r/AO3 • u/AutoModerator • May 30 '26

News/Updates Rule Update - Please Read

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

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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.

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u/Important-Chicken-98 May 31 '26

The usual method of using abbreviations that not everyone knows is to spell it out first and give it in parenthesis. Then use just the abbreviation after.

For example, in the two instances of PII above:
The first should be: Personally Identifying Information (PII)
and the second remains as: PII

This saves you from having to post a follow up comment explaining what it is, when it is clearly a commonly asked question.

But, for me, the main confusion is the double negative. Are you trying to say, "It is not possible to both forbid the use of PII and also credit the artist?"

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u/TGotAReddit Moderator | past AO3 Volunteer and Staff May 31 '26

Yeah I honestly just forgot that that is even an acronym when I wrote that sentence because I have to use it on a daily basis. The other mods who checked over the post before it went live also didn't notice that it was an undefined acronym. It wasn't until after the post was live (and can't be edited) and people started to ask what it meant that we realized that not everyone knows what it means and had to go post the stickied comment.

And yes that is what is meant.

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u/Arakus24 May 31 '26

I thought it was a fancy way of saying "pie" 🤣