au whoreder

Ghost Story

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 Let’s say you’ve got a city where there’s tame white doves everywhere. They’re not pests, they’re regarded as sacred, holy protectors of the city, and the whole city cares for them and feeds them like they’re pets. They’re so tame because it’s a social taboo to hurt or scare one. Nice pretty doves :)

 Then someone points out that even if they’re not seen as pests, doesn’t having a completely unchecked feral pigeon population - that not only isn’t being culled, but actively fed and cared for - mean that there would be bird shit absolutely all over the place?

 A part of you wants to say no, because these are your nice, pretty doves. To explain that there’s a reason why they’re not shitting all over the place, maybe they’re super-intelligent and specifically bred and trained to not shit all over the place. The logistics of how, exactly, could anyone breed and train a flock of feral birds go unaddressed.

 An even worse solution would be to not have those birds, editing them out of the world. No, they spark joy, you can’t just toss them out!

 Now, consider: Yes, yes they would, but the city also has an extensive public sanitation service that’s occupied 90% of the time by cleaning bird shit off of everything. One of the most common last names in the area actually translates to “one who scrapes off dove shit”, and it’s a highly respected occupation. And thanks to the sheer necessity of constantly regularly cleaning everything, the city enjoys a much higher standard of cleanliness, and less public health issues caused by poor public sanitation.

The Augsburg concept has one big pigeon house every 500m in which wild pigeons are fed, protected from weather and have nesting opportunities. Cities doing that have WAY less uncontrolled populations (since they can take out eggs if they feel they need reduce the population), way less shit AND a healthy population since it’s easier for veterinarians to notice and get to sick animals.

So I’d say one can of course still keep your general idea……but there’s also those MASSIVE palace-like pidgeon houses and only the most worthy are allowed to enter and directly interact with the pigeons (feed them, heal them, clean their lodgings). One big entrance for the human servants (priests??) and millions of small holes for the pigeons.

meanwhile AO3: so everything is free in our house. read whatever you want offline. also no ads. no capitalism. no censorship. be as wild as you want with your fics. also we have tagging systems so you can search or avoid any specific tags, pairings, relationships or characters. whatever you want.

if you report fanfiction to police and tell them they should “investigate this because fictional children are being harmed in these fanfiction and I don’t like it!!!!!”, you will get either of these outcomes:

the police will laugh at your face

they will investigate fanfiction, and while they waste their time investigating fanfiction and victimless “crimes”, real children are being hurt elsewhere, and you are taking the police’s time and resources away from these real children. so instead of doing something to actually help save real children, police are too busy trying to protect fictional ones that exist only in fantasies

also ao3 abides by american laws, so actually everything that is posted on the site is legal in america. and no, it’s not “child abuse” or “rape” or “csem” if the “victims” are fictional characters who were harmed in a fictional world (I believe that’s why it’s legal and allowed).

you don’t have to like it. you can find it extremely disgusting. but whether or not you like it, your personal discomfort is not law. for the record, anything that involves (fictional) children in sexual situations makes me super uncomfortable. so I just… don’t seek out fics that I know will make me uncomfortable. it is in fact that easy.

if you are allergic to peanut butter and you swallow a spoonful of peanut butter, knowing damn well that you are allergic, then the one who’s to blame is you. peanut butter alone will not and cannot hurt you unless you shove it in your mouth.

AO3 is currently experiencing slowness and errors. We are aware and are actively investigating.

Please refer to our status page for more information.

Thank you for your patience!

Left is MY FIC, right is the ACTUAL BOOK QUOTE IT WAS INSPIRED BY

(Mask context: masquerade ball / cinderella au)

It has been doing numbers EVERYWHERE and I only found out from this lovely person who commented on Ao3:

See that bit at the bottom? Don't do that. Insert ParamedicGuy.gif going "Don't."

Other malicious spam comments I've gotten seemed designed to make an author question their writing, or outright encourage them to delete their stories from AO3. This one is different, in that it tries to get you to destroy the work on your own computer.

If you ran that command, it basically locates your Documents folder, then deletes everything in it, including all subfolders. It also does it without any prompt, so you have no chance to second guess your actions.

This is just fucking trolling.

Coincidentally, we just did training on a cyberattack similar to this, called a ClickFix attack. You can read about how that works here.

As a general rule, if ANYONE or ANY WEBSITE tells you unsolicited* to do anything in Powershell, CMD RUN, command prompt, shell command, or something similar, DON'T.

*There are legit reasons for running commands in PowerShell or the command prompt, but in those cases you are likely seeking out a solution to a problem you are already experiencing. Don't just run random commands on your computer as recommended by some unlogged-in guest on a fan fiction site.

Always think and consider before taking action, and get a second opinion from a trusted source. When I got this comment I was pretty sure what the command would do, and it took me about three seconds of googling to confirm it.

AO3 WILL NEVER EVER CONTACT YOU VIA A COMMENT UNDER YOUR WORK. EVER.

AO3’s banning AI generated works would mean their volunteers would have to read each of those reported fics and determine based on vibes if they were AI or not.

Do you think AO3 has enough resources and volunteers to do that? Do you genuinely believe genuine writers won’t get falsely reported and have their hard works wrongly marked as AI and taken down?

allthingsao3 is a blog meant to let people ask questions about fanfic/ao3, promote their works, share writing tips, participate in polls, engage with the ao3 community, and more.