echoekhi

[echoekhi]

I just want to start this off with I'm really embarrassed to ask this and more embarrassed it took me so long to realize.

I've made and posted some podfics in the past and I didn't realize you needed to ask permission. The thought did cross my mind at first but after checking the comments of a fic my, at the time favorite, podficer had covered and not seeing anything, I dismissed the idea. Moving forward I'm always going to ask permission if I want to podfic something but my problem lies with the ones I've already done. How should I move forward to fix this?

I really admire what you're doing and you seem to know a lot about this subject so I wanted to ask you for advice as I don't have anyone else I can ask. I didn't mean any harm by it but I can understand I might have caused some so I'd really appreciate any input.

Don’t worry, everybody makes mistakes. Our policy is we give a 1 week grace-period to human podfic accounts for them to correct their mistakes before we reach out to authors and instruct them to send DMCA notices.

I recommend that you private the podfic and reach out to the author and ask for permission. If they are OK with it, you can put your podfic back up. If you are monetising your channel, you would need to declare that with the author. We advise putting a link to the permission statement in the podfic’s description, so you can prove that you sourced the fic legally and ethically.

We have just released a set of guidelines and a grading scale for podfic creators, you can check them out here: https://checker.copyknight.org/

Quite a few channels we’ve come across has successfully transitioned from copyright infringing to law-abiding creators, it’s a straight-forward process and you have nothing to worry about as long as you follow the guidelines.

[echoekhi]

FictionDomainWhatifs, suspected owner of 23 different channels with a combined 2469 uploaded videos we've scanned. We've been doing our best to scan these channels, but unfortunately because Naruto is a comparatively old fandom and the majority of fanfics are on FFN instead of AO3, we have very low match rates for them compared to other fandoms like BNHA because we don't have access to FFN fic databases to match against.

We're still actively tracking their channels, but if they steal from FFN fics and that fic hasn't been cross-posted to AO3, there's not much we can do about it.

If you're an author, here's what you can do to help us:

Cross-post your old fics to AO3;

Opt-in to automatic notifications so we can notify you about these cases faster;

Spread the word with your fellow authors and get them to do the same.

We're always looking for additional volunteers to help us with the backlog, which now stands at 416 videos pending manual confirmation.

Context: https://www.tumblr.com/echoekhi/735065816966545408

Tracking spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1to9To9uPPFGlyiGCVRXXUt3UH9h7gOJoqcyThGPTBwg

I got recommended a video today from a youtuber who is just stealing others fanfics and reading them off for a video. I don't even think a human voiced it once I heard the voice over pronounce hokage as "ho-cage" in a Naruto video. The title and author of the fic is never mentioned nor credited anywhere and the video titles is just "What if __?" and presents the stories as just "what if"-type stuff instead of saying it's fanfic. I wish something could be done but I don't know what.

The youtube channel's name is Fiction Domain (has a profile pic of some guy from Demon Slayer, I think). Maybe someone out there knows how to deal with this crap.

--

#copy-knight

[echoekhi]

Project Copy-Knight

Hi tumblr,

I woke up this morning to a new AO3 comment on my most liked Naruto fic, but this comment was unlike any other I ever got before. It will interest fanfic writers around, especially anime fanfic, so allow me to share it:

Hello, Unfortunately, your work may have been stolen by content farms to create YouTube videos here: (link removed by dianamoth) If you have granted permission for this uploader, you can safely ignore this comment. If not, you should report these videos here: DMCA Complaint Form. You should re-confirm the video contents before you file the report. Note that only the original creator for this work can submit a complaint. When filing the complaint, do not select the "Scheduled: Send a 7-day notice" option, or they won't get a copyright strike from you. We recommend that you do not negotiate with the channel before-hand. Remember to include a link to your work in the 'Title' section of the complaint form. Channels like this have stolen many more works from other writers as well, so your efforts in reporting this channel will also help other writers. See full list of stolen works here: Google sheets Your authorship was identified a while ago by an automated detector under Project Copy-Knight, but for anti-spam reasons we could not inform you until we have manually confirmed each case. If you would like us to notify you as soon as possible, please include this text in your profile page to grant us permission. To prevent a build-up of our notification comments on inactive accounts, we will only send you a maximum of 3 messages before you grant us permission. This is message 1 out of 3. This message was sent automatically, but your case was manually confirmed, and replies to this comment are monitored. If you need additional guidance on how to take the video down, just reply to this comment. To learn more about what we do, please read this article or join our Discord server. From Project Copy-Knight, EsquireBot

I did not give consent for my fic to be used on youtube, ofc.

I was skeptical at first (for context, I write OC Naruto fanfics, who the hell would be interested in that on youtube, I thought?), but this is a well-crafted message with all the ways to verify this claim, so verified it I did!

And hello and behold, this is all true! I'm Amazed. This Project Copy-Knight is quite impressive, it seems well organized and everything, so I thought I would share the word about their existence so that people are aware that this is a problem that exists, that someone is working on it, that it's not spam, and how you can participate, etc... I recommend checking the article they mentioned and the Discord server if you have time to help.

Also, for those who might be in the same case as I and want to report a youtube video (because obviously I'm going to, can you believe this? Just read further to see what a mess it is), let it be known that the link above only works if you have a channel. If not, you have to send your complaint to [email protected]

Now, if you're interested in seeing what a MessTM this is, continue reading about this video that stole my work.

Guys, this is the presentation of the video:

The title (and the pictures) has absolutely NO link whatsoever to the plot of my fic, to be clear.

The pictures inside of the slideshow are about DragonBall Z! XD

But yes, it is indeed a generated "podfic" of my OC fic (but only part of it? it cuts in the middle of a scene at around half of the story)!

When you click on the description of the video, there is a link that actually contains a list of links on fanfiction.net. So they actually didn't steal it from AO3 but ff.net. Writers from ff.net, be aware!

The video has 1,4k views and 37 likes in 2 months. What the heck.

But the comments guys!

I find this frankly hilarious. I mean, there is so much confusion here. Obviously the basic Naruto fans that would hate on (female) OCs are expected, but someone listened to it long enough to realize it was not the complete story. Respect to them.

Can you believe that with such a mess this channel has 5,37k subscribers? Please people, have some self-respect.

#copy-knight

[echoekhi]

PSA! Leech Alert!

There is a bottom feeder amongst us, fanfic writers and readers, this creature here is stealing work from other authors and placing it behind a paywall on patreon currently with 210 subs at $10 dollars a pop. Needless to say I'm more than a little ticked to discover my own fic Secrets of the Hidden Leaf was added yesterday. I've filed a DMCA claim, and reported their page. Please take a look to see if your work, or someone else you know's work is up there and report them so this leech can be shut down.

FYI: this was brought to my attention by Project Copy-Knight. They have an option for authors to opt in for automatic alerts when someone is stealing your work. This is their discord if you have questions. Opt-in option to receive automatic alerts when someone is leeching off of you. Spreadsheet of stolen works.

#copy-knight

[echoekhi]

FILED THREE DMCA TAKEDOWNS YESTERDAY AND ALL THREE OF THEM WERE ACCEPTED TODAY LETS FUCKING GOOOOOO THANK YOU PROJECT COPY-KNIGHT!!!!

#copy-knight

[echoekhi]

"#sadly this is why I lock the fics to users only"

Setting your works to archive-users only does not prevent this sort of theft. We've detected quite a few videos stealing from works that are archive-locked.

I’m Declaring War Against “What If” Videos: Project Copy-Knight

What Are “What If” Videos?

These videos follow a common recipe: A narrator, given a fandom (usually anime ones like My Hero Academia and Naruto), explores an alternative timeline where something is different. Maybe the main character has extra powers, maybe a key plot point goes differently. They then go on and make up a whole new story, detailing the conflicts and romance between characters, much like an ordinary fanfic.

Except, they are fanfics. Actual fanfics, pulled off AO3, FFN and Wattpad, given a different title, with random thumbnail and background images added to them, narrated by computer text-to-speech synthesizers.

They are very easy to make: pick a fanfic, copy all the text into a text-to-speech generator, mix the resulting audio file with some generic art from the fandom as the background, give it a snappy title like “What if Deku had the Power of Ten Rings”, photoshop an attention-grabbing thumbnail, dump it onto YouTube and get thousands of views.

In fact, the process is so straightforward and requires so little effort, it’s pretty clear some of these channels have automated pipelines to pump these out en-masse. They don’t bother with asking the fic authors for permission. Sometimes they don’t even bother with putting the fic’s link in the description or crediting the author. These content-farms then monetise these videos, so they get a cut from YouTube’s ads.

In short, an industry has emerged from the systematic copyright theft of fanfiction, for profit.

Project Copy-Knight

Since the adversaries almost certainly have automated systems set up for this, the only realistic countermeasure is with another automated system. Identifying fanfics manually by listening to the videos and searching them up with tags is just too slow and impractical.

And so, I came up with a simple automated pipeline to identify the original authors of “What If” videos.

It would go download these videos, run speech recognition on it, search the text through a database full of AO3 fics, and identify which work it came from. After manual confirmation, the original authors will be notified that their works have been subject to copyright theft, and instructions provided on how to DMCA-strike the channel out of existence.

I built a prototype over the weekend, and it works surprisingly well:

On a randomly-selected YouTube channel (in this case Infinite Paradox Fanfic), the toolchain was able to identify the origin of half of the content. The raw output, after manual verification, turned out to be extremely accurate. The time taken to identify the source of a video was about 5 minutes, most of those were spent running Whisper, and the actual full-text-search query and Levenshtein analysis was less than 5 seconds.

The other videos probably came from fanfiction websites other than AO3, like fanfiction.net or Wattpad. As I do not have access to archives of those websites, I cannot identify the other ones, but they are almost certainly not original.

Armed with this fantastic proof-of-concept, I’m officially declaring war against “What If” videos. The mission statement of Project Copy-Knight will be the elimination of “What If” videos based on the theft of AO3 content on YouTube.

I Need Your Help

I am acutely aware that I cannot accomplish this on my own. There are many moving parts in this system that simply cannot be completely automated – like the selection of YouTube channels to feed into the toolchain, the manual verification step to prevent false-positives being sent to authors, the reaching-out to authors who have comments disabled, etc, etc.

So, if you are interested in helping to defend fanworks, or just want to have a chat or ask about the technical details of the toolchain, please consider joining my Discord server. I could really use your help.

------

See full blog article and acknowledgements here: https://echoekhi.com/2023/11/25/project-copy-knight/

[echoekhi]

Hiya, I received a notif from Project Copy-Knight that one of my fics had been stolen.

Thank you, first of all, for putting in the work to get it up and running and for letting me know! I'm not sure about filing a DMCA complaint, though, because it requires me to give a bunch of personal info that I'm not comfortable with giving (e.g. phone number, signature, etc). Do you have any advice on that, or is it just something to figure out on our own if we're comfortable with?

Hi, unfortunately this is a common problem for a lot of the authors we have contacted. We are looking into ways around this, including setting up a DMCA agent to act on the authors' behalf while keeping their anonymity, collaborating with either companies or NGOs to offer this service, but unfortunately these things take time and we currently don't have this set up yet.

At the moment, we recommend that 1) you talk to your lawyer about this; 2) if you don't have a lawyer, you can try contacting OTW's Legal committee to see if they can help; or 3) wait around 2 weeks, at which point we should be able to start offering this at a small scale in a test-run.

#copy-knight

[echoekhi]

Don't worry, copyright is confusing, a lot of the authors we contacted were similarly confused too.

Fanfiction is transformatively derivative from the original books or shows, which falls under the fair use clause and therefore does not infringe on the original copyright. At the same time, the fic's author holds copyright over their fanworks, so fanworks are actually copyrighted.

We've had many authors successfully submit DMCA notices and had the videos taken down. I don't think we've had a single report of failure so far.

I’m Declaring War Against “What If” Videos: Project Copy-Knight

What Are “What If” Videos?

These videos follow a common recipe: A narrator, given a fandom (usually anime ones like My Hero Academia and Naruto), explores an alternative timeline where something is different. Maybe the main character has extra powers, maybe a key plot point goes differently. They then go on and make up a whole new story, detailing the conflicts and romance between characters, much like an ordinary fanfic.

Except, they are fanfics. Actual fanfics, pulled off AO3, FFN and Wattpad, given a different title, with random thumbnail and background images added to them, narrated by computer text-to-speech synthesizers.

They are very easy to make: pick a fanfic, copy all the text into a text-to-speech generator, mix the resulting audio file with some generic art from the fandom as the background, give it a snappy title like “What if Deku had the Power of Ten Rings”, photoshop an attention-grabbing thumbnail, dump it onto YouTube and get thousands of views.

In fact, the process is so straightforward and requires so little effort, it’s pretty clear some of these channels have automated pipelines to pump these out en-masse. They don’t bother with asking the fic authors for permission. Sometimes they don’t even bother with putting the fic’s link in the description or crediting the author. These content-farms then monetise these videos, so they get a cut from YouTube’s ads.

In short, an industry has emerged from the systematic copyright theft of fanfiction, for profit.

Project Copy-Knight

Since the adversaries almost certainly have automated systems set up for this, the only realistic countermeasure is with another automated system. Identifying fanfics manually by listening to the videos and searching them up with tags is just too slow and impractical.

And so, I came up with a simple automated pipeline to identify the original authors of “What If” videos.

It would go download these videos, run speech recognition on it, search the text through a database full of AO3 fics, and identify which work it came from. After manual confirmation, the original authors will be notified that their works have been subject to copyright theft, and instructions provided on how to DMCA-strike the channel out of existence.

I built a prototype over the weekend, and it works surprisingly well:

On a randomly-selected YouTube channel (in this case Infinite Paradox Fanfic), the toolchain was able to identify the origin of half of the content. The raw output, after manual verification, turned out to be extremely accurate. The time taken to identify the source of a video was about 5 minutes, most of those were spent running Whisper, and the actual full-text-search query and Levenshtein analysis was less than 5 seconds.

The other videos probably came from fanfiction websites other than AO3, like fanfiction.net or Wattpad. As I do not have access to archives of those websites, I cannot identify the other ones, but they are almost certainly not original.

Armed with this fantastic proof-of-concept, I’m officially declaring war against “What If” videos. The mission statement of Project Copy-Knight will be the elimination of “What If” videos based on the theft of AO3 content on YouTube.

I Need Your Help

I am acutely aware that I cannot accomplish this on my own. There are many moving parts in this system that simply cannot be completely automated – like the selection of YouTube channels to feed into the toolchain, the manual verification step to prevent false-positives being sent to authors, the reaching-out to authors who have comments disabled, etc, etc.

So, if you are interested in helping to defend fanworks, or just want to have a chat or ask about the technical details of the toolchain, please consider joining my Discord server. I could really use your help.

------

See full blog article and acknowledgements here: https://echoekhi.com/2023/11/25/project-copy-knight/

[echoekhi]

AO3 switched to a new and more secure PDF generator (wkhtmltopdf to Calibre). Source. This had the effect of increasing the size of the PDF file, but you're using PDF anyways, PDF was never designed to be space efficient, it's designed to display the same way across many devices. The 'P' in PDF stands for portable between devices, not portable as in small, so if you want space efficiency, use EPub.

The underscores in the file names are a different story - it's because Kindle doesn't like spaces mixed with encoded spaces "(%20)" in the document manifest URL list in EPub files, so they've decided to replace all spaces with underscores in the file name. Source.

Anyone else get weird formatting for PDF downloads on AO3 recently? Been asking around with some friends but none have seen anything about it, but did notice how downloads have "_" between the words now, and how everything seems more spaced out?

--

I don't usually download pdfs, but when I have, I think the formatting has often been slightly weird. Not this bad though.

[echoekhi]

I’m Declaring War Against “What If” Videos: Project Copy-Knight

What Are “What If” Videos?

These videos follow a common recipe: A narrator, given a fandom (usually anime ones like My Hero Academia and Naruto), explores an alternative timeline where something is different. Maybe the main character has extra powers, maybe a key plot point goes differently. They then go on and make up a whole new story, detailing the conflicts and romance between characters, much like an ordinary fanfic.

Except, they are fanfics. Actual fanfics, pulled off AO3, FFN and Wattpad, given a different title, with random thumbnail and background images added to them, narrated by computer text-to-speech synthesizers.

They are very easy to make: pick a fanfic, copy all the text into a text-to-speech generator, mix the resulting audio file with some generic art from the fandom as the background, give it a snappy title like “What if Deku had the Power of Ten Rings”, photoshop an attention-grabbing thumbnail, dump it onto YouTube and get thousands of views.

In fact, the process is so straightforward and requires so little effort, it’s pretty clear some of these channels have automated pipelines to pump these out en-masse. They don’t bother with asking the fic authors for permission. Sometimes they don’t even bother with putting the fic’s link in the description or crediting the author. These content-farms then monetise these videos, so they get a cut from YouTube’s ads.

In short, an industry has emerged from the systematic copyright theft of fanfiction, for profit.

Project Copy-Knight

Since the adversaries almost certainly have automated systems set up for this, the only realistic countermeasure is with another automated system. Identifying fanfics manually by listening to the videos and searching them up with tags is just too slow and impractical.

And so, I came up with a simple automated pipeline to identify the original authors of “What If” videos.

It would go download these videos, run speech recognition on it, search the text through a database full of AO3 fics, and identify which work it came from. After manual confirmation, the original authors will be notified that their works have been subject to copyright theft, and instructions provided on how to DMCA-strike the channel out of existence.

I built a prototype over the weekend, and it works surprisingly well:

On a randomly-selected YouTube channel (in this case Infinite Paradox Fanfic), the toolchain was able to identify the origin of half of the content. The raw output, after manual verification, turned out to be extremely accurate. The time taken to identify the source of a video was about 5 minutes, most of those were spent running Whisper, and the actual full-text-search query and Levenshtein analysis was less than 5 seconds.

The other videos probably came from fanfiction websites other than AO3, like fanfiction.net or Wattpad. As I do not have access to archives of those websites, I cannot identify the other ones, but they are almost certainly not original.

Armed with this fantastic proof-of-concept, I’m officially declaring war against “What If” videos. The mission statement of Project Copy-Knight will be the elimination of “What If” videos based on the theft of AO3 content on YouTube.

I Need Your Help

I am acutely aware that I cannot accomplish this on my own. There are many moving parts in this system that simply cannot be completely automated – like the selection of YouTube channels to feed into the toolchain, the manual verification step to prevent false-positives being sent to authors, the reaching-out to authors who have comments disabled, etc, etc.

So, if you are interested in helping to defend fanworks, or just want to have a chat or ask about the technical details of the toolchain, please consider joining my Discord server. I could really use your help.

------

See full blog article and acknowledgements here: https://echoekhi.com/2023/11/25/project-copy-knight/

#ao3 #fanfic #copyknight #theft #copyright

[echoekhi]

Hey I'm the person who asked for the source. I'm well aware of the anti-asian patterns they've displayed in their candidate analysis, and I rebloged fandomantiracism's call-out post against that. However beyond that I don't know of any other examples.

My point is saying someone was racist is a pretty serious accusation, and it would be nice if you could back that up with some sources.

I saw someone ask "What source there is for the EOTWR team being racist" I suck ass at finding shit, but I think there were several anons on here who specifically highlighted it on here, and with links. Included were stuff like specifically anti-asian racism. Admitting to the EOTWR mainly being made to protect one of the key members to the group. And anti-semitic remarks?-That one I just glanced over, so I'm not sure how hard those accusations and the proof was.

--

We don't actually know who ran the campaign because they remained anonymous. Certainly, some people whom the campaign referenced or who seem to be big supporters suck, but if you want to be precise, the only stuff you can reliably attribute to EOTWR itself are things its own tumblr posted.

[echoekhi]

I'm sorry but where's the source proving EOTWR organisers are racist?

I only now just really realized how weird and fucked up the End Racism on the OTW movement is. Listen, like we already know that the people who created this are really fucked up and actual racists, who're trying to hide each others asses. But what about the people who blindly follow the movement without even bother to know what the movement even stands for and how it started`? I know it's often a joke that "We called our movement "The good guys" so if you're not on our side you're a default bad person" but that's kinda what this is, isn't it? You are supporting racists because they called themselves the "anti-racists", and by doing so, even if it's done with actual anti-racist intentions, you are literally walking and supporting the actual racists. Just because the name is basically "anti-racists" people don't even spend two minutes to actually research the origin of the movement, and they just blindly become another acolyte to the actual racists. And the actual racists? Do they care? Probably not, they're just excited that so few people are keying into how deplorable they actually are, and if anyone calls them out. They can just tell their followers "See they are the objective bad guys for criticising us, because we're named the good guys" without ever having to put any effort into explaining why, because the blind followers just take their words as gold.

--

[echoekhi]

14 out of my 24 contributions to the AO3 codebase were improvements to the comment feature. I'm not having them deleted that easily.

Proposal for the crowd: have AO3 be JUST an archival site and nothing more. No public bookmarks, no comments. We can keep tags and filtering options and maybe kudos, but forcing people to take all wank offsite feels like it would allow authors to better control to what degree they wish to engage in it, and also make readers take more ownership of their choices and actions. And if it drives away the people using AO3 like social media… sounds like a win to me! Thoughts?

--

I mean, you can do whatever thought experiment you want, but AO3 was designed to be like a better version of what its creators already used (LJ and old archives like the Smallville Slash one with a dash of Delicious). It was never going to go zero interaction.

[echoekhi]

I'd argue that being born in a deep-red state where democrats and independents have absolute no chance of winning and the only way a politician can ever hope to win is by running as a moderate Republican is not any different.

"oh she could have stayed independent" yeah and Americans can just emigrate to Canada. These decisions come with personal and financial sacrifices. Not everyone can afford to make those sacrifices.

The Republican party has 492 currently proposed anti-trans laws in addition to the laws that have passed and at CPAC stated they wanted to "exterminate" trans people. Yes, being a Republican automatically disqualifies you from ever being supported by myself and any decent, rational person. If you proudly participate in the genocide of a minority, you are never getting my support, whether it's a vote in an AO3 election, a bake sale or a date. If you are affiliated with a group that wants to kill my brother and my girlfriend, then I see no reason why I should go, "oh no I'm sure this isn't a red flag! I'm sure this person is one of the good fascists! I won't take their being a fascist into consideration when voting" because hot take: there is no such thing as a good fascist.

An OTW candidate could have given only answers that purely aligned with my beliefs 100% and I would still not vote for them upon learning they were a Republican. They want to exterminate people I love. I can't overlook that. And it's absurd to ask that people do so and act as if being a fascist is not a red flag or dealbreaker in and of itself.

--

[echoekhi]

You know what, since all other means of trying to convince people of the nuance in this situation failed, let me try this:

Try mentally replacing the word "Republican" with "American" in that paragraph, and read it again slowly.

Oh, and don't go "BUT NOT ALL AMERICANS ARE BAD" no shit sherlock that's the point I've been trying to make

The Republican party has 492 currently proposed anti-trans laws in addition to the laws that have passed and at CPAC stated they wanted to "exterminate" trans people. Yes, being a Republican automatically disqualifies you from ever being supported by myself and any decent, rational person. If you proudly participate in the genocide of a minority, you are never getting my support, whether it's a vote in an AO3 election, a bake sale or a date. If you are affiliated with a group that wants to kill my brother and my girlfriend, then I see no reason why I should go, "oh no I'm sure this isn't a red flag! I'm sure this person is one of the good fascists! I won't take their being a fascist into consideration when voting" because hot take: there is no such thing as a good fascist.

An OTW candidate could have given only answers that purely aligned with my beliefs 100% and I would still not vote for them upon learning they were a Republican. They want to exterminate people I love. I can't overlook that. And it's absurd to ask that people do so and act as if being a fascist is not a red flag or dealbreaker in and of itself.

--

[echoekhi]

The fact that she puts on a show about being “moderate” just makes me hate and distrust her more. She’s never going to cross all the way over, so what’s the point? I know it’s important to cooperate with people at whatever middle ground you can find, but it feels degrading to have to reach this far.

--

The thing I think a lot of the bitching in my replies is missing is that the bad part here isn't opposing her bid for the Board. That's entirely justified.

The bad part is:

Thinking this must be a conspiracy that involves other Republicans

Thinking it's wrong for OTW to allow her to run

Thinking it's impossible that she's also being harassed in addition to being rightly grilled about how her political stances do or don't line up with OTW's

Thinking that she has no place in general OTW work that's not the Board

Thinking that Republicans or conservatives or [insert group here] don't also like fanfic and don't also care about archiving it

We don't have to cooperate by actually putting a Republican on the Board. Fuck that. Nobody thought she was a good candidate.

What we do need to do is stop being mega assholes in a way that will scare people away from even running. This reaction is not going to put off only conservative candidates. "You shouldn't vote for her because she's a Republican. [link to evidence]" is totally fine, but the reactions have gone far beyond that.

What we do need to do is welcome people who are willing to show up and do the low level grunt work. We don't need to like someone's politics to let them do all the boring tag wrangling or the grueling hours of translation.

There are large parts of OTW that are less like public office and more like organizing people to pick up trash around the neighborhood. If you're here to pick up trash with me, I don't care if you have stupid views as long as you do the work and treat the other volunteers well.

Yes, absolutely, vote to keep conservatives out of leadership positions! But the reactions this election cycle haven't only been that: they've been naive incredulity that any conservative could possibly share any common goals or be useful in any context to any fandom endeavor.

These are dangerous and stupid attitudes.

[echoekhi]

There has been proposals from Qiao C and Zixin Z, two of the Board candidates this year, to turn blocked/muted users' bookmarks into private bookmarks. I personally think it's a bad idea. This wank is not over, even within AO3.

Saw a post about how readers should keep their fic ratings to themselves and not put them on public bookmarks because there’s no need to when authors can see them. And maybe I’m being mean but authors should just not look at bookmarks of their fics if they aren’t ready to take any sort of criticism. If you want to only see praises of your work then just read your comments? People bookmark fics for a variety of reasons and it’s not always because it’s their favorite fic.

I get the “fanfic is free and readers act entitled (sometimes)” thing but bookmarks aren’t an extension of the comments. Am I missing something? Is this actually fandom etiquette I didn’t know about?

--

No, it's not general fandom etiquette. It's a result of bookmarking culture having been gutted by Delicious being bought and ruined.

AO3 is quite clear that bookmarks are for the bookmarker. Barring shit like doxxing, you can put what you want.

Certainly, it's possible to make a bookmark that isn't technically harassment but that I think crosses a line... But it's going to take more than a "1/5 DNF Bad grammar" to do that.

We've had multiple wanks on here about authors' "right" to control bookmarks. Those people remain wrong. Negative bookmarks remain fine.