#kudos bot

But searching for info on what is happening to them and other authors, I find that for the last year or so there has been another bot and that it is being deliberately targeted at specific fandoms and authors to inflate and unbalance their Kudos counts and make them targets for harassment campaigns using accusations of self-promotion or other bullshit.

So, I got 5000 kudos in 12 hours, evenly distributed across all my fics, in a small fandom deep in hiatus. Obviously, these are fake, there just aren’t that many readers, and some of these stories are niche oneshots posted a year ago.

I’m sure some of you have noticed or experienced it yourselves, but I haven’t seen any posts about it on here, and this kudos bot has hit our little fandom HARD over the last few days. Every other newer fic is affected, although not all to the degree mine have been, some experience bursts of 40-100 kudos on a single fic. This is just a psa, if this happens to you, or you’re confused with the numbers you see with others. The writers themselves are not doing this, it’s a third party.

I do NOT want these kudos, they’re meaningless and not reflective of real reader interaction, and it feels really shitty to have these forced on you. This is not harmless, certainly not to me, but not on a larger scale either. 1) It makes it impossible for me to gauge my real stats, it’s hit every single one of my fics. 2) it’s demotivating because it’s burying the real guest kudos, I don’t know if any of them were real so I can’t be happy about them. 3) it’s unfairly promoting my fics relative to others, which I feel horrible about. Kudos is the most common metric for readers to sort by, and I don’t want to benefit at the expense of others. 4) It’s undermining the system at large, making kudos a useless metric by which to judge stories. 5) I worry people will suspect me of doing this myself and that I look dishonest, and it’ll be at best a reader-deterrent and at worst get me reported.

Ao3 is not able to do anything at present, was the response I and many others got. I understand it’s run by volunteers and resources are limited, and this post is not meant as a complaint. But I wanted to show the scope of this, because in a small fandom, this is a massive impact, fics don’t GET that many kudos, and it’s already at a point where kudos are meaningless, just a few days into this. And the bot is still at it.

I hate it, but I went ahead and locked those fics (and a couple new ones whose kudos counts seemed disproportionate). Hopefully it’ll break the cycle.

Kind of annoyed that the ratio on my most popular works are now meaningless, but I didn’t even know about the AO3 bot—or crawler, or whatever it is—until last week, so consider this a PSA to all AO3 authors who may not already know. Check your kudos, or make sure you've got the "Turn off emails about kudos" unselected in your preferences. If you’ve been getting small but daily kudos from guests over a long period of time, like me (I had to check my AO3 kudos notification emails over the last month to verify), you might be a victim.

I really hate doing this, I want my work to be accessible.

I published my work yesterday, put 4 chapters up, then got a really sus amount of kudos.

this is a comparison of my newest work and my old work, both of the Lego Ninjago fandom. The newest work is a rewrite of the old.

There is a CLEAR difference in the ratio here, the amount of hits on the first screenshot. The original fic was edited over the course of several months (approx jan- november) my newest fic has only been out for a day.

I have set my newest fic to registered users only, hopefully to block this spam.

From what I understand, kudos work differently from hits.

I LOVE CHECKING MY WORK, EVEN IF IT'S MOSTLY GUESTS. I LOVE HAVING MY WORK OPEN TO EVERYONE.

If it's a bot or some specific person: DON'T SPAM KUDOS ON A FIC. IT'S KILLING MY ENJOYMENT OF MY HOBBY.

I'm someone who does small time works, and it KILLS me to have to do this, but until the weird spammy traffic stops I'll have to deal with this. This issue has been going on a while and it's frusterating that ao3 won't do anything.

17 hits and 58 kudos just doesn't add up at all, I'm relieved I checked it before I was spammed more but.. Ugh..

Please support my work, I have put in two months of my life to work on this, and it sucks to see all that effort seemingly go to waste. PLEASE register an account if you haven't, it's not that hard. Trust me, it helps me and other fanfic authors keep track of our work.

Also... did all or most of my fics get hit? But why? I haven't linked them anywhere in ages!!! D: Except for Five Times but none of the others... I'm gonna lock all my most important fics...