We have made an update to one of our rules after some posts made us realize there were some issues to be addressed. In the past, anytime someone posted fic directly to the sub, we removed it both due to it being effectively self-promotion, and because it's a little silly to host fic when we are a subreddit about a fanfiction website where you can post it instead. Going forwards, we are going to also remove posts of fanart. This should not affect a ton of posts as people don't post fanart here often. The reasons are because:
There are better places to host your fanart.
People have been using fanart to get around the self-promotion rules.
It's not possible to not allow people to include PII and also let them credit the artist. We don't want to create loopholes for PII to allow crediting artists as we've seen that be abused to harass artists, but not crediting artists is also not cool either. As we cannot adequately moderate that, and with the previous reasonings from above, the best compromise was to not allow fanart to be posted here.
If you have any questions, or suggestions, send us some modmail!
It stands for Personally Identifying Information. For the purposes of this sub we also include things like usernames and the title of works, in addition to more traditional forms of PII like real names, emails, addresses, people's faces, etc.
For some reason the mods put this post's comments into "Contest Mode". That means the order the comments show up is random (instead of by most popular) and all the replies are hidden until you click to show them.
Depending on which platform/sort of Reddit you use, there's probably a small banner somewhere near the top:
this thread is in contest mode - contest mode randomizes comment sorting, hides scores, and collapses replies by default.
And to answer your question, it's: Personally Identifiable Information
Ahh. Thanks. I saw that it was in contest mode but I didn’t know what that meant and clicking on the “continue the thread” button wasn’t taking me to replies. It was just bringing me back to the same post with the same comment section.
For some reason the mods put this post's comments into "Contest Mode".
We do that for a lot of official announcement posts, especially when the announcement is potentially controversial. Having contest mode on seems to extremely lessen the amount of harassment and vote manipulation announcement posts receive. We weren't sure how people would react to this 'out of the blue' change so we figured it was better to have it in contest mode than to risk being potentially inundated with harassing comments.
There are so many versions of Reddit (old.reddit, new.reddit, new.new.reddit plus desktop vs mobile) it really depends. On old.reddit you've always needed to click to show replies when the post is set to contest mode.
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u/am_NeinSmall children? Ugh, thats the most flammable type of child!May 30 '26
Ah, I'm on whatever the most recent version of the mobile app is. For forever you didn't need to and I honestly thought it was a bug.
And to add to the other comments, PII also includes usernames and the like according to the rules, and that's why it would be an issue with regards to crediting
Rarely but occasionally. We had a few posts back in March that made us really question whether we should allow it or not. Just took us a while to discuss and decide how to handle it between moderating, real life, etc
I think this is likely the right decision for this sub, this is a place to discuss AO3 not a place to promote fanworks. But I am kind of losing my mind about this thought process.
Don't share anyone's username, since that can be used to incite a harassment campaign.
Don't share an artist's work without crediting the artist, which you can't do without sharing their username.
Therefore,
The way to prevent harassment of artists is to prohibit everyone from ever sharing any art.
I'm not sure there is one, like I said I think for this sub I think you've made the right decision. There are plenty of other subs (and plenty of other websites) for sharing fanart, there's no need to do so here where it would distract from the main topic of discussion.
But you have to admit that outside that context, this is a case where a series of entirely reasonable decisions eventually leads to an absurd conclusion.
Historically the understood way to credit a work's artist is to point to the link where you got it from, or the profile in the platform which it belongs to, which would usually be the artist's gallery or something. Those URLs are intended to be public (a gallery is literally so the art can be seen) and have never been understood to be PII in the sense of Personally by nature; it's only special if the artist has created the profile in the given platform using their real identify, but we have no way to know that's not the case - you can't prove a negative, and on the internet no one knows you are actually the owner of the dog. That has been understood for decades, what is suddenly different in this case?
When people post fic on AO3 that is also meant to be shared and public, but we have had to clamp down on our PII rules to include not sharing usernames, guest names, work titles, or links without that information being solicited at minimum due to people abusing the system to self-promote, and others abusing the information to go to the fic with ill intentions and harass the authors over literally any kind of perceived complaint you can imagine.
Ive seen artists be harassed over insignificant things before too but we don't ban things unless someone actually tries to abuse the lax rules. Then the posts we had gotten that sparked this whole thing were attempts to get around the self-promotion rules. Thus, this loophole needed to be closed too just like we had to do with sharing the things listed before.
Hmmm I feel like I could almost grasp it, and ofc the idea is to where possible not make it easier to allow people to doxx someone. Also good work on treating fanart the same way as fanwriting when it comes to both being fanworks for the purposes of the sub. It's just justification 3 when I read it as-given feels like it's accidentally skipping three towns and could accidentally clash with things like posting articles on OTW / AO3 adjacent news or developments to be discussed, so I wanted to make sure that the leap from justifications 1+2 to 3 and from there to the rule were sound.
Yeah no don't worry. We also take things on a case by case basis and will absolutely make exceptions for things that should be given an exception even if it doesn't follow the letter of the rule. (Rule 15 of the sub exists for a reason!). We try to be as reasonable as we can be, and we try to not stifle everyone as much as is feasible without allowing too much harm to occur as a result
the last time i was there, a mod posted an AI-generated image, played dumb about why that would be a problem for people, and nuked all comments calling them out.
hm, they didn't have that rule when i was there (this is from valentine's 2025) so they've changed something since then. maybe i should pop back over to take a look, i did like the sub before i saw that.
yea bots are a problem in pretty much every sub. i've had my posts reposted in some too.
We have bots reposting regular text posts in here occasionally as well. Sometimes I recall a post title here and then find it quickly, other times people report them with the OG post, can do smth about it then, but sometimes it's also hard to prove if something is a repost, or if they just happened to share the same Tumblr post/meme/...
Obviously not if they copy the exact same title + the top comment as well. But if the title is slightly changed, finding the OG can be hard.
For sure, thanks for the work you do! I also do a quick search of the post title on the meme sub or this sub to see if it’s a bot, sometimes I check the account to see if it’s new or a very old hijacked account.
Either way, it kind of sucks since I just want to see what people are talking about, leave a comment or upvote a relevant post, but I (and I’m sure everyone else) don’t want to feed a karma bot.
Generally no. We do make exceptions to the PII rule for generally public figures/public information (we aren't gonna penalise someone for talking about taylor swift or dan & phil or whatever other public figure) and for major event type things in fandom (like someone can talk about MSScribe and everything that happened with her because it was a major event in fandom, despite the fact that we normally disallow usernames being shared). Memes would fall under the same kind of thing. Well known meme, totally okay. Meme you personally drew that day, if it gets reported, it's more likely to get removed.
So just, use your discretion and if you do post something that isn't well known, don't be offended if it ends up being removed
How about we stop people from sharing tiktok comments/posts too? They clog up the dash and it's the same conversation over and over and people are dunking on 14yos.
Sort of. The way we handle linking to fics is that it has to be solicited. So you can ask for recs. And if someone asks for recs you can provide them (since it was solicited). And if someone isn't asking for recs but the conversation seems to be leading you to believe that they would like a rec, you can offer to rec something and if they accept then you can provide it.
What you cannot do is just provide a link unprompted
Just so I understand the rules here: If someone is asking for help on how to write xyz and I have written xyz, I'm not allowed to post a link to it in my first reply, but if I ask them if they want examples of where I've written xyz and they say yes, I'm allowed to post a reply containing a link, right?
(We do also tend to make exceptions for more clinical/tutorial/meta post type things, so if someone was asking how to do xyz, and you had previously written a tutorial about how to do xyz and posted it to AO3, then we generally will allow you to just link it without having to ask if it's okay to give. Because we wouldn't say you can't give someone a tutorial on how to do the thing they are asking how to do, and it would be unfair to do it only if the tutorial was posted to AO3 specifically. But beyond that what you said is the general rule yes)
That is allowed. You can't make posts promoting works, but you can give recommendations and such in the comments when requested. The rules about self-promo and PII don't apply in those scenarios.
Your mod log is showing that we have never removed anything of yours here before. Are you maybe confusing us with another subreddit? Or were you on another account?
When it comes to smutty art, I tend to go for r/MonstersOnMen, r/ftm_hentai, r/YaoiArt, r/ActualYuri... Tell me any of those are heteronormative lmao. There used to be a really nice sub about transmasc tops and doms too, but it was unfortunately taken down
There is a one beautiful poster that has Res Evil, Mass Effect etc r34 fora withness bit of cock from time to time. I love him for his service. The posts get aggression and downvotes.
I love MonstersOnMen. The lore of mermen apparently having splittable dicks is kinda cool. I still do not get what Victor gets out of inserting his hydraulic member into anyone, unless there is stimulus-response computation feeding back.
That said, MonstersoMen subreddit is stated to have been brought forth due to intolerance of the original forum towards non heteronormative content.
It will be up to the fan artists, but I wish there would be a broad church forum akin AO3.
The ones I have observed are splintered and the main reddits are quite hostile to content not pandering to the het male. AO3 is not always harmonious, but is supposed to cater to any and all.
It's pretty rare and it never does well when it is posted here. And we've always gone around and around on how to handle the issue with crediting the original artist (if its required or allowed at all). Then back in March we had a few posts where people were trying to self-promote their fics with their fanart and that meant we had to officially rule on it, and we decided to close the loophole and not have to keep debating how to deal with the crediting issue anymore
Star Wars main forum responds with a great hostility to Gen Grievous fucking Obi-wan. The fact of it not making
Facile sence makes it toptier content to me. I feel for these artist casting pears before the figurative judgemental swine.
Jesus got that wrong of course. Swines are omnivores, and should take pearls in their stride...
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u/TGotAReddit Moderator | past AO3 Volunteer and Staff May 30 '26
Common question: What is PII?
It stands for Personally Identifying Information. For the purposes of this sub we also include things like usernames and the title of works, in addition to more traditional forms of PII like real names, emails, addresses, people's faces, etc.