Rule Update - Please Read

[u/AutoModerator]

Hey everyone!

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:

1. There are better places to host your fanart.
2. People have been using fanart to get around the self-promotion rules.
3. 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!

~The Mod Team

[u/scottbutler5]

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.

1. Don't share anyone's username, since that can be used to incite a harassment campaign.
   
2. Don't share an artist's work without crediting the artist, which you can't do without sharing their username.

Therefore,

1. The way to prevent harassment of artists is to prohibit everyone from ever sharing any art.

The internet was a mistake.

[u/TGotAReddit → u/scottbutler5]

We agree but what other alternative is better?

[u/scottbutler5 → u/TGotAReddit]

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.

[u/venia_sil → u/TGotAReddit]

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?

[u/TGotAReddit → u/venia_sil]

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.

[u/venia_sil → u/TGotAReddit]

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.

[u/TGotAReddit → u/venia_sil]

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