everyone for recent kind comments. Y’all make my life better.

ysabetwordsmith posting in

followfriday

Got any Follow Friday-related posts to share this week? Comment here with the link(s).

Here's the plan: every Friday, let's recommend some people and/or communities to follow on Dreamwidth. That's it. No complicated rules, no "pass this on to 7.328 friends or your cat will die".

Current Mood: busy

anais_pf posting in

thefridayfive

These questions were written by

ideealisme.

1. What did you do on Monday?

2. What did you do on Tuesday?

3. What did you do on Wednesday?

4. What did you do on Thursday?

5. What are you going to do today?

Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.

If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!

genderjumper

This put me on a tear on Bsky today: https://lauriepenny.substack.com/p/straight-men-are-now-banned-from. It's so good!

In 2011, I met up with a former mentor, an older cisgay who told me he didn't think straight people should do nonmonogamy. I was indignant, but the only defenses I could offer were about how *I* was doing it right. I kinda agreed about straight men, I just hadn't fully removed the label from myself.

I've known a lot of people who found nonmonogamy after queerness, but I am a rare harbinger whose queerness emerged through nonmonogamy. I'm not saying I always got it right or I never did toxic things, but I always recoiled from them and endeavored to do better. I refused to not be held to account and some of the straightest partners I had at the time became indignant that it was so important to me, that I stayed friends or partners with flawed individuals instead of throwing them away. That I believed in changing myself rather than blaming others and scorching where they trod.

In my master's thesis on caregivers, I cited J. Jack Halberstam's IN A QUEER TIME AND PLACE and embraced his framing that existing outside of normative, consumer-oriented procreation was just as queer as any intimate relationship. It's one's relationship with power that determines queerness.
‪
Straights who refuse to unpack the power dynamics in their relationships will always falter at polyamory or any other nonmonogamous model. And those who do not refuse seem to, over time, figure out we are not so straight after all.
‪
If you're worried that I'm conflating unalike concepts, I'll just say it for you: this is the vision of queerness that scares right-wingers most. Behind their pearl-clutching over children and triggers of disgust, they don't want a complex, dynamic world because they can't control it.
‪
It's not even about profit: diverse human experiences lead to better products and get closer to perpetual growth than any top-down hierarchy every could. There is data on this.

Hierarchies exist because someone wants to outsource difficult decisions & others are eager to assert preference as truth.
‪
The corporate class want us monogamous & cheating because it fosters loneliness & inarticulate feelings that can be channeled into impulse buying & status protection on a macro scale. Too busy to care.

The queer class just wants to exist and care for each other & figure things out on a micro scale.
‪
Only one of these visions includes room to care about how our actions affect others beyond our bosses' bottom lines. But it will require constant, recurring introspection until the infrastructure of choice (intimacy, purchase, politics, engagement) makes room for anything else.
‪
Thanks Laurie Penny for saying what needed to be said: Relationships are always political, & people who are comfortable with their social power make polyamory worse for the rest of us.

Let's save all our sexual and romantic liberation for those whose practice includes liberating others.

Current Mood: quixotic
Current Location: Several rabbitholes away from where I thought I'd be

adore

Moontime began today morning, right as I woke up. Turns out napping is what works to relieve the cramps better than anything else. This is not good news for workplaces that don't want to give menstrual leave.

I've been reading Haroun and the Study of Mischief by Lynn Strong and it's the perfect moontime read. It's comforting and hilarious and all the characters are a delight. It's set in a fantasy world that feels close to home. My South Asian self rarely encounters such a thing. I don't often want to escape to a world that feels close to home, but here I do. So that's a novel feeling!

I bleed so heavy that I need to use pads most of the time and change around 8 times a day. I prefer period panties on my light days, but on my heavy days it has to be pads because washing a pile of period panties is exhausting. Four days of my period are heavy, so that's a lot of pads I run through. I was unhappy about the prices of organic pads and the hazardousness of the inorganic ones, but I recently found organic bamboo pads that are 400 rupees, or $4, for a pack of 40 pads 320mm long! I'm using them now and they're really nice. Comfortable, handle my flow, don't make me sweat. And they're unbleached!

It seems that there's a factory churning them out cheap and supplying it to brands (white labelling) because when I search for organic bamboo pads, they all have the same wrapper but are being sold as different brands. There are some being sold as a generic lot with no box or brand, and with the same wrapper, like this lot. I just thought that was interesting, lol. I'm going to stick to the brand I bought because they come with additional individual disposal bags that you can reseal.

Current Mood: sore

ao3_news_feed

https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/34806

OTW recruitment banner

Are you a paralegal interested in helping the Legal Committee carry out its legal advocacy mission? Do you have legal experience, preferably trademark-specific, especially in the EU and US? Would you like to assist AO3 users by resolving complaints? The Organization for Transformative Works is recruiting!

We're excited to announce the opening of applications for:

Legal Committee Paralegal - closing 22 April 2026 at 23:59 UTC
Legal Committee Trademark Specialist - closing 22 April 2026 at 23:59 UTC
Policy & Abuse Volunteer - closing 22 April 2026 at 23:59 UTC

We have included more information on each role below. Open roles and applications will always be available at the volunteering page. If you don't see a role that fits with your skills and interests now, keep an eye on the listings. We plan to put up new applications every few weeks, and we will also publicize new roles as they become available.

All applications generate a confirmation page and an auto-reply to your e-mail address. We encourage you to read the confirmation page and to whitelist our email address in your e-mail client. If you do not receive the auto-reply within 24 hours, please check your spam filters and then contact us.

If you have questions regarding volunteering for the OTW, check out our Volunteering FAQ.

Legal Committee Paralegal

The Legal committee is responsible for carrying out the OTW's legal advocacy mission and providing internal legal support and guidance to the OTW as an organization. We provide confidential legal advice to every part of the OTW organization, respond to fans' requests for general assistance and information, and create educational materials. We also file briefs in lawsuits and advise lawmakers about how to take fans’ needs and interests into account in creating and interpreting the law. And we're looking for a few new members!

We are looking for a paralegal to assist with managing standard questions, tracking issues, and ensuring we adhere to deadlines. If this describes you, please click through to the application form. Please note that you must be over 18 years of age to apply for this role. All applicants will be asked to upload their resume.

Applications are due 22 April 2026

Apply to be a Legal Committee Paralegal at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.

Legal Committee Trademark Specialist

The Legal committee is responsible for carrying out the OTW’s legal advocacy mission and providing internal legal support and guidance to the OTW as an organization.

We are currently looking for a Trademark Specialist, who will be responsible for trademark registration applications and maintenance and trademark enforcement, generally dealing with platforms and attempts to monetize AO3 via apps or merchandise.

If you have legal experience, preferably trademark-specific, especially in the EU or US, and can effectively communicate legal issues to non lawyers, click through for the job description and to apply. Please note that you must be over 18 years of age to apply for this role. All applicants will be asked to upload their resume.

Applications are due 22 April 2026

Apply to be a Legal Committee Trademark Specialist at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.

Policy & Abuse Volunteer

The Policy & Abuse committee (PAC) is responsible for addressing questions and concerns about potential violations of the AO3 Terms of Service. We determine whether reports are about legitimate violations of the Terms of Service, and what to do about them if they are. PAC volunteers correspond directly with AO3 users and collaborate on projects both within PAC and with other OTW committees.

Our main goals as a committee are:

to adhere to the AO3 Terms of Service
to make our reasoning and processes as clear and transparent as possible
to handle all user reports consistently, no matter which volunteer is doing the work
to keep every case we work on completely confidential

We are seeking people who can:

Commit to working on cases regularly
Be patient with rephrasing explanations
Ask for help when needed
Collaborate both inside the team and with other committees
Act in accordance with established rules, policies, and procedures
Treat confidentiality and user privacy as a priority

You must be 18+ in order to apply for this role. While English proficiency is required, we welcome applicants who are fluent in other languages, especially Brazilian Portuguese (Português brasileiro), Chinese (中文), French (Français), Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia), Japanese (日本語), Polish (Polski), Russian (Русский), Spanish (Español), Turkish (Türkçe), or Ukrainian (Українська).

Applications are due 22 April 2026

Apply to be a Policy & Abuse Volunteer at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.

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.

https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/34806

genderjumper

Not everyone will have seen the 5,500 words I dropped yesterday recounting my complex history with my complex family, but today I got a wild text from my mom that makes a perfect epilogue...

After telling me the answer to tonight's Final Jeopardy!:

"This was my wedding night 54 years ago. I usually look at [first husband]'s FB page, but there have been no posts on it for several years. Today I found [first husband's second wife, who has the same name but spelled differently]'s page and learned they were married 50 years in March. I'm glad he found someone who could tolerate him and make him happy since it wasn't me."

So my mom, whose anniversary with my step-dad (her second husband) I kept track of because neither of them could ever remember through 20 years, still keeps tabs on the first husband she married at 18 and who left her only a couple years later? My mom, who became estranged from her parents for eight years after that wedding and still doesn't really know how to have a direct conversation with me, still drops random bombshells like this out of nowhere. My mom, who silently looks down on my decades of nonmonogamy but still waxes nostalgic for a relationship with a guy she hasn't seen since before I was born.

I think she cheated on him and he stomped off petulantly, but I have no idea what went down. Maybe she'll tell me next year. After Final Jeopardy!

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Location: a break from watching Heated Rivalry with NP
Current Music: You Dropped a Bomb on Me -- The Gap Band

gothfvck posting in

the_magick_circle

( You're about to view content that a community administrator has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

adore

My mother made me talk to an arranged marriage match. Oh, the joys of being an Indian daughter.

Here's a snapshot of our Whatsapp conversation. Guess how badly it went 😆

( Screenshot )
Alt text for the screenshot:

Audacious Guy: you consider yourself a humorous person?
Long-suffering Indian Daughter: my jokes are not everyone’s cup of tea
Audacious Guy: high iq jokes ah?
Long-suffering Indian Daughter: you could say that
Audacious Guy: cool
Long-suffering Indian Daughter: 😎
Audacious Guy: how do you feel normally everyday?
Audacious Guy: like privileged, entitled… ala
Audacious Guy: or better than everyone else..
Long-suffering Indian Daughter: i feel emotionally self-sufficient
Audacious Guy: why do you need a partner then

Some context: 'ala' is a filler word in Telugu. It means something like 'and so on', 'like that', 'or some such'.

Some more context: this is our first (and last! lol) conversation, so it wasn't a case of familiarity breeding rudeness. I asked him what's important to him in life, and in marriage, and then since I was the one asking these questions and he was just asking them back to me, I asked him if he had any questions for me. The 'are you humorous' question was the first one he asked, and the 'are you entitled' question was the second.
( Read more... )

Current Mood: angry

ao3_news_feed

https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/34681

Our February releases included new admin tools for our Support and Policy & Abuse teams, as well as a bunch of challenge and collection fixes and a host of small updates and improvements. We also upgraded to Rails 8 and Elasticsearch 9!

Many thanks to first-time contributor Shel!

Credits

Coders: Bilka, Brian Austin, Danaël/Rever, FlyingFalcon, Hunter Ada Smith, james_, Jennifer He (DisappearEagle 无鸢), marcus8448, Richard Hajek, Scott, slavalamp, varram
Code reviewers: Bilka, Brian Austin, james_, sarken
Testers: ana, Bilka, choux, hvalrann, Lute, mumble, ömer faruk, pk2317, therealmorticia, Yuca

Details

0.9.457

On February 2, we deployed a major Rails update.

[AO3-7231] - Updated the framework the Archive runs on to Rails 8.0.

0.9.458

On February 9, we introduced a way for our Support team to add information to the support form without disabling the form, and deployed a bunch of miscellaneous fixes and improvements.

[AO3-6983] - It was already possible for our Support team to temporarily close the support form and replace it with a message to users, e.g. about a known site-wide issue the development team was already working to solve. Additionally, they can now add a temporary message to the form without disabling the form entirely.
[AO3-3245] - Trying to open the posting form to add a work to a closed collection (only possible by manually typing in the appropriate URL) would lead to an error message that looked like the form had already been submitted. The URL now redirects to the collection with a more helpful error message.
[AO3-7246] - We added a "Parent" link to comments, so you can quickly jump to the specific comment that is being replied to.
[AO3-7260] - Passwords must now be between 8 and 72 characters long. (The previous minimum was 6 characters.)
[AO3-7274] - Comment previews for Policy & Abuse admins were previously truncated after the first 100 characters, and admins had to click on the preview to access the full comment. Now the preview includes the first 1,000 characters, which is much more useful.
[AO3-7279] - When a collection is set to "revealed" or "non-anonymous", the collection is placed in a queue that runs when resources are available to change the status of potentially thousands of works. This means the moderator often has enough time to quickly change the setting back if a checkbox was ticked in error. We now make sure the process really only runs if the revealed or non-anonymous option is still wanted when the servers are ready to work through the queue.
[AO3-7240] - In our ongoing internationalization efforts, we prepared the text in the help pop-ups for Rating, Warning, and Fandom tags for translation.
[AO3-7047], [AO3-7281], [AO3-7287], [AO3-7288] - Code clean-up, database performance improvements, and system updates.

0.9.459

Our February 17 deploy included various small fixes and updates.

[AO3-4031] - Draft works include a message at the top, warning the creator that unposted drafts will be automatically deleted after a certain time. If you had a draft with multiple chapters, this message would not be displayed! Now it appears everywhere it should.
[AO3-5367] - If someone bookmarked a mystery work, i.e. a work in an unrevealed collection, the bookmark would show up in bookmark searches that matched elements of the mystery work. Since we don't want information about a mystery work to be guessable in this manner, we now make sure searching bookmarks doesn't give away information about unrevealed works.
[AO3-5870] - A blockquote in a comment would awkwardly overlap with the commenter's user icon, so we've taken steps to make sure it stays within its own boundaries.
[AO3-5963] - You can't request an invite with an email address that is already used by an existing account. If an existing account updates their email address to one that's waiting in the request queue, we now make sure that request is deleted.
[AO3-7206] - Downloads of a work in progress with only one chapter posted were missing that chapter's title, summary, and notes, displaying only the information entered for the work as a whole. Now all data is present and accounted for!
[AO3-7254] - We've added a limit to how many times a specific comment can be reported to the Policy & Abuse team for review.
[AO3-7263] - Under certain circumstances, an admin would get a 500 error trying to access a user's preferences page. Now they can access it even under those circumstances.
[AO3-7289] - When a user tried to create a skin with faulty CSS, the parser would just throw an error 500 instead of telling the user which part was stressing it out. It now helpfully points to the problem in the CSS code.
[AO3-7210] - The help pop-up that provides information about creating skins is now prepared for translation.
[AO3-6853], [AO3-7048] - Code clean-up and database performance improvements.

0.9.460

A bunch of gem updates went out on February 21.

[AO3-7036] - When reviewing comments held in moderation, to either approve or reject, there was no "Thread" link to get the URL for a specific comment, e.g. to report it to the Policy & Abuse team. Now there is!
[AO3-7278] - AO3 admins from the Open Doors team can now track invitations in the admin area.
[AO3-7236] - Prepared the text in a couple of skins-related help pop-ups for translation.
[AO3-7265], [AO3-7297], [AO3-7298], [AO3-7299], [AO3-7300] - Code clean-up and database performance improvements.

0.9.461

On February 28, we upgraded to Elasticsearch 9.

[AO3-7282] - Upgraded the search engine that powers, among other things, work searches and filtering from version 8 to 9.

https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/34681

ao3_news_feed

https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/34676

Banner of a paper airplane emerging from an envelope with the words 'OTW Newsletter: Organization for Transformative Works'

I. AO3 IS EXITING OPEN BETA

In early April, we announced that AO3 is exiting open beta!

AO3 has grown and changed a lot since open beta launched in 2009! We've gone from 347 users to over 10 million and from 6,598 works to over 17 million. We've also introduced many features in that time, including the tag system and tag wrangling, additional privacy settings that allow creators to restrict their works or comments to logged-in users, downloads for offline access to fanworks, and more.

Since AO3's software has been stable for a long time, this change is mostly cosmetic and doesn't indicate everything is finalized or perfectly working. Our volunteer coders and community contributors will still be adding to and improving post-beta AO3 every day.

For more information on AO3 exiting open beta, check out the announcement for details.

II. ELSEWHERE AT AO3

In March, we celebrated AO3 reaching 17 million works! \o/

Beyond exiting beta, Accessibility, Design & Technology also performed two important upgrades in March: updating Elasticsearch to version 9 and Ruby on Rails to version 8.1. With these two upgrades, AO3 is on the latest version for two of its most important pieces of software. They also published January’s release notes.

Systems published a postmortem on early March's AO3 downtime.

Open Doors announced the import of SlasHeaven, a Spanish-language slash fanfiction and fanart archive, as part of their Online Archive Rescue Project.

In February, Policy & Abuse (PAC) received 5,674 tickets, which is over 2,000 fewer tickets than the previous month and marks the first decrease in PAC's backlog since 2024. PAC also coordinated with Communications on a news post describing various spambots seen on AO3 and how we're combating them. Also in February, Support received 3,031 tickets, and User Response Translation completed 42 requests from PAC and Support.

Tag Wrangling announced 31 new "No Fandom" canonical tags in their March round-up. On the @ao3org Tumblr, they announced changes to Critical Role fandom tags, creating an overarching fandom metatag for the Exandrian Universe and having specific campaigns or other media split into subtags. They hope these changes will help users better tag and filter for the works they want to see.

In February, Tag Wrangling wrangled over 543,000 tags or approximately 1,200 tags per wrangling volunteer.

III. ELSEWHERE AT THE OTW

Communications has updated the OTW News by Email service! You can now subscribe specifically to recruitment posts. If you're already subscribed to OTW News by Email and would like to change what emails you receive, please contact Communications via their contact form.

In March, Fanlore ran a monthly editing challenge inviting users to archive external links on a page.

Legal answered a number of questions about pending and newly enacted laws around the world, as well as dealing with internal requests from OTW committees.

TWC released No. 47 of Transformative Works and Cultures, a special issue on Gaming Fandom edited by coeditors Hayley McCullough and Ashley P. Jones.

IV. GOVERNANCE

Board and Board Assistants Team continued work on ongoing and newer projects, including making progress on the OTW website project with Communications, supporting Accessibility, Design & Technology with their documentation, and supporting Finance with streamlining messaging policies. They also began preparing for the next public Board meeting scheduled for April 18.

In March, Development & Membership caught up on their recurring donation gifts and put in more regular procedures for them going forward. In conjunction with Communications and Translation, they're now preparing for April's Membership Drive by getting graphics and new gifts ready.

V. OUR VOLUNTEERS

Volunteers & Recruiting conducted recruitment for three committees this month: Communications (News Post Moderation), Translation, and User Response Translation.

From February 21 to March 22, Volunteers & Recruiting received 160 new requests and completed 159, leaving them with 66 open requests (including induction and removal tasks listed below). As of March 22, 2026, the OTW has 992 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below.

New Committee Chairs/Leads: Becca Bun and Jules Moon (Fanlore), Rebecca Tushnet and Stacey Lantagne (Legal)
New Communications Volunteers: LinnK, Jahnavi, and 3 other Social Media Moderators
New Fanlore Volunteers: 1 Policy & Admin and 1 Social Media & Outreach
New Open Doors Volunteers: Andrea T and 4 other Import Assistants; Kathy and 1 other Technical Volunteer; adyn, Seren, Claire M, and 2 other Administrative Volunteers; and 1 Liaison
New Organizational Culture Roadmap Workgroup Volunteers: 1 Volunteer
New TWC Volunteers: 1 Symposium Editor
New Volunteers & Recruiting Volunteers: miffmiff, PippaLane, and 2 other volunteers

Departing Committee Chairs/Leads: 1 Open Doors Chair, 2 Fanlore Chairs, and 1 Internal Complaint and Conflict Resolution Lead
Departing AD&T Volunteers: 1 Senior Volunteer and 1 Liaison
Departing Fanlore Volunteers: 1 Social Media & Outreach
Departing Finance Volunteers: 1 Bookkeeper
Departing Open Doors Volunteers: 1 Technical Volunteer
Departing Policy & Abuse Volunteers: 1 Volunteer
Departing Tag Wrangling Volunteers: 4 Tag Wranglers and Soppon (Tag Wrangling Supervisor)
Departing Translation Volunteers: Ito, Polyxeni Foutsitsi, and 3 other Translators; 1 Chair Trainee; and 1 Volunteer Manager
Departing User Response Translation Volunteers: 1 Translator
Departing Volunteers & Recruiting Volunteers: 2 Volunteers

For more information about our committees and their regular activities, you can refer to the committee pages on our website.

https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/34676

ao3_news_feed

https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/34631

Spotlight on Policy and Abuse

NOTE: This is a living document and will be updated in response to changes and new types of spam as observed by OTW volunteers.

LAST UPDATED: March 30, 2026

As AO3 continues to grow, there has been an increase in the amount and variety of spambots that attempt to harass or scam users. Spambots may try to imitate other users and even AO3/OTW volunteers to appear more realistic. This post shares a brief update on how we're working to combat this issue, what types of spam we've seen, and what you can do if you encounter spam comments on AO3.

What We're Doing

Protecting our users from scammers and bots targeting AO3 is important to us, and we are actively working to combat spam on the site in a variety of ways—both visible and not. We will not share a detailed list of every change we've made (so as to not provide spammers with information about how to circumvent these measures), but some examples include introducing comment rate limits for logged-in users, changing the default comment setting on new works to "Registered users only", spam checking comments and comment edits from new users, and making a variety of improvements to the admin tools used by our Policy & Abuse volunteers to handle reports and remove spam comments.

We continue to consider and undertake additional technical changes to help prevent and improve our response to spambots. However, it is important to us that any anti-spam measures we implement do not substantially harm users who are browsing or attempting to comment normally. Many more aggressive anti-spam measures would make AO3 less accessible, particularly for users using assistive devices such as screen readers.

In addition to taking technical steps to help address the issues, we continue to post updates about spambots and other important changes to AO3 on our Tumblr, Bluesky, and Twitter/X. We encourage you to follow us on these platforms to stay informed about what's going on.

Types of Spam Comments

Below is a list of different types of spam comments that have been posted on AO3 over the last year. We intend to maintain this list and add new types of spam to it as they are identified; however, this list may not include every type of spam comment that could possibly be received. We encourage you to remain vigilant and follow internet safety best practices.

If you're not sure if something is a spam comment, you're welcome to contact Policy & Abuse for assistance. Before doing so, we encourage you to click through the links below to learn more about each type of comment and use your best judgement to determine if a comment appears to be genuine or could be a scam.

Art Commission Spam: These comments come from both guests and registered accounts who pretend to be artists who want to make comics or illustrations for your fanfic. They may ask questions or praise your work to try and get you to reply to them, before convincing you to contact them off AO3 (often via Discord). They will try to scam you into paying for their art, which is either AI-generated or does not exist at all. (First reported August 2024, news post published December 2024)
Deprecated Fandoms Spam: These guest comments claim that AO3 will be "deleting works to conserve server space". There is no such thing as a deprecated fandom and there is no limit on the number of fanworks that can be posted to a specific tag. (First reported May 2025, Tumblr announcement May 2025)
AI Use Accusation Spam: These guest comments will accuse you of using AI in your work. They may mention a particular AI generator or AI detection service, or claim that they "saw you remove the AI prompts from your work". (First reported April 2023, Tumblr announcement November 2025)
Harassing Spam: These guest comments will accuse you or another user of promoting discriminatory beliefs, deceiving fans, or similar behaviors. They often suggest that you "consider adding more diverse characters" to "repair the trust you've lost with your audience". (First reported October 2025, Tumblr announcement November 2025)
Praise and Unsolicited Suggestions Spam: These guest comments will compliment your writing but then offer ridiculous suggestions for how to make your work better. Similar to the harassing spam, they may ask you to add a minority character to your work or threaten to publicly expose you if you don't do what they want. (First reported October 2025)
Special Character/Keysmash Spam: These comments are usually long and consist entirely of emojis or nonsense, keysmash-style sequences of characters from a variety of non-Latin scripts or languages (e.g., Chinese, Cyrillic, Thai, etc). (First reported November 2025)
Reporting To Authorities Spam: These guest comments threaten to report you or your work to the authorities or your employers. They also may allege security concerns like your email being compromised or spyware on your computer. (First reported December 2025, Tumblr announcement December 2025)
Disparaging Spam: These guest comments insult you or your writing, claiming that you "wasted your talents" or "have no life". They may also threaten suicide or tell you to delete your work. (First reported December 2025)
PowerShell Spam: These comments present you with a piece of code to enter into your computer's terminal/command line. While they claim that the purpose of the code is for your protection or security, the code in these comments would actually delete all documents from your hard drive. (First reported January 2026)
Doxxing Threat Spam: These guest comments claim that they know where you live, have seen you in person, and/or threaten to meet you face-to-face. They often say that they have or will post your personal information (name, address, etc.) online or that they are stalking you in real life (e.g. "left a gift in a briefcase near your house"). (First reported January 2026, Tumblr announcement January 2026)
Spam Impersonating OTW Volunteers: These guest comments claim to be AO3/OTW volunteers and say that there has been a data breach or that AO3 and other sites (such as Reddit) have been sending out fraudulent password reset emails. (First reported January 2026, Tumblr announcement February 2026)
Downtime Spam: These guest comments claim that the March 2026 AO3 downtime was caused by hackers and AO3 has a virus that will destroy your device, and encourage reformatting your device or deleting all your works. (First reported March 2026)

None of the accusations these spam comments make are true. The bots are merely spamming false accusations in order to alarm or harass AO3 users. It is generally safe to ignore these comments once you've removed and/or reported them as outlined below.

What You Can Do

Do not engage in conversation with spam commenters. Do not provide your email or social media contact information to a commenter who asks for it. 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.

Do not click on any links, run any code commands on your computer, or search out and harass any users named in these comments. Scammers often copy the username of a real AO3 user on their guest comments to make them look more real. Pay attention to the "(Guest)" indicator which will appear next to the name of anyone who comments while not logged in.

For spam comments on your own work, the best way to handle them depends on whether they are from registered accounts or guests. Refer to the instructions below on how to handle Spam from a Guest User or Spam from a Registered Account.

If you see a spambot comment on someone else's work, you can report the comment as spam to Policy & Abuse (even if it's a guest comment) as you would a comment on your own work. You can also let the creator know the comment is from a bot and that they should mark it as spam.

Please don't report comments that have already been deleted. As part of handling a report about spam comments (whether from guests or registered accounts), we will remove other comments made by the same bot. If the comments have been deleted, the bot has already been actioned and no further reports are needed.

Spam from a Guest User

If you receive a spambot comment on your work which is posted by a guest:

Go directly to the comment on your work, either by clicking on the link in your email or in your AO3 inbox.

Note: The "Spam" button only appears when viewing a guest comment directly on your work. This is because the AO3 comment inbox is merely a copy of the work's comments—deleting a comment from your AO3 inbox does not delete the comment from the work itself.
Click on the "Spam" button to mark the guest comment as spam, remove it from your work, and help train our automated spam-checker to reject similar spam comments in the future.

Note: Marking guest comments as spam does not submit a report to the Policy & Abuse committee, but unless you are receiving dozens of guest spam comments in a short time period, there is no need to submit a separate report.

To prevent future guest spam comments, you may also want to consider disabling anonymous commenting or restricting your work to registered users only.

If you are reporting multiple guest comments, please submit only one report and include all comment links in your report description. (You can get the direct link to a specific comment by selecting the "Thread" button on the comment and copying the URL of that page.)

If you are receiving dozens of guest spam comments in a short time period, we recommend turning on comment moderation and providing us with a link to the unreviewed comments section of the affected work(s) instead of reporting the comments individually.

Spam from a Registered Account

If the spam comment is posted by a registered AO3 account:

Select the "Thread" button on the spam comment. This will take you to the specific comment page.
Scroll to the bottom of the page and select Policy Questions & Abuse Reports.
In the "Brief summary of Terms of Service violation" field, enter "Spambot".
In the "Description of the content you are reporting" field, enter "This is a spambot, their username is USERNAME." (replace USERNAME with the account's actual username)
Optionally, you may also choose to block or mute the account.

Please don't report multiple spam accounts in one report. Each account is actioned separately and listing more than one account per report delays our response to you.

Closing

In general, please follow internet safety best practices and be cautious of unsolicited advertisements or harassing comments on your work. For some advice on other ways you can protect your AO3 account, take a look at this internet security guidance from our Policy & Abuse volunteers.

https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/34631

genderjumper

In their infinite thoughtfulness,

flamingsword and others recently encouraged me to write my life story/ies here because there is still so much to learn about each other. I found it a delightful motivation, particularly when they requested "the Bildungsroman of your oppressed childhood?"

But if I was going to start such a project, I had to make sure I wasn't repeating other stories, and I found I'd written way more here than I recalled!

So here is a rough anthology of posts I've already make that would fall under "A Thousand Ways to Tell a Life Story":

Adverse Childhood Experiences
Burnout
Homes
Sleep
My fam-o's great expectations for me
Alcohol (I called it a "Culture Catalogue" there)
Friendships
Jobs & Employment

And as a treat, here's the first time I wanted to grieve my lost chance to move to Chicago.

I also cleaned up my tags (though I only got through the I's so probably needs a lot more work); as they get streamlined better they should help me as the writer and yall as readers to seek out specific topics more quickly. One thing I have not streamlined yet is which posts are public and which are access-only, so I apologize in advance if something isn't showing up for you. That's a DW etiquette thing I'm still learning.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: Memphis Vitality Hotel
Current Music: Sudan Archives: Selfish Soul

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

I keep forgetting to post about this: we've been troubleshooting the "missing notifications" problem for the past few days. (Well, I say "we", really I mean Mark and Robby; I'm just the amanuensis.) It's been one of those annoying loops of "find a logical explanation for what could be causing the problem, fix that thing, observe that the problem gets better for some people but doesn't go away completely, go back to step one and start again", sigh.

Mark is hauling out the heavy debugging ordinance to try to find the root cause. Once he's done building all the extra logging tools he needs, he'll comment to this entry. After he does, if you find a comment that should have gone to your inbox and sent an email notification but didn't, leave him a link to the comment that should have sent the notification, as long as the comment itself was made after Mark says he's collecting them. (I'd wait and post this after he gets the debug code in but I need to go to sleep and he's not sure how long it will take!)

We're sorry about the hassle! Irregular/sporadic issues like this are really hard to troubleshoot because it's impossible to know if they're fixed or if they're just not happening while you're looking. With luck, this will give us enough information to figure out the root cause for real this time.

flamingsword

You know what I haven’t seen in a minute? An ask meme! Y’all are interesting and I have things I want to know about you, so I propose a trade of information.

Comment to ask a question about any of the interests on my profile, and I will tell you about what it means to me. Post this on your journal so I can ask you stuff, too?

https://flamingsword.dreamwidth.org/profile

About the Author

Crash Margulies is a virus-avoidant, disabled, polyamorous, and queer-trans artist & activist living on Očhéthi Šakówiŋ (Dakota Sioux) & Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) land, colonized as Minneapolis, MN.

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April 2026

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Page Summary

bzedan - New story incoming!
genderjumper - Introductory Post
flamingsword - Dad stuff
genderjumper - Love Stories: Introducing MOWRS
liminalovertea - 📖 ✍️ Mostly reading and writing at the moment...
flamingsword - (no subject)
ysabetwordsmith in followfriday - Follow Friday 4-17-26
anais_pf in thefridayfive - The Friday Five for 17 April 2026
genderjumper - Response: Straight Men Are Now Banned from Polyamory
adore - 🌙
ao3_news_feed - The OTW is Recruiting for Legal Committee Paralegals, Legal Committee Trademark Specialists, and Pol
genderjumper - Post-script to Origin Story #0
gothfvck in the_magick_circle - ~Hair~, DRUGS, and jorbs.
adore - TW: men
ao3_news_feed - Releases 0.9.457 - 0.9.461: Change Log
ao3_news_feed - March 2026 Newsletter, Volume 209
ao3_news_feed - Spambot Comments on AO3
genderjumper - Anthology: 9 Ways I've already Told My Life Story (on DW)
denise in dw_maintenance - The case of the missing notifications
flamingsword - Moar memes!

the writing of Crash Margulies

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Policy & Abuse Volunteer

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0.9.457

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I. AO3 IS EXITING OPEN BETA

II. ELSEWHERE AT AO3

III. ELSEWHERE AT THE OTW

IV. GOVERNANCE

V. OUR VOLUNTEERS

What We're Doing

Types of Spam Comments

What You Can Do

Spam from a Guest User

Spam from a Registered Account

Closing

About the Author

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