AO3 Spam info

[feng_shui_house]

AO3 talks about their current spam fighting methods (in necessarily vague terms- no sense telling the enemy the details). They are using a behind the scenes spam detector to HIDE works it suspects are Spam. It will send an email (to your user email, so you need to be sure that is a working email) and the Abuse team will review everything it catches and unhide any legitimate works.

So if you post, and your work doesn't show up, and you get an email, Do NOT Panic. It hasn't been deleted and they say they're not going to be looking at any other possible TOS violations that get caught in the Spam filter.

https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/9060

https://archiveofourown.org/invite_requests/status

It now shows they've increased the number of invite requests per day to 2000 (it was 250), so it should be around 11 days wait instead of the creeping up to 80 days.

Comments

[thisbluespirit]

Oh, well, that sounds a bit better! *crosses fingers*

[sallymn]

I'd missed the whole thing...

[feng_shui_house]

It was pretty bad. At one point there was about a ten to one ratio of Spam posts to actual fanworks. There'd be a page of Spam in the results, one fanwork, and another page of Spam, etc.

It's greed that's their undoing. If it was spaced out a lot further, it wouldn't have been worth the effort and inconvenience to the users to take drastic action. And if they'd used those tactics on a site whose owners were unable to fight back, the site would be destroyed and the owners would simply stop paying for the hosting- in either event, massive spamming soon results in none of their spam.

Survival Tip: a parasite that overloads the host dies too. ;^)

I just checked, they've increased the number of invites. If you have already requested an invitation, you can check your position on the waiting list. There are currently 16296 people on the waiting list. We are sending out 5000 invitations per day.

[sallymn]

I'm glad they're getting on top of it.