AO3 was founded partly in response to a growing trend of fanworks being removed from websites that had previously allowed them. This pattern has been observed numerous times throughout fandom history.

Whenever there are fears about censorship on other sites, AO3 sees an increase in the waitlist for our automatic invitation queue. Regardless of their reasons for joining, we welcome any new user to our site who agrees to abide by our Terms of Service. We will not vet new users for “legitimacy”, because AO3 is for everyone.

The OTW has no plans to change the content we allow on AO3, and we stand by our commitment to maximum inclusiveness of fanwork content. We will not remove works unless they violate the AO3 Terms of Service, and we don’t make decisions based on how many times something is reported. Users do not need to worry that anyone’s works will be taken down due to a baseless report or a mass-reporting campaign, if one were to occur.

Regarding the unverified rumors that reports to the Policy & Abuse committee have greatly increased in the past few days, changes in ticket volume can be due to many different factors (including simple coincidence). If you’re interested in learning more about how many and what kinds of reports the Policy & Abuse committee receives, we publish information about the previous month’s tickets in our monthly newsletters as well as an annual breakdown of ticket types on the OTW website.

In May, updates to AO3 focused on improving skins, collections, and gift exchanges, boosting performance across AO3, and addressing several security issues. Read more at: https://ao3-news.org/v-0-9-48

In June and early July, we updated the AO3 Terms of Service FAQ and made improvements all around prompt memes and gift exchanges. We also improved skin previews and the AO3 admin area, along with a few other small fixes.

→ Releases 0.9.482 - 0.9.484 - Change Log

The Archive of Our Own will be down for about 30 minutes beginning at 21:45 UTC on Friday, May 12 (what time is that for me?).

While we expect the downtime to be uneventful – we’re moving Redis from one machine to another – you can follow @AO3_Status on Twitter for reminders and updates.

The Archive of Our Own will be down for about 30 minutes at 12:00 PM UTC on Friday, March 17 (what time is that for me?). We’ll be rolling out a code update that should help reduce the amount of time it takes to post or edit works during periods of high load.

Any changes to this schedule will be announced on @AO3_Status on Twitter and ao3org on Tumblr.