Help? AO3 hiding a whole series when some works in the series are in an 'unrevealed' collection??
I've been meaning to ask Tumblr about this weird AO3 bug(??) for a while but keep forgetting. I sent a support request to AO3 but haven't heard anything, so maybe the fandom hivemind will have some insight.
I have several series on AO3, and there are some old images from a couple of them that make me want to peel my skin off every time I look at them. I would like to delete them, but they're also some of my most popular images, and I know some people really like them, so I've been waffling on it for a while (I definitely don't want to orphan them because then I would never be able to delete them, and they're also, you know, part of those series I mentioned, so they would still be clearly tied to me. Also, I think art styles are generally a lot more recognizable than writing styles, so there's that, too).
Anyway, in the meantime, I decided to put all of those works in a collection that's set to 'unrevealed.' This hides those works without deleting them so I have time to figure out what I want to do.
Easy fix, right?
INCORRECT. 🙃🙃🙃
I discovered that doing this actually made both series completely disappear from my series list page on AO3 (the one on your dashboard that shows all your series - image below). I just about shit myself when I went to that series list to navigate to one of them, because it looked like they'd been deleted. It also doesn't even list them in the total number of series. This should say 15 and not 13:
If I go to my works list, click on a work in either series, and then go to the individual series from there, both of them are visible. I checked with some friends, and they can see the individual series pages, as well, but are unable to see them on my series list page.
My browser tab even says 'mystery series' instead of the title of the series:
And any links to the individual series get all fucked up. The most basic link, for example, just says 'mystery series.' Even the Archivist Discord bot lists some of the info but says the authors are anonymous when there are actually 9 other people besides me who have works in this series:
This is all super weird and frustrating. And a huge oversight on the part of AO3?? This seems like it would affect a lot of people who participate in events that involve collections on AO3—if they were to draft works into unrevealed collections, it seems like that could also hide any related series until the collections are revealed?
The way I see it, I can either delete the works, remove them from the 'unrevealed' collection, or remove them from both of the affected series while I decide what to do with them. However, the whole point of making the collection was to hide those works so they're not making me cringe.
Plus, as you can see, there are 14 works in the collection:
Not all of them are in theses series, but most are, so removing them would be a bit of a pain, and if I ever want to add them back in, I'd have to reorder the series to place all of them in their correct order. One of these series has about 150 works in it, so that's a giant pain in the ass.
Does anyone know if there's a workaround for this? I'm leaning toward just deleting the works at this point, but I also feel bad about that. :/
