marchmetamatterschallenge | Response from AO3 on Review Content

This past week I got a notice from AO3's Policy & Abuse Committee that four of my posts had been flagged for not conforming to the guidelines for non-fiction content.

I responded with what I took to be the relevant portions of their TOS FAQ which addressed ephemerality and the fact that ""We will, in general, defer to the creator's characterization of a work as fannish nonfiction as long as it has a reasonably perceptible fannish connection, either to a specific source or to fandom in general, and takes the form of an independent, nonephemeral commentary."

It seemed clear to me that the FAQ examples of ephemerality were rather different than the sections of my works. What I noticed though is that each of the flagged works were compilations of different reviews and responses to things from books to movies to TV series. Many of these were in fact brief and more response-like rather than at all analytical. I proposed that the format was more of an issue than the content since quite a few sections went past brief reviews into analysis and offered to fix that.

However the response was that "We do not consider responses to movies or episode reactions to be non-ephemeral fanworks, regardless of how analytical they are. Changing the format in which you present these works will not change that they are not permitted under the Terms of Service."

This seems rather an odd response since one of the canonical tags on the site is "episode reviews" so apparently the distinction is between what constitutes a "review" versus a "response".

I thought I'd share this issue as I know that quite a few other people doing the challenge, either during March or continuing the archiving work during the year, might run into a similar problem. So just a few more observations:

a) It's probably a bad idea to do a single work with a lot of separate chapters covering different fandoms. It's more likely to get flagged by people seeing it come across their feeds and thinking it's mistagged for that fandom. Although I titled each of my chapters with the canon in question for easy retrieval, not everyone might notice this.

It would be better therefore to do a series with a different work for different fandoms if one wanted to keep all reviews together. This will also be better in terms of tagging since each can be tagged individually and the series will not run into tag limitations.

b) Brief separate works may also get flagged so you should probably ensure that each separate work is fairly substantial.

c) Once a work is deemed a violation it is locked from public view and, what is key to me, is that the download button vanishes. So while you may be able to see and edit the work you will not be able to save it in the varied formats you normally could. (You can still do a right click "save as" for an HTML file though). This means you may lose a considerable amount of work if you wanted a PDF or EPUB backup.

So if you're in doubt about any particular works, best to download copies and save those in case they're ever flagged in the future.

I'll be glad to answer anything I can about the emails but there's not much else to them.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

alexseanchai

…the way that is phrased suggests one cannot do meta about a single movie. because what is meta if not analytical responses? which means there are quite a few fandoms one cannot do meta about at all, or not without doing a multifandom meta, because the canon is one (1) movie.

Edited Date: 2022-06-21 01:48 am (UTC)

yourlibrarian

It may have been me being confusing, but it wasn't the AO3 team who said that about multifandom content. That was my own interpretation about why those specific posts got reported. Unfortunately as they are now blocked I can't point to them as an example. But those four were the only posts I've made (of hundreds) that included (a) brief commentary and (b) were multichaptered (20+ chapters) works with a different canon being discussed in each chapter.

So it wouldn't be the multifandom aspect of a post, I think it's a long, chaptered work with just brief paragraphs in each chapter that will get the wrong kind of attention.

elf

If this review of Civil War would not be welcome at AO3, there is something very wrong with its policies.

(Oh, but that's titled "review" and not "response.") (WTF is a review if not a response?)

...It is very much time for that "non-ephemeral" term to get a serious overhaul and definition.

I suspect part of the reason for this, is the rise of non-fanworks on AO3. There are endless numbers of young fans who post fic-finder requests and RP-partner searches, tag them extensively for their fandom, characters, and tropes, and either delete or orphan the work when they find what they're looking for. So the abuse team is getting hammered with "Not Actually A Fanwork" complaints, and they may not be putting any thought toward consistency for the edge cases.

Edited (fix typo) Date: 2022-06-21 05:08 am (UTC)

That, to me, is the critical problem. A review, is of course, a response, but chances are it's actually less transformative because it's going to recap a bunch of things that happened in canon. By contrast, a "response" might take it as understood that the reader knows what happened in the movie or episode (or TV season or music album, etc.) so instead it's going to spend time talking about the relevance of the impact of the "what."

Yeah, I've certainly seen plenty of stuff that was not a fanwork -- fic searches, beta requests, place holders, plot bunnies up for adoption, etc. But it's hard to see how these particular works could be confused with that.

But the definition of "ephemeral" in the ToS FAQ is: ""Ephemeral content could include, for example, a single short sentence, a single unedited image or .gif with or without a short caption, a short unedited video clip, or a short unedited sound clip. Ephemeral content is generally meant to be read at a particular time: for example, a message about a particular challenge or a reaction meant to be read while or just after a particular episode airs.""

If one goes by those examples, then these four works are definitely not edge cases. So despite what they said about the format, I do think that it makes a difference.

osteophage

Oh wow. I didn't realize anyone was actually motivated to report that kind of thing. That's a perplexing response, too, considering what you mentioned about Episode Reviews being an official tag. I wonder if mods and tag wranglers aren't necessarily all on the same page about this kind of thing, given how AO3 was intended more for fiction than nonfiction.

This is also giving me pause about how to use my own account... I had been thinking of archiving some of my posts about websites/web projects, like Buzzly, Tumblr, and Fanexus, but now I'm wondering how "fannish" they need to be to count.

Edited Date: 2022-06-21 04:19 am (UTC)

It's likely to be unpredictable since the Policy & Abuse team doesn't spend time looking for content violations, they just act on what's reported. And that's why I'm assuming the format I chose was behind the report.

For example, a lot of people dislike it when writers create long, multichaptered works for their drabbles. These are completely fine under the ToS, but a lot of readers hate the format because they can't easily find the drabbles that pertain to their fandom and those entries come across as big blocks of tags when they're scrolling. So nothing would happen if those were reported, there's no violation.

But if a meta work doing something similar were to be reported, then it might be more likely to be deleted if the PAC team deems it to be either insufficiently fannish or too ephemeral. Of course, that decision is difficult to understand too but given that many sections of these 4 works in question could be interpreted as responses and not reviews, I can see how it was at risk.