# Archive of Our Own

Archive of Our Own (AO3) is a nonprofit open source repository for fanfiction and other fanworks contributed by users. The site was created in 2008 by the Organization for Transformative Works and went into open beta in 2009 and continues to be in beta. As of 1 January 2025, Archive of Our Own hosts over 14,630,000 works in over 70,700 fandoms, including those related to real people. The site has received generally positive reception for its curation, organization, and design, mostly done by readers and writers of fanfiction.

## History

In 2007, a website called FanLib was created with the goal of monetizing fanfiction. Fanfiction was authored primarily by women, and FanLib, which was run entirely by men, drew criticism. This ultimately led to the creation of the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) which purported to record and archive fan cultures and works. OTW created Archive of Our Own in October 2008 and established it as an open beta on 14 November 2009. The site's name was derived from a blog post by the writer Naomi Novik who, responding to FanLib's lack of interest in fostering a "fannish" community, called for the creation of "An Archive of One's Own." The name is inspired by the essay A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf, in which Woolf said that a writer needed space, time, and resources in order to create. AO3 defines itself primarily as an archive and not an online community.
By 2013, the site's annual expenses were about $70,000. Fanfiction authors from the site held an auction via Tumblr that year to raise money for Archive of Our Own, bringing in $16,729 with commissions for original works from bidders. In 2018, the site's expenses were budgeted at approximately $260,000. In 2022, the actual yearly expenses of AO3 were $290,688.25, most of which was used for server hosting and maintenance, and revenue from fundraising efforts reached a reported $512,358.90. Fundraising for the platform is accomplished through multiple means. Primary fundraising efforts such as their April and October drives as well as other non-drive donations have raised $621,454.87 as of 30 September 2023. Some revenue is also collected in the form of royalties from books written by some of the initial OTW members.
On 10 July 2023, an unnamed hacker group attacked the site with a DDOS attack or Denial-of-service attack. Anonymous Sudan (likely Russian-backed according to cybersecurity company CyberCX) claimed responsibility in a Telegram post, saying it was motivated over the website's United States registration as well as its sexual and LGBT+ content. The group then demanded $30,000 worth of Bitcoin within 24 hours to end the attack. The site came back online the next day with Cloudflare protection added.

## Features

Archive of Our Own runs on open source code programmed almost exclusively by volunteers in the Ruby on Rails web framework. The developers of the site allow users to submit requests for features on the site via a Jira dashboard. AO3 has approximately 700 volunteers who help the organization by working on volunteer committees. Each of these committees, which include AO3 Documentation, Communications, Policy & Abuse, and Tag Wrangling, manages a part of the site.

### Tags

Archive of Our Own has a system for labeling and categorizing uploaded works, referred to as tags. The tagging system allows users to sort content based on intended audiences, included content, fandom, characters, relationship pairings, and additional tags. Writers are generally free to choose whatever tags they like for their stories without restrictions on tag length, spaces, characters, or non-Roman characters. The maximum number of tags was capped to 75 for works created after September 2021; previously, authors used to be able to add an unlimited amount of tags to their work, which resulted in a The Untamed fanfic titled Sexy times with Wangxian creating issues with site navigation due to its over 1,700 tags. When browsing or searching for a tag, any work which has used the tag, or determined related tags, will appear in the search in a curated folksonomy.
All uploaded works on Archive of Our Own are required to use Rating Tags, Archive Warnings, and Fandom Tags. Rating Tags are self-appointed by writers and allow users to rate their stories by intended reader age ("General Audiences", "Teen And Up Audiences", "Mature", and "Explicit"), which are depicted as G, T, M, and E icons when searching. If the Not Rated tag is chosen, an empty icon is displayed. Archive Warnings are used to alert readers about certain content warnings such as "Graphic Descriptions of Violence", "Major Character Death", "Rape/Non-Con" and "Underage Sex"; there is also the option to tag "Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings". Fandom Tags are used to sort the work into the appropriate fanbase. Multiple Fandom Tags can be used which is frequently used for crossovers.
Additional tags can range from indicating the type of relationship, character pairings or ships, individual characters, and a space for open tags. Tags that indicate the type of relationships depicted in the work are called Category Tags and are of six types ("F/F", "M/M", "F/M", "Multi", "Other", and "Gen"). Some of these tags use a slash to depict a romantic and or sexual relationship pair. This style of depicting relationships with a slash traces its origin to slash fiction. While slash fiction previously only indicated homosexual pairings, it has since been adapted as a shorthand for all types of relationships. If there are non-romantic relationships within the work, the slash can be replaced with an "&" symbol.
The tagging system is maintained by volunteers called "Tag Wranglers". Approximately 300 of them manually connect synonymous tags to bolster the site's search system, allowing it to understand "mermaids", "mermen", and "merfolk" as constituents of the "merpeople" tag, as an example.

### Accounts

The site does not require users to sign up using their legal names, allowing the use of usernames. In addition, users may identify themselves by one or more pseudonyms, referred to as "pseuds", linked to their central account. In order to sign up, users must request an invitation which will be sent to their email addresses. Receiving an invitation can take a few days to weeks. The invitation system is a metered signup queue to protect the website from spammers and mass influxes of users. An account is not required to view posted content as long as the author has not chosen to show their works only to registered users.
Only those with an account can publish works, participate in writing challenges, create a reading queue, follow authors and stories to receive notifications of updates, and bookmark their favorite works.

### Kudos and comments

In addition to sharing certain allowed fanfiction and works, Archive of Our Own users can interact with posted materials. Like many other online platforms, readers with AO3 accounts can leave comments on publications which have not had comments deactivated.
Readers can give stories kudos which function similarly to likes on other sites. Kudos are permanent and cannot be taken back. Added in 2010, the kudos feature, however, has been negatively received by various AO3 authors who claim that the simple act of leaving a 'like' discourages the reader from interacting further with the author's work through leaving comments or reviews. In fact, in 2012, a number of authors banded together with the shared goal of creating an 'opt out' feature that allows authors on AO3 to remove the kudos feature from their published works.

## Content

The legal team working on behalf of Organization for Transformative Works believes that the publication of fan fiction on AO3 is legal under the Fair Use doctrine, meaning that they need to be "transformative", which they interpret as giving new meaning to the original work.
AO3 hosts controversial content including works depicting rape, incest and pedophilia. This allowance was developed as a reaction to the policies of other popular fanfiction hosts such as LiveJournal, which at one time began deleting the accounts of fic writers who wrote what the site considered to be pornography, and FanFiction.Net, which disallows numerous types of stories including any that repurpose characters originally created by authors who disapprove of fanfiction. According to AO3 Policy and Abuse Chair Matty Bowers, a small fraction (1,150) stories submitted to the Archive were flagged by users as "offensive". Organization for Transformative Works Legal Committee volunteer Stacey Lantagne has stated that: "The OTW's mission is to advocate on behalf of transformative works, not just the ones we like."
The OTW's Open Doors project, which launched in 2012, invited maintainers of older and defunct fic archives to import their stories into Archive of Our Own with the aim of preserving fandom history. The site is also open to certain original, non-fanfiction works, hosting over 250,000 such original works as of 27 January 2024.
AO3 reached one million works (including stories, art pieces, and podcast fic recordings, referred to as podfics) in February 2014. At that time, the site hosted works representing 14,353 fandoms, the largest of which were the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), Supernatural, Sherlock, and Harry Potter. In July 2019 it was announced that the site had 2 million registered users and 5 million posted works. Of the top 100 character pairings written about in fic on the site in 2014, 71 were male/male slash fiction and the majority of character pairings featured white characters. In 2016, about 14% of fics hosted on the site took place in an alternative universe (often shortened to AU) in which characters from a particular canon are transplanted into a different context. The length of a story on Archive of Our Own tends to correlate with its popularity. Stories of 1,000 words often received fewer than 150 hits on average while stories that were closer in length to a novel were viewed closer to 1,500 times apiece.
AO3 does not allow social media posts, prompts or requests, and any works that AO3 moderators consider to be spam or non-transformative. The decision to delete works for alleged violations of their Terms of Service (TOS) is handled on a case-by-case basis and users (not merely accounts) can be banned for it. Furthermore, fan fiction published on AO3 is expected to be "noncommercial" – the author cannot legally make any money off of their fan fiction because they are using another author's characters, setting, etc. AO3's nonprofit status prohibits it from commercializing works of fan fiction.

## Reception

In 2012, in an article entitled "Where to find the good fanfiction porn", Aja Romano and Gavia Baker-Whitelaw of The Daily Dot described Archive of Our Own as "a cornerstone of the fanfic community", writing that it hosted content that other sites like FanFiction.Net and Wattpad didn't allow and was more easily navigable than Tumblr.
Time listed Archive of Our Own as one of the 50 best websites of 2013, describing it as "the most carefully curated, sanely organized, easily browsable and searchable nonprofit collection of fan fiction on the Web".
According to Casey Fiesler, Shannon Morrison, and Amy S. Bruckman, Archive of Our Own is a rare example of a value-sensitive design that was developed and coded by its target audience, namely writers and readers of fanfiction. They wrote that the site serves as a realization of feminist HCI (an area of human–computer interaction) in practice, despite the fact that the developers of Archive of Our Own had not been conscious of feminist HCI principles when designing the site.
In 2019, Archive of Our Own was awarded a Hugo Award in the category of Best Related Work, a category whose purpose is to recognize science fiction–related work that is notable for reasons other than fictional text. Fiesler wrote positively of the nomination: "...its nomination signals a greater respect for both fan fiction as an art form and for the creators and users of this remarkable platform. It's a recognition of the power of these diverse spaces and voices that have, for so long, been marginalized—both in genre fiction and in computing."

## Censorship
### Xiao Zhan controversy

On 29 February 2020, Archive of Our Own was blocked in China, after fans of Chinese actor Xiao Zhan reported the website for hosting an explicit fan fiction novel about Xiao Zhan. The banning of the site led to several incidents and controversies online, in the Chinese entertainment industry, as well as to professional enterprises, due to heavy backlash from mainland Chinese users of Archive of Our Own. Users called for a boycott against Xiao Zhan, his fans, endorsed products, luxury brands, and other Chinese celebrities involved with the actor.

### Germany

On 13 December 2022, the site was indexed by the German Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons due to "child pornography content", temporarily removing it from Google search results. In January 2023, the restrictions were lifted since the agency had committed administrative errors in the indexing process.

### Russia

In March 2023, Roskomnadzor had requested Archive of Our Own to delete 16 fics, containing "child pornography". The site was subsequently blocked in Russia on 14 April 2023, after failing to comply with the request. A Ukrainian Twitter user claimed responsibility for the report in a deleted tweet.