Archive of Our Own

Archive of Our Own, a.k.a. AO3, is a multi-fandom archive website owned and operated by the Organization for Transformative Works, which largely hosts fanfiction. According to the site's main page, it is "A fan-created, fan-run, nonprofit, noncommercial archive for transformative fanworks, like fanfiction, fanart, fan videos, and podfic."
Archive of Our Own is a "fan-created, fan-run," site which was first proposed in the post An Archive Of One's Own by Astolat in 2007. The post discussed instances in the past when websites and corporations attempted to profit from fandom, fans, and fanworks on their online platforms, while not respecting or protecting fandom. This issue was especially important because transformative fandom has been repeatedly targeted due to the debated legality of fanworks, which involves issues of copyright, intellectual property, and fair use. On the internet, this has led to websites mass-deleting fan accounts, fanfiction, etc. for various content and reasons. Astolat's post and subsequent discussions led to the conclusion that there needed to be a reliable non-profit fanwork-hosting site that was run by people who were themselves fans, and would therefore know what fans wanted and work in the interest of fandom.
AO3 is currently designed to host text-based fanfiction as well as fandom nonfiction and allows embedding (but not yet hosting) for vids, fanart and podfic. Fanworks are protected under fair use. AO3 permits Underage sex, RPF, and other controversial content, as it is intended to be an archive for any and all types of fanworks. The archive's interface is planned to be translated into languages other than English in order to make it more accessible to an international userbase. It requires that DMCA takedown notices be signed in order to be acted upon and says that the OTW "will remove the content upon satisfactory review of the merits of the infringement claim."
==Its Beginnings==
AO3 was first proposed in May 2007 by Astolat. Her post, An Archive Of One's Own, was one of many in LiveJournal fandom reacting to the commercial startup FanLib, which had tried to recruit some fanfic writers for its new fic archive. LiveJournal fandom was unimpressed by the company's desire to profit off of the popularity of fanfic, not to mention a sales pitch to get buy-in from copyright holders saying things like "All the FANLIB action takes place in a highly customized environment that YOU control" (see :File:FanLib info.pdf). Astolat's post An Archive Of One's Own set out some guidelines for a fan-controlled archive in opposition to the dystopian future she saw in FanLib: no ads, no restrictions on content, and a commitment to fic as fair use. To realize this vision, the Organization for Transformative Works was created.
Fans had other (often long-standing) reasons for wanting to help build a new multifandom archive. Strikethrough happened a few weeks after astolat's initial post, driving home the point that it was not safe to rely on commercial entities to preserve fan culture. Around the same time, the Snarry archive Detention vanished literally overnight because of an argument between the owner and one of the mods. This raised awareness that a long-term archive would need to be run by an organization not subject to a single person's whims. See Beginnings of OTW: 2007-08 Comments for more comments regarding AO3 and OTW's creation.
==Timeline==
:Main article: Timeline of the Archive of Our Own
* First proposed by Astolat on 17 May 2007 in the post An Archive Of One's Own.
* A Livejournal community fanarchive was created on 20 May 2007 to coordinate discussion and planning for the creation of the archive.
* The archiveofourown.org domain name was registered 30 May 2007 by Rebecca Tushnet.whois look up 20 October 2008
* Call for Ruby on Rails tutorial writers on 1 November 2007.
* Call for Ruby on Rails Coders on 8 January 2008.Volunteer Search: Volunteer Ruby Coder, accessed 20 October 2008
* Archive opened for closed beta, in which members of the public were welcome to view and comment, but account creation was limited to Organization for Transformative Works staff and testers on 3 October 2008.
* Archive entered open beta on 14 November 2009. Users are able to get accounts either via a first-come, first-served invitation queue, or via invitation codes distributed to those who helped with closed beta testing. The speed of new account creation depends on the servers' ability to handle increased load.
* Yuletide 2009 opened on the AO3 on 18 December 2009. All Yuletide participants were given an invitation. On 24 December 2009, the AO3 had 4648 fandoms, 33,810 works and 4127 users.
* Kudos added circa December 2010.
* New servers added in February 2011.
* Subscriptions to authors added in March 2011.
* Database performance issues recurred in September 2011, with administrators blaming them on greatly increased use. As of 5 October 2011, the archive had 7385 fandoms, 228,489 works and 22,974 users.
* As of 31 December 2011, the archive had approximately 8100 fandoms, 275,000 works and 31,000 users.
* Database performance issues recurred in May 2012 when the site reached 1.4 million unique visitors a month, coinciding with Fanfiction.net's 2012 M-rated Purge. The archive began to cache works and stats pages as an immediate measure to decrease server load, and then temporarily suspended tag filtering for the same reason, reinstating them with improvements in November.
* As of 15 July 2012, the archive had 56,203 registered users. As of October 2012, there were 459,655 works and approximately 23,000 fandoms.
* As of 16 July 2013, the Archive had 763,326 works in 12,448 "canonical" fandoms, and over 183,000 registered users.
* The one millionth work was posted on 15 February 2014.
* The archive reached two million fanworks as of 20 December 2015., posted to AO3_News 20 December 2015.
* It was announced on 31 October 2016 that AO3 had 1 million registered users, 2,615,000 works spread across 22,970 fandoms.
* The archive reached three million fanworks as of 28 April 2017.
* The archive reached four million fanworks as of 20 July 2018.
* The archive reached five million fanworks in July 2019. Newsletter 137 
* The archive won a Hugo Award for "Best Related Work" on August 18, 2019.
* AO3, AI and scraping (May 2023)
* 2023 OTW DDOS Attack (July 2023)
==Behind-the-Scenes Organization==
AO3 is a project of the Organization for Transformative Works. Many OTW committees are responsible for aspects of the project:
* Accessibility, Design & Technology (AD&T) and their three subcommittees of Design, Coders, and Testers train AD&T volunteers, design and develop software features, and write and test the code for new features and bug fixes.
* Systems maintains the servers and infrastructure AO3 runs on.
* Support answers user help requests, bug reports and feedback submitted via the form on AO3. 
* Policy & Abuse Committee addresses questions and concerns about potential violations of the AO3 Terms of Service.
* Tag Wrangling organises and maintains the AO3 user-created tags for Fandoms, Characters, Relationships and Additional (freeform) categories.
* Content Policy is responsible for site content policy and TOS updates in conjunction with Legal.
* Translation works to translate news posts and work on the new site translations feature in conjunction with ADT.
* Internationalization and Outreach works to improve support and visibility for international and underrepresented fandoms on the archive.
* Open Doors helps maintainers of other archives to import their content to AO3.
* Communications coordinates newsletters and blog posts on the OTW site and mirrors.
* Volunteers & Recruiting (VolCom) recruits and looks after volunteers and manages the internal wiki and access to various tools.
* Development and Membership and Finance fundraise and pay for AO3 hosting and servers.
* The Board of Directors oversees the Committees.
==Notable Features==
* The tag system and tag wrangler team. (even inspired fanfic, see also Wrangulator)
* Built-in bookmarking, with the ability to add reader tags, label a bookmark as a rec, and no limit on the number of bookmarks or recs.
* The ability to lock a fanwork to registered Archive users only, instead of posting it publicly, known as "archive-locking."
* Options to view either chapter-by-chapter or the whole work at once.
* Separate fanworks can be linked as a series.
* An easy way for creators to orphan works (disassociate their name from a work), providing a reader-friendly alternative to completely deleting fanworks.
* A clear, minimal and enforceable warning policy, which includes the ability to add additional warnings as searchable tags.
* One-click download of stories in a variety of formats: PDF, HTML, ePub, and Mobi.
* The "Kudos" button, a fast, simple, possibly threshold-lowering way for readers to express appreciation for a work.
===Collections and Challenges System===
The collections and challenges system is the set of features that make collections of fanworks (including importing for Open Doors), gift exchanges, prompt memes, and other challenges possible on AO3. Collections and challenges were initially implemented for the Yuletide exchange, as the founder of Yuletide is Astolat, but usage of the features has spread out greatly since it was first implemented for Yuletide 2009, including usage by the AO3/Dreamwidth-based exchange fandom. Other large exchanges include Trick or Treat and Chocolate Box.
Collections have the following features available to all users:
* Creating a new collection.
* Adding new maintainers (moderators or owners) to the collection
* Adding their own works to a collection they maintain 
* Bookmarking works to a collection they maintain
* Setting the collection to moderated, so that works be approved by a maintainer before it will show up in the collection)
* Setting the collection to closed, so that only maintainers can add new works or bookmarks)
* Setting the collection to unrevealed, so that most of the details about works in the collection are hidden.
* Setting the collection to anonymous, so that the authors of works in the collection are hidden. There is a specific Anonymous Collection that authors may put their works in to completely anonymize the work while retaining control over it.
* Marking the collection as a prompt meme or gift exchange
* Adding a banner, icon, and other information
* Making the collection a sub-collection of another collection the user owns, making it a "subcollection"
Collections that are also gift exchanges or prompt memes get additional features, such as the ability to run matching or posts prompts.
===Tags===
The Archive has an innovative system for managing fandoms and other tags that allows uploaders to enter all manner of freeform tags while "tag wranglers" organize and link them so that readers can browse or search. zvi wrote a noteworthy post explaining it.
The AO3 tagging system (and the related search and filtering problems) have not been all joy for all users. See AO3 Tagging Policy Debate for more information on criticism and discussion of AO3's tagging system.
Fanworks have been written about tags and tag wranglers. The fandom tag for tags is AO3 Tags; wrangler RPF is folded into the OTW RPF tag. See AO3 Tag Wrangling for more details.
===Filtering===
:See also: Filtering Tools
AO3 offers extensive filtering options in its "Sort and Filter" sidebar that appears on work list pages (works by a user, works in a collection, or works in a tag). Users can filter to include or exclude a wide range of work metadata, including but not limited to work tags. Both general and fandom-specific filters are available. Filterable metadata types include:
*Ratings ("General Audiences", etc.)
*Archive warnings ("Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings", etc.)
*Relationship categories (f/f, etc.)
*Fandom tags (BTS, etc.)
*Character tags (Martha Jones, etc.)
*Relationship tags (Kirk/Spock, etc.)
*Additional tags (Alternate Universe, etc.)
*Crossovers
*Completion status
*Word count
*Date updated
*Language
Additionally, users can search for specific words within the filtered results.
The purpose of filtering is to help users more easily find fanworks with specific criteria, and this feature has been celebrated by many fans as one of the benefits of using AO3.
==Fanwork Statistics==
In August 2013, the percentage of fanworks by relationship category on the AO3 was: 50% M/M, 26% Gen, 22% F/M, 5% F/F, 4% Multi, 2% Other.centrumlumina. Stage 7: Panfandom Overview, posted to Tumblr on 17 August 2013. (Accessed 11 May 2014) See more AO3 statistics from destinationtoast and centrumlumina.
In October 2014, the overwhelming majority of works posted on AO3 was fanfiction, with the percentages for other work types being: 0.25% fanvids, 0.71% fanart, 0.17% meta (meta nonfiction and fanfiction), and 0.55% podfic.
Fans doing statistical analysis of fanworks frequently use AO3 data.
==Inclusion of Meta on the Archive==
The Archive of Our Own TOS FAQ states []
 
All three of these points must be true of a work to be allowed under the Terms of Service. Later on it also specifies that the fanwork should be "transformative". 
The publication of meta essays on AO3 was not officially permitted until 2013, when the OTW Board of Directors announced that they had voted to allow meta on AO3 "after a long period of discussion".OTW Board Approves Meta Hosting on the AO3, Archive of Our Own. Published February 15, 2013 (Accessed January 4, 2021). Prior to this decision, meta and fannish non-fiction existed in a somewhat dubious grey area: it was occasionally posted to the site and did not appear to be explicitly forbidden by AO3's Terms of Service,As evidenced by this discussion on Livejournal, where la_mariane states, "Besides, I've seen meta at AO3 before and I'm pretty sure it's allowed by the TOS." and Hells' Half Acre agrees, "They have a tag for it! And I read their FAQ page and it didn't say anything about disallowing certain kinds of content...so, yeah, people are strange." but would often attract flames, angry comments and reports.My first anon hate! by Hell's Half Acre via Livejournal. Published June 22, 2012 (Accessed January 4, 2021). At one point, AO3 appeared to be taking a stance explicitly prohibiting meta, but the decision was almost as quickly reversed.Hell's Half Acre's post Meta on AO3: Get it while you can. describes how AO3's team requested that they remove a piece of meta that had been reported by an upset fan. Hell's Half Acre later updated the post to say that "Five minutes after I deleted the meta, I got an email from AO3 apologizing for telling me to delete the meta and saying that I could keep it up until they make a final decision on the status of meta as a fanwork and whether it should be allowed on the site."
In their announcement officially permitting meta, the Board of Directors wrote that,
The announcement emphasised that officially permitting meta hosting on AO3 was "just the first step in this journey", adding that the Board and relevant committees would now begin working together to "define exactly how meta will be handled" and "agree on some definitions and policies". The Board also invited feedback on the decision via comments on the news post.
Works which may be classified under the umbrella of "fannish nonfiction", including meta, are now allowed provided they fulfill the other stated requirements (noncommerical, nonephemeral, and fannish) of hosted works.
Fannish nonfiction can be discussions of fannish tropes, essays designed to entice other people into a fandom, commentary on fandoms, hypothetical casting for alternate versions of works, documentaries, podcasts about fandom, explanations of the creative process behind a fanwork or works, tutorials for creating fanworks, guides for fan-created gaming campaigns, or many other things. 
Fannish vs Nonfannish 
The Archive is dedicated to fanworks in particular, and is not intended to be a repository of all creative works. However, there are a number of works produced by fans that do not fit comfortably into a narrow definition of fanfiction, fanart, vids, or other types of fanworks. Original works that are not based on a [[canon|specific media source (canon)] are welcome on the archive so long as they are fannish in nature.The line between fannish and nonfannish is recognized to be ambiguous. The explicit inclusion of meta in 2013 blurred the the line further in some fan's eyes.
 
Disallowed nonfannish fiction includes:
* Episode transcripts and other non-transformative fandom material;
* Primarily autobiographical or non-fandom-related essays (e.g., essays on bike lanes, even if they contain a single reference to a fannish source);
* General complaints about behavior towards a particular creator (e.g., a post stating that a work was deleted due to lack of feedback);
* Suggestions that other fans contact the creator through email or other social networks;
* A single word or pairing name repeated hundreds of times;
* Offers and giveaways.
 
Ephemeral vs Non-ephemeral
Ephemeral content is generally meant to be read at a particular time and is not allowed on the Archive.
Content disallowed under this requirement include works that are:
* A single short sentence
* A single unedited image, short unedited sound clip, or short unedited video clip
* A .gif with or without a short caption
* Messages about a particular challenge
* A reaction meant to be read while or just after a particular episode airs.
* Message-board, social media or forum-like requests, such as 
** Notifying of an upcoming work's release or upcoming challenge
** A request for recommendations for particular kinds of fanworks
** A list of recommended works on a particular topic
** Providing or requesting recommendations or help locating a work
** A description of a challenge for other creators 
* Live-blogged episode reactions, which more appropriately belong on a journaling service
Allowed Content
With the addition of fannish nonfiction, such as meta, currently allowed types of works include:
* An audio performance of a fannish essay about vampire biology across sources, or the same essay in text form.
* Photographs of a knitted character.
* Short clips of footage from existing sources, edited over a song to make an argument or tell a story.
* A comic telling the romantic adventures of the protagonist of a video game.
* Photographs of a knitted character.
* An alternative version of a Jane Austen novel in which there's a zombie apocalypse.
* The supporting text for an original adventure for a tabletop roleplaying game.
==No Direct Advertising==
Advertising on "Archive of Our Own" is not allowed. This includes mentions by fans of writing commissions and Patreon work.
As stated in the TOS[]
As stated in various parts of the TOS FAQ[]
===From a 2016 Discussion===
==2019 Hugo Award Win==
In August 2019, Archive of Our Own was awarded The Hugo Award for Best Related Work. It was the first time a fanfic archive or the Organization for Transformative Works had ever won a Hugo, the most prestigious award in Science Fiction Fandom. To date, no fanfiction has ever won a Hugo, despite the existence of a Fan Writer category. It was seen as an advancement from fanfiction's poor reputation in SF fandom, as well as in mainstream society.
Many AO3 users had joked about being Hugo Award nominees/winners, leading some to explain that the award was for the site itself and not for the fanworks on the site. Some people questioned whether an entire project could be eligible for a Hugo Award, resulting in the WSFS stating that AO3 was eligible for the award based on “aspects other than the fictional text.”2019 Hugo Results
On September 13, the OTW posted , stating that the World Science Fiction Society (who give the awards) had asked them to publicly clarify "that the Hugo was awarded to the AO3, and not to any particular work(s) hosted on it".
Discussion ensued in comments to the post as well as on File 770 and elsewhere over why the WSFS had needed to clarify the joke and whether or not SF fandom was still anti-fanfic.
==Reactions==
===Initial Criticisms Of===
Initial complaints by some fans:
* it was too powerful
* fans disliked the tagging system: see AO3 Tagging Policy Debate and AO3 Tag Wrangling
* the archive put too many eggs in one basket
* it allowed "problematic content"
* fans didn't like various features
* fans didn't like archives "... trolling archives for fic is about the last way I want to find reading material. I'd much rather read from recs or delicious or my flist. -- comment by kyuuketsukirui at in response to the FanLib proposal, May 21, 2007
* it lacked a way to rate fanworks "The main problem with such mass run sites is that there is no way to determine what is good writing and what isn't. A search on the site isn't going to help me figure that out and their rating system isn't either. Rating systems have been around nearly as long as their have been archives." -- , post by midnightbex, May 21, 2007
* it was too Western-media centric
* fans didn't like the people who created it, nor the way it was created
===Initial Praise Of===
Initial praise by some fans:
* it was owned by fans
* it had a tagging system
* it was non-profit and had no ads
* it did not sponsor content
* it was one-stop shopping
* there was no censorship or policing of content
=== History: Some 2007/2008 Fan Comments===
For much more, see Beginnings of OTW: 2007-08 Comments.
Below are some anecdotal comments from An Archive Of One's Own (post by astolat) which show challenges, enthusiasm, and eventual growing pains of getting this project off the ground. See An Archive Of One's Own (post by astolat)/Comments for many, many more.
* "... I would say that much of the reason that fanfic.net is a badfic haven is because the interfaces and design are bad and not satisfying for the picky readers that most of us are, once we get through the first rush of "omg my fandom!" I know that when ff.net was first launched, I wasn't inherently avoiding it; I avoided it because it was just terrible to use. I *do* think that in order to be successful, an archive has to be someplace where you yourself want to live—it has to be a place where you want to read, or else you are not going to bother posting there, and that if you make a site that the most demanding readers are satisfied with, that is kind of the key. For instance, I feel that LJ has beaten out the fandom-specific central archives because it has MAJOR advantages for anyone who is multifannish or social, despite the lack of searching capabilities. I don't want to try and duplicate the effort of LJ, but I think something like the "post here AND to LJ at once" tool would be a great way to keep people posting to the archive because it would have zero cost (possibly negative cost if you also add in automatic lj community posting) for someone posting a story to LJ." from astolat, May 17, 2007
* "[Live Journal] is also lousy for finding fics and authors in a new fandom. Yes, there are communities, but they don't always have names that would enable someone to find them on their own, and I for one have never managed to get into a new fandom that included authors I already knew from a previous one, which means having no one to point those communities out. In general, the loss of archives (and mailing lists, for that matter) in favor of LJ has made my fannish life more difficult. A quality panfandom archive would be a big help." from few, May 17, 2007
* "Yes, I think locking is a very good option to allow (and also google-blocking) on an individual user basis, so the archive lets different people manage their own comfort level. The problem with adding vids (other than vids as links -- which I think would be brilliant) -- is the massive bandwidth cost, and the bigger questions of legality. from astolat, May 17, 2007
* "In my mind, this doesn't sound like reiterating LiveJournal. I'm one of the folks who almost never posts outside of LiveJournal anymore but could definitely go for something like this--it's combining all the best features of archiving and LJ at once. It wouldn't just be the search feature that would make things more user-friendly; it would be the tiers of organization that would appeal to me. As a panfandom reader using LiveJournal is just a pain in my ass, but I do it because there isn't really another option. More than that, if there was an option for site-wide tag searches, that would integrate a lot of the best features of del.icio.us. I'm having a hard time seeing any downsides to it other than the 'getting off the ground' phase where people ask themselves 'Ugh, do I really want to go back and re-post all my fanfiction here?' Because that would the major hump to get over, I think, in regards to converting some folks to this new system. Or maybe I should say to converting me. *g*"—tracendenza, May 18, 2007
* "My feeling is the gatekeeping needed to keep out badfic costs more than it is worth. I think if you provide filtering mechanisms that let people find manageable lists of stories they are really interested in (narrowing down by fandom, pairing, category, particular features), and sort them by (admittedly imperfect) criteria like #comments/recs/hits, while ALSO providing mechanisms to give exposure and encouragement to new writers so those imperfect measures don't bury new people, that really, any quantity of badfic can be managed. Also, frankly, I suspect that the presence of higher quality fanfic as examples within the archive would all on its own help badfic/newbie writers improve rapidly. The problem with ff.net is there are no real mechanisms for winnowing out badfic."—astolat, May 17, 2007
===History: Some 2016 Fan Comments===
A conversation about content, policies, and history:
In 2016, a fan commented, "See i didn't realise ao3 was started in response to lj deleting account relating to pedophilia and they explicitly support the posting of such works yikes for this discussion."
This post was deleted, and then reposted after it had gotten a long response. The original poster then wrote a much longer post with this excerpt: "The post was me starting to think about whether I want to post my own work on a website which also allows pedophiles to be present on it. That could lead to me being associated with them, or some way indirectly supporting such a community (by supporting the archive). Some moderator said, ‘If you want to kick certain kinds of content off of AO3, you do not belong on AO3 in the first place,’ so this was me thinking maybe I do not belong on AO3. And maybe I think other people should consider this also. But really I lack the personal investment or moral integrity to stop posting there, because I like getting weekly kudos emails." see the full exchange here: .
The long response:
Also see AO3 Content Discussion (2016).
==Racism and the AO3==
Numerous discussions have arisen over the years, particularly as AO3's size, notoriety and clout has grown, about the handling of racist content, abuse and behaviour on the site. AO3 & Censorship is one meta essay published in 2018 that deals with the subject of racist trolls harassing AO3 users and how the site's content policy could be adapted to address this more effectively. 
In 2020, the OTW and AO3 Racism Discussion (2020) was instigated by the global protests in the wake of George Floyd's death and the subsequent debates ignited about racism in all parts of life, including fandom. It gave rise to the Open Letter to the OTW on Racism in Fandom, which led to a statement being published by the OTW Board, Chairs and Leads about steps that the OTW would be taking to address issues of racism both internally and within its projects. Many of these proposed steps concerned the AO3, such as tools to facilitate investigations by the Policy & Abuse team, and features to give readers and creators more control and protection, such as comment freezing and potential blocking and muting functionality.Statement from the OTW Board of Directors, Chairs, & Leads, June 24, 2020. (Accessed February 10, 2022).
The blog post What's up with the AO3 and racism? was also published during this period, and summarises the main issues under discussion.
Other relevant essays/articles:
*The Myth of Strikethrough and ‘Knowing Our History’ (May 2018)
*Fleeting Frustrations # 7: Archive Frenzy and Being (Un) Grateful To Our Fannish Foremothers (Stuck In 2002) (June 2019)
*Thread Collection: Antiblackness in the Archive (6/14) (June 2020)
*Let’s talk about racism in The Archive – again. (January 2021)
*An archive of whose own? White feminism and racial justice in fan fiction’s digital infrastructure (September 2021)
*Over A Year After the OTW/AO3’s Statement of Solidarity: Where Are We With That Anti Racism? (September 2021)
===Proposed Action===
====Removal of Racist Fanworks====
Many fans have called for the outright removal of racist fanworks on AO3, or questioned why AO3 continues to allow these works to exist/be published on the site. 
This has engendered pushback from other fans arguing that this would undermine AO3's stance of maximum content inclusivity (with some advocating for new required warnings, or features to help readers curate their experience, as an alternative), leading to debates about whether advocating for anti-racist action is being misclassified as a push for "censorship".
The question of how works on the Archive would be identified as "racist" has also been the subject of considerable debate, as well as the issue of works by fans of colour that deal with racism and its effects being potentially caught in the crossfire.
====Additional Warnings====
==Censorship==
AO3's content policies comply with U.S. law. A few countries with more restrictive speech laws have outright blocked or limited access to the website:
* China: In February 2020, AO3 became inaccessible to users in mainland China. The reason for the block has never been officially acknowledged, but occurred after fans of Xiao Zhan sent reports to the Chinese government over a fanfic about him that was hosted on the site. See Blocking of AO3 in China. 
* Germany: In December 2022, German users reported that AO3 links were no longer returned in Google search results. The URL remained accessible directly but Google users were unable to find AO3's URL via the search function. Notices on Google suggest that AO3 was removed from search results due to receipt of a local law complaint, with the URL reported as illegal under German Youth Protection laws., a tumblr post by wordsintimeandspace, Dec 23 2022., a tumblr post by alpaca-clouds, January 6 2023. The site was indexed by the German Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons due to "child pornography content". Because Google implements the Federal Department's block list, AO3 does not appear in Google search results within Germany.
* Russia: In April 2023, Russian users reported that they could no longer access AO3. See Blocking of AO3 in Russia.
==Communities==
* ao3_skins on LJ
* ao3some on DW
* ao3_invitecodes on DW
* ao3_skins on DW
* AO3 subreddit
* AO3 thread at holiwarka (in Russian)
==Interviews==
* -- -- (August 12-16, 2019)
==Further Reading/Meta==
===General===
* List of Content Banned by Archives (many fanwork archives, compare and contrast)
* Timeline of Organization for Transformative Works
* How To Find The Best Fanfic On The Internet, an AO3-focused overview at Gizmodo (August 18, 2015)
* The Fanfic Author's Guide to Metatext by Eiiri (April 24th, 2021)
===2007===
* Beginnings of OTW: 2007-08 Comments (many, many links to meta and comments)
* (May 23, 2007)
===2009===
* , November 27, 2009
===2011===
* on browsing & reading on AO3 by xparrot (August 2011)
* AO3 Fun Facts by elz (November 2011)
===2015===
* (April 2015)
* , Farasha Silver (November 2015)
===2016===
* PSA: DON'T MENTION COMMISSIONS/PATREON ON AO3 (2016)
* AO3 Content Discussion (2016)
*An Archive of Their Own: A Case Study of Feminist HCI and Values in Design by Casey Fiesler, Shannon Morrison, and Amy S. Bruckman (2016)
* I didn't realise ao3 was started in response to lj deleting account relating to pedophilia and they explicitly support the posting of such works yikes (2016)
===2017===
* Concerning Archive of Our Own (2017)
* Feedback culture is dead, long live feedback culture! (A meta post and project about feedback on fanfiction, primarily focused on AO3 and suggesting improvements for the site) (2017–present)
===2018===
* A “quick” & “simple” guide to finding old fic off of AO3 (2018)
===2019===
* (January 2019)
===2020===
* OTW and AO3 Racism Discussion (2020)
* What's up with the AO3 and racism?
===2021===
* What’s going on with all the “if you donate to AO3 you’re evil” posting on Tumblr? (April 15, 2021)
* (April 16, 2021)
* A Brief History of Online Fanfiction Platforms by Fangirls Anonymous (May 2021)
*"aooo...was never meant to be the only fanfic posting site. It was meant to be an alternative to sites which censored content you were allowed to post" (October 20, 2021) 
===2022===
* the tiktokification of ao3 (Sep 25, 2022)
* (2022)
==AO3 Metafandom==
===AO3 Tag Appreciation===
*ao3tagoftheday on Tumblr
*neatao3tags on Twitter
===AO3 Authors Appreciation===
*Ode to AO3 (Filk)
===AO3 Commenter Appreciation===
*ao3commentoftheday
==Some Old Links==
* very early front page 
* very early FAQ 
* front page (95 users, 182 fandoms, 1145 fanworks) 
* The OTW Seven (moving to new server)
* browse for more old pages
==References==
Category:Multifandom Archives
Category:Organization for Transformative Works
Category:OTW-Archive
 
Category:2008 Archives
Category:2000s Archives
Category:2010s Archives
Category:2020s Archives