idk what traumatized or mentally ill person needs to hear this but dreams (especially the really disturbing ones you dont want to talk about to anybody) arent some deep peek into your psyche or a sign of your True Desires or whatever theyre quite literally your brain making fruit salad with whatever it can find on the shelf. just putting all that shit in a blender and hitting obliterate. its fine, youre fine, youre not a weirdo for it
So I’m in fandom spaces basically all the time, this is not news if you know me at all. It’s probably why you follow me.
In the past 6 months - 1 year, my friends and I have been noticing a bit of an uptick on Bad Comments to our fanfics. We’ve noticed this on our fics. We’ve noticed this on other’s fics.
We don’t have statistics - that’d be near impossible to collect, anyway, but it seems they’re on the rise. As I’m starting to publish more fic lately, I want to share my personal policy on this - and that is the fact that I’m not going to tolerate bad comments on my fanfic.
(I will happily also step in for other fanauthors, as well - though I do only do this with permission of the fic’s author.)
My stock reply to bad comments is below. You may borrow and use it freely, no credit needed.
Dear Human,
You have left the type of comment that falls into a category we fanauthors call entitled. If you would like an explanation on how your comment qualifies, please press 1. If you require advice on how to leave better comments, please press 2. If you would like to argue that your comment does not qualify, please hang up and never call back.
Rude or entitled responses from you in the future may lead you to be blocked. This is your only warning.
Have a nice day!
If the comment isn’t “entitled” but falls into another bad category, it’s usually outright harassment and will get both an immediate block and a report to AO3, or whoever the hostsite winds up being.
I have three questions I ask before sending this message:
1. Did they say anything at all about the fic they’re commenting on, and was it nice?
For a bad comment, the answer to this is “no”.
2. Does the comment ask or demand something of me, as a fanauthor.
For a bad comment, the answer is “yes”.
Comments that are entitled will have both qualifications. They will get the stock reply above. If they only fit one of the questions, I will consider a more mollified report.
I already know what people are going to argue when they read this -
But Chroma! What if the commenter doesn’t know any better and is young/new/neurodivergent!
Okay first of all, I am autistic myself and am perfectly capable of fucking manners and learning social norms, so I resent the automatic implication some of y’all have that all neurospicy people are inherently rude or vice versa.
Secondly, that is why I left the phone options. If the commenter wants to be better they can use them as a jumping off point for the future conversation. If they legitimately want to learn how to not be a dick in fandom they can reach out.
But Chroma! What if the commenter didn’t realize what they were doing wrong?
They they can politely go “oh shit, my bad,” apologize to me, and leave a real fucking meaningful comment.
If you want to use this policy, go ahead. If you don’t, that’s fine too. If you think that this is a piece of shit policy then feel free to ignore this post and, in the future, everything I say and write.
In the meantime, I’ve been in fandom for over two decades now. So this Fandom Old is gonna enforce etiquette in her spaces and live her best fandom life.
There’s a Board meeting scheduled for July 2 at 20:00 UTC, and as part of our second call to action, we’re asking fans to attend and ask questions about what the Board is doing to fulfill the promises it’s made to combat racist harassment on its platforms and make the organization and its projects more welcoming to fans of color.
When asking questions, please be courteous. During the meeting, the Board takes relevant questions about the business at hand and then there’s an open question period at the end. Because meetings are only scheduled for an hour, the time for questions is often limited, but if you get yours in before the end of the hour, it should be answered.
There’s no size limit to the questions you can ask, but keep in mind that if you ask a multi-part question, you may only get an answer to the easiest part of it, so you might want to keep additional questions in reserve and only ask them once the first one’s been answered. If you’re afraid of sounding pushy, team up with a buddy and have them ask the follow-up!
Below are some questions that we’d like the Board to answer. Some are topical and some are long-standing issues, but all of them are focused on racism within the OTW and the projects it manages. Feel free to take one to the next meeting copy & paste style, or simply use them as a starting point for your own questions.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Why doesn’t the OTW have a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee? Are there plans to create one?
When was the last time you met with the diversity consultant research officer? What did you discuss and what kind of obstacles have they encountered?
What goals do you have for a diversity consultant? What do you hope the diversity consultant will be able to provide?
At the last meeting you said the diversity consultant research officer will be speaking to people within the OTW “so she can get a clearer picture of what OTW leadership and volunteers expect from a consultant, what concerns they have, and what they see as priorities for this work.” Are there any plans for the DCRO to speak with fans of color who use the org’s platforms, to hear their concerns and get a sense of their priorities for this work?
How has the OTW reached out to fans of color to determine their priorities in making OTW’s platforms more welcoming places?
Given the long delay in hiring a diversity consultant, why has the OTW taken little other action on policy changes that don’t require a consultant to implement?
How have internal conflicts hampered the OTW’s ability to meet the goals set out in the 2022-2025 Vision Statement to prioritize diversity and increase inclusion within the organization?
Why did it take the OTW almost a month to acknowledge the #EndOTWRacism protest?
What can fans outside the org do to help speed along the work of making the OTW a more anti-racist space?
Chinese-speaking Fandom
Why did the OTW shut down the AO3 Weibo account? How was this decision made? Are there plans to reinstate it?
There are allegations that the OTW put mainland Chinese volunteers at risk by deciding to include politically sensitive languages on the Archive, and that a sitting Board member was dismissive of that risk and made inappropriate comments about Chinese-speaking volunteers and fans. What happened and what has the Board done to make this right?
After the sinophobia and racism faced by one of the candidates for the OTW Board in the last election, what does the OTW intend to do to protect future candidates and prevent the spread of racist misinformation about candidates?
Policy & Abuse
How does the Board plan to empower the Policy & Abuse Committee to handle cases of racial harassment?
The May 2023 newsletter reports that the review of AO3’s Terms of Service for revisions that would allow Policy & Abuse to address different types of harassment not covered under the current TOS is still in progress, but also that “Policy & Abuse and Legal teams have agreed on some changes about harassment in general, and about works created with the clear intent of making AO3 unwelcoming.” What are these changes? When can we expect them to be put into effect?
These are really just a few of the many questions we have for the Board. If you have your own questions, please show up and ask them! But if you can’t make the meeting, or don’t feel comfortable attending, you can always write to the OTW Board (third option on the drop-down menu) and pose your questions – or any of these! – in a letter.
And if you’d like to be informed of future Board meetings and any actions we plan around them, you can join our mailing list! Just check the “OTW Board Meeting” box.
As part of our second call to action, we’re asking fans to attend OTW Board meetings and ask questions about what the Board is doing to fulfill the promises it made to combat racist harassment on its platforms and make the organization and its projects more welcoming to fans of color.
With thanks to Punk for allowing us to utilize their work, here’s what you need to know about Board meetings:
Board meetings are held quarterly (every three to four months) and are open to the public. You don’t need to be an OTW member to attend! Meetings are generally announced on the OTW Twitter about a week before and again an hour before, though this lack of transparency is something we’re pushing the OTW to change. As part of our call to action, we’ve launched a letter-writing campaign urging the OTW to make these announcements more broadly across its social media and on the OTW News site itself.
Right now the only place on the site where you can reliably find the meetings is on the Board’s Google Calendar, which you can add to your own and set notifications for new events. The agenda for the next meeting can also be found at the bottom of that page.
Here’s the currently planned agenda for the July 2 meeting:
If it’s your first time on the server, you’ll have to agree to the rules of conduct in #01-some-rules with a thumbs-up and choose a role in #02-role-selection. Then you’ll be allowed into the #public-board-meetings channel.
Board meetings are scheduled for an hour. During the meeting, the Board takes relevant questions about the business at hand. If there’s time, there’s an open question period at the end, but you have to get your question in before the hour’s up. We don’t know about you, but we definitely have a list of questions that need answering. It’s also helpful to ask follow-up questions if a Board member gives an evasive or vague answer. Pressing for more information in these meetings is often the only way we get it.
If you aren’t already on our Board meeting mailing list, you can sign up for it here, along with our other End OTW Racism projects.
Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in costume as Josephine and Daphne in the United Artists/Billy Wilder comedy Some Like It Hot, 1959. During an interview with Entertainment Weekly in 2006, Curtis shared the following recollections about making the movie:
EW: You weren’t happy with the dresses they initially gave you. TC: Oh, horrible! They put Debbie Reynolds’ clothes on me from a costume company. Her waist was up around my armpits! And they tried some Loretta Young outfits. But all her clothes wanted to do was spin around. So Billy said let Orry-Kelly make them for you. Boy, did we get excited! We had custom garter belts and brassieres, shoes that fit us properly, and nice cloche hats and those high collars that Olivia de Havilland used to wear in those early movies. Oh, did I love them!
EW: You look like Eve Arden. TC: And a little bit of Grace Kelly and my mother.
EW: How long did it take for you and Jack to become Josephine and Daphne? TC: About 30 minutes for makeup. Then we’d put on our hair and the costumes. We’d be ready in about an hour and 15 minutes.
EW: That’s pretty fast. TC: Yeah, we wanted to get that behind us. Neither Jack nor I liked sitting in a makeup chair too long. So we’d lie back in those chairs and reach across and hold each other’s hand. We’d just hang on to each other.
I mean... with all this stuff re: denise in mind, *is* there an alternative if the archive goes down? if otw is so abusive and incompetent an org as to be unsalvageable?
Nothing current and good has the ability to host the level of traffic AO3 gets.
No. Nothing is ready to take up AO3’s workload.
Squidgeworld.org is the closest. It doesn’t have the same capacity but it does have the same structure, and it would try to beef up capacity.
The OTW is not going away.
The OTW was designed, at its core, for stability. For the ability to withstand any level of fandom drama (internal or external), media attention, or hostile activism from religious nuts, conservative politicians, or assimilationist “progressives.”
Some events that shaped the structure of the OTW:
Strikethrough/Boldthrough, when “concerned citizens,” not happy that Livejournal was brushing off their complaints, complained to advertisers about the horrible stuff their ads were being shown next to. So the advertisers complained to LJ, and LJ responded by deleting hundreds of journals that were not, until that point, in violation of their TOS. OTW decision: NO ADVERTISERS. Ever. Of any sort. Also no external host company, because that’s subject to the same problems. We are done with letting outsiders tell us what is and isn’t fit to put on a website.
FanLib: A “fanfic hosting” site with contests sponsored by tv shows. NSFW was hidden from public view; you had to be logged in to even know it existed on the site. Fics were rated 1-5 stars; you could search for the highest rated stuff. (Not: Highest-rated per fandom. It didn’t really separate fandoms.) The contests were full of “you give us permission to use this work in any way we want, forever, no take-backs, but if you win, you get a t-shirt and your name in the scrolling credits after a tv episode.” Its forums were a tangled mess of drama. The site lasted less than a year and then evaporated when the owners found a buyer for their software. OTW decision: No option for buy-out, ever. Nonprofits cannot be converted to for-profit companies; if Disney decides AO3 is the next best source for movie scripts and wants to give the OTW twenty million dollars for it… the OTW can’t accept.
Detention: a Snape/Harry fanfic archive. (This one’s less well-known, but several Snarry fans were among the core group involved with AO3’s founding.) This was, at one point, the premier ship archive for Snape/Harry. Everyone loved it. But. The owner got into a fight with her co-mod and yanked the whole site one night with no warning. Snarry fans spent weeks crawling through Google to find cached versions of the stories, sometimes to give to the original authors who didn’t have copies of them. OTW decision: No single person will have pull-the-plug permission. No amount of internal fighting amongst the board, committees, volunteers, paid staff if there ever is any, will have the right to say “nah I quit” and pull the archive down. (Some people do have pull-the-plug ability, but not permission. There are people on the coding side of things who could wipe the archive. But (1) they’d be in legal trouble for doing so and (2) there are backups.)
(Side note: the OTW decision parts are not all directly related to the causes mentioned. These are “three things that happened” and “some things the OTW built into their structure, partially inspired by these three things.”)
In 2015, a few days after the election, the entire existing board resigned, leaving the whole org in the hands of the two new electees (who had to appoint 5 more people to the board).
Most of fandom today does not know this, because an event that would destroy most nonprofits was barely even noticed outside of the official communications channels.
Some of the OTW’s problems - a lot of the OTW’s problems - are the glacially slow pace at which it makes changes.
“Hey this would be a good thing to do” comes up, goes around gets agreed on, someone volunteers to look into the practical logistics, someone else mentions how it would affect this-or-that committee and yet another someone else starts putting together a list of feature requirements, and then there’s costs to discuss, and legalities, and hey now we have a different committee head here or there and they need to be brought up to date on the project, and someone publicly posts some rumors they’ve heard about it so another committee has to be brought in to explain what’s really going on, and then there’s rumor-squashing both internal and external to deal with, and somewhere in that mess is a need for actual progress on the original plan. Which is slow. Very slow.
Note that all of this is unpaid volunteers working in their extra time. Sometimes whoever was managing most of it has a life event - change of jobs or address, gain or lose a family member, gets sick, goes to school/graduates, etc. - and the amount of time they have to pour into the OTW plummets.
The OTW is designed to function, business-as-usual, while all of that is going on.
It is possible the current round of communications, complaints, activism, are the start of another 2015-esque org-wide shakedown and changeover.
…If so, that won’t be visible from the outside, until a handful of new features get released. They won’t be obviously connected to the changes.
Even if Denise is correct about the OTW being out of compliance with various data laws… legal action about that kind of thing can take years to process. There is no “what if the OTW goes down tomorrow;” the OTW is not megaupload (and takes care to not become megaupload) (which, although it did vanish overnight, also had years of legal complaints involved… it wasn’t a secret that it was at risk of gov’t action).
If you trust nothing else about the OTW… believe that it knows how to say, “This problem? WIP. Not abandoned. Will update eventually.”
Whether or not it updates is a separate problem. But it sure does know how to sit there in a holding pattern.
It’s pretty hilarious how many people don’t remember the whole Board quitting.
[alt text: Image of a cheerful Brown Owl in a cartoony style holding a dollar bill in its claw on a green field. Text above the Owl reads “End OTW Racism. Donate to the OTW & become an OTW voter” Text below the Owl reads “elections.transformative works.org/voting . Last day to donate to become a voting member is June 30”]
Eligibility to vote in the upcoming OTW elections is determined by membership. Due to legal requirements, the OTW restricts membership to those who have made a minimum donation. Read more about that here and if you are comfortable, donate by June 30th so you can Vote in this year’s Board Elections.
Voting is only one way to make a difference, however, and we fully support those who are not comfortable donating (or are unable to). Follow us and look at our Call to Action for other ways you can help support change at the OTW and end racism within our fannish spaces!
Earlier this week the OTW responded to our previous action and reaffirmed their commitment towards combating and preventing racism within its platforms.
They also thanked us for working to keep holding them accountable to their goals and we intend to keep doing so.
To that end, Fandom Against OTW Racism is calling for our Second Action!! This action is centered around the upcoming Board Elections set for August 11-14. We want to encourage everyone who can to participate in the election process and spread the word far and wide about these elections!
Currently, 4 of the 7 Board positions are up for election, which is a majority. Now is the time to get involved. In light of multiple accounts coming forth about the state of the organization, it is clear that fundamental changes need to happen – and those can only happen with a shift in leadership, from what we currently have to one that is capable of supporting and implementing those much-needed changes.
Please join us in calling upon our fellow fans to vote to make things better for all of us!
How to get involved:
With four Board Seats open, now is the perfect time to act and make this issue a key component of this election to select people who demonstrate a commitment to combating racism in our fannish spaces. So if you can, please plan to vote this election cycle!!
If you already are a member, use your voice and Vote. If you have donated in any of the fundraising drives for AO3 in the last year, you are likely eligible. You can check your eligibility status here by selecting “Is my membership current/Am I eligible to vote?”
When donating you can add ‘End OTW Racism’ to the ‘In Honor Of’ field if you feel comfortable doing so.
If you donate, ensure you select the yes to the ‘Do you want to be an OTW member?’ question
ALT
[alt text: image of text that reads “Do you want to be an OTW member? ($10 minimum donation)” with two radio buttons to select from with the choices of “Yes” or “No”]
We understand that many people may not be comfortable doing so or may be unable to and that is perfectly fine! You are under no obligation to spend any money and we do not want to pressure anyone into doing so. There are plenty other ways to get the word out to encourage others to vote as well as continue to show support for this issue.
Other ways to get involved:
When posting a new fanwork between now and August 14, add ‘Vote to End OTW Racism’ to your title and provide a link to the End OTW Racism blog in your top Author’s Note. Reminder: New fanworks participating in the action are always welcome to join our AO3 collection.
For those who may not be creating works or who use AO3 just for commenting/ kudosing, create a Pseud named Vote To End OTW Racism. AO3 will automatically append your default name at the end. So it would look like “Vote To End OTW Racism (Your Name)
Add a link back to this call to action on your profile page, for anyone clicking on your name to see.
Update your pfps/avatars/user icons across social media
Participate in the upcoming Board Meeting between now and the election (August 11-14). The next Board Meeting is scheduled for July 2 and we will post an explainer about how to participate soon!
Send a letter to the Board encouraging them to be more transparent and to better advertise their Board Meetings. (credit to Punk who allowed us to utilize their work for this template)
Submit questions during the Q&A period with the Board Nominees. (We will post about this closer to election time)
Follow us on Tumblr, Twitter or Dreamwidth as we will be reviewing Board Candidates through the lens of our goals and providing more information on how to be involved over the election period.
Anonymous
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