Stuckupinmymind - Dull Knife

About the AO3 "No Guest Comments for a while" warning

If you're not following any of AO3's social media accounts you might be in the dark as to what kind of "spam comments" have engendered this banner at the top of the site:

These spam comments have been posted about a great deal on the AO3 subreddit for the past couple of days. Initially they comprised a bunch of guest (logged out users) bot comments that insulted authors by suggesting they were using AI and not writing their own fics. Some examples, from the subreddit:

But it then escalated to outright graphic porn images and gifs being posted in comments, again by logged out 'Guest' accounts. Obviously, I'm not going to give examples of those, but between these two bot infestations, AO3 has clearly decided to act and has temporarily closed the ability to post comments for users who are not logged in with an AO3 account.

Unfortunately, this means that genuine readers who don't have an AO3 account won't be able to leave comments on fics that they enjoy.

If you are a genuine reader who doesn't yet have an AO3 account, I strongly suggest getting yourself on the waiting list for one. More and more AO3 authors are now locking their fics down to registered users only - either due to these bot comments or concerns about AI scraping their work - which means you're probably missing out on a lot of great stuff.

Hopefully guest commenting will be enabled again at some point soon, but I suggest not waiting until then. Get yourself on that list.

Wait times are going to be longer than usual at the moment, due to the current Wattpad purge [info on Fanlore | Wattpad subreddit thread], but if you're in line, then your invite will come through eventually.

Update: There's now a Megathread about this on the AO3 subreddit.

Writing Prompt #2938

"I'm sorry. I'm supposed to be strong." She buried her face in her hands, hoping to hide the tears on her face.

"You are strong. You're okay to keep going. Take all the time you need."

“One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.”

— Erich Fromm

If you’re a real human person still using the default tumblr avatar, consider changing it.

why should you change it?

When you guys pop up in our notifications, most seasoned tumblr users will suspect you’re a bot and block on sight.

why do we block immediately?

tumblr has a history of bots trying to infiltrate and establish a connection to a valid, existing blog in order to populate google searches. Simply liking or reblogging a post, not just adding a scam link to it, establishes this connection. Tumblr users don’t want this to happen, especially if it’s a scammy p*rn bot. So, we often block on sight.

So now I have to reblog stuff AND change my pfp?

Well, of course that’s up to you! I just want to explain why you may have been already blocked by an artist/blogger you may have discovered recently, and how you can avoid it in the future.

Reblogging does help creators more than likes because your reblogs will show up on the dash of those that may follow you. Plus, reblogging puts that post on your own blog, and in case the original gets deleted or edited by the OP, it’ll be on your blog like that–forever (or until you delete your blog). Nice.

Here are some free icons created by catalyststuff on freepik. Highly recommend their art for a simple replacement!

Captain America: Civil War

Me when I wake up and see my parents are still arguing:

Sherlock: Liam, you’re offered 500,000 dollars, but, if you accept it, the person you hate the most in the world gets 1,000,000 dollars. Would you take it? Liam: Of course! I mean, why wouldn’t I want 1,500,000 dollars? Sherlock: ... Liam, no.