Response from AO3 on Review Content
Jun. 20th, 2022 06:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yourlibrarian posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
marchmetamatterschallengeThis 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.
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.
