it's my bridge now, goatman

@AO3_Status

We're experiencing an influx of spam comments—that is, comments advertising porn or consisting only of a random series of letters. If you notice comments like this on your works, please help us train our spam catcher by pressing the "Spam" button instead of "Delete."

-

There's also a follow up tweet explaining how to turn off comments on your fic if you're receiving a lot of spam.

Hello! I have my Master’s Degree in Social Work, was a licensed clinical social worker, and provided therapy for years both through the Veteran’s Administration and the Sexual Assault Response Team (SART) in my community. I worked, primarily, with victims of sexual assault (SA), military sexual trauma (MST), and childhood sexual abuse (CSA) before I developed PTSD from my exposure to my clients and had to hang up my hat. 

With that said - let’s talk about trauma. I’m going to put the rest of this under a cut because I am going to be going into detail about the symptoms and some causes of trauma. I will be talking about sexual assault, death, disasters, violence, and childhood abuse. If you find yourself reading anyway, and at any time are experiencing trauma symptoms beyond your coping skills, please reach out to a trained counselor. I have US-central resources listed here, but I know that there are resources in most countries and would be glad to help people locate them. 

If you’re looking for other posts about trauma I’ve created, I’m going to keep a master list below:

Coping Skills and Triggers - 8/25/2020

Same for works on AO3. Sure, maybe some of us have some old works that aren’t up to our current standards of writing. But I, personally, am never going to look at a kudos email and think “ew omg I can’t believe someone found this fic from 2016 why are they liking it”. In fact, I am entirely going to go “nice! people are still reading some of my older works too, I’m glad they enjoyed it”. It’s an archive, it is meant to be a collection of transformative works, old and new, and you are meant to find them. 

In fact, if you find a work that is from five years ago and you really liked it? I bet the author would love a comment even then.

Stories are written to be read. 

Part of why there’s sortable searches at AO3 is to let you find fics for a now-dormant fandom, fics that are no longer canon-compliant after the new episodes, fics that work with fanon tropes that are no longer popular, fics from authors who are no longer actively writing… and just fics that weren’t written recently. 

For the fanfic authors who don’t get art of their fics

For the fanfic authors who can’t get to 1000/500/100 hits

For the fanfic authors who don’t get comments/reviews

For the fanfic authors who write for small fandoms

For the fanfic authors who write rarepairs or gen fics

For the fanfic authors who get hate for the ships/characters/fandoms they write

For the fanfic authors who write in English despite it not being their first language

For the fanfic authors who don’t write in English

For the fanfic authors who don’t think anyone reads or likes their work

For the fanfic authors who aren’t big name fans

For the fanfic authors who don’t get requests in their inboxes

For the fanfic authors who can’t write stories that are more than a thousand words

For the fanfic authors who only write one ship

For the fanfic authors who are just starting

For the fanfic authors who have been writing fic for years

For the fanfic authors who use fanfic to practice writing

For the fanfic authors who write self-insert fics

For the fanfic authors who write about their OCs

For the fanfic authors who write to vent or cope

For the fanfic authors who are just waiting for their big break

So a while ago I asked staff at AO3 why it was that I could post a work, update it with chapters, and have it appear no higher than tenth, ever, even with new chapters, on a busy fandom. I finally got an explanation. 

“If, however, your work is appearing below works that were already visible, it’s possible you’re running into an issue that occurs when a work is posted between 12:00 AM and 5 AM UTC - works posted during this time frame cause the system to believe the work has had a posting date set manually. (Normally you would do this by ticking “Set a different publication date” in the posting form.) This also applies to works that were initially saved as a draft on a date previous to the day they are posted. Works that have been backdated are assigned a default time of day, which may be earlier than the actual time you posted the work.”

So don’t post during that time. It just HAPPENS to be between 5 pm and 10 pm Pacific time so posting things after dinner is RIGHT OUT if you happen to live on the west coast of the US. That’s between 8 pm and 1 am east coast time.

So until they fix this (and it’s been going on a LONG time, they’re working on it but it’s a massive code overhaul, apparently) I’ll be posting fics OTHER times.  This means if you’re posting a long, multichapter work, posting the first chapter in the evening can screw up the entire rest of your posting. Posting a draft before posting for reals will also keep you from being at the top of the list. And this probably explains why some of my fics have done better than others.  What does this look like? Someone posts at, say, 4 in the afternoon my time. I come along and post around 8 pm, which is pretty typical for me, but it gets marked as “set manually” and given a time much earlier in the day, and thus appears behind everything posted that day. So it’s never on top, people start reading down the list, think they’ve seen everything that’s at the top, and don’t poke any farther.  So for writers, DO NOT POST BETWEEN  12:00 AM and 5 AM UTC. Google will translate, just plug in 12 am UTC and it will pop up your local time in most places.  For readers, realize this exists and that you’re probably missing something. Scroll back if it’s between those hours, and after those hours. 

chapter 1: i can hear the sirens but i can’t walk away

Tim Drake lives a perfectly good life. During the day, he’s a freshman at Gotham Academy. At night, he surveils criminal activity and sends detailed analyses to Commissioner Gordon. If he’s lucky, he might even get a photo of a Bat or two. He even writes increasingly popular LinkedIn articles about vigilantes and the criminal justice system under the pseudonym Jeffrey Anderson.

Gotham is the one that needs help, not Tim.

Bruce Wayne has a thing or two to say about that.