PSA: bot comments are taking over ao3

The above examples have been provided with the authors' permission to demonstrate what these look like.

Basic rundown:

• They are all 3 sentences long
• Perfect grammar, capitalization, and punctuation
• Like absolutely flawless English teacher-style writing with only a single exclamation mark, ever
• No mentions whatsoever of character names, settings, situations, or anything that could be tied to the story
• The usernames may be identical to people who exist on ao3, but the name is not clickable, and no profile is associated with it EXCEPT when you directly search for that name. What this means: the comments come from an unregistered (not logged in) reader, bots scrape the site for real usernames, attach that to the comment, and post

Please spread the word about this so authors can filter comments and report them accordingly

There has been some speculation about why this is happening at all, and the best guess is that this is a feature that AI-training story-scraping tools are implementing to try and make their browsing traffic look legitimate

this was mine. it was on a ONE-SHOT. keep your eyes open, kids

Elsa Martinelli for The Belle Starr Story (1968)

All the times 
you failed to love 
are now behind.
This is the present: 
a new chance 
to be kind.

read over a wip i haven't been working on and dang hope this author writes more someday

I love and relate to these parts but I also want people to know that one time I was feeling lazy in holiday, without Internet, and decided to go back and reread a five-year-old wip. I had forgotten most of it, and when I got to the cutoff point, I suddenly remembered how it was going to end and finished it on the spot. Now I have a novella.

Reread your WIPs! It's good for you!

Tumblr, buddy, listen to me. This is an unprecedented opportunity. You can snap up all of the pie here, and become defacto internet goodguy easy. All you gotta do is... drop the nsfw ban. Unambiguously. Announce that dicks are back on the menu. You want people subscribed the blogs? You want people to actually use your Post+ function? Porn. Let us use it for porn. The youngins aren't joining this site anyway, you're not competing with tiktok. The vaguely horny 20-40 demographic though? You can have that. You can have all of that. Think about it.

Do you know how many pinup artists alone are itching to come back to tumblr, but dont because of the unclear, seemingly arbitrary application of your nsfw policy? These are insanely talented people who are practically begging to give you content. For free. But you gotta change the policy. We can't keep dancing around this. Just think of publicity. The drama. A complete 180. You'd kill it tumblr. You could make it happen. Please.

This ⬆️⬆️⬆️ @staff take notes

RB for the largest sample size this site has ever seen

WTF IS BRO SAYING 🔥🔥🔥🔥

BIG fan of taking it easy. HUGE enthusiast of chilling. MASSIVE supporter of not taking things in the worst way and assuming the worst from the get go.

write fanfic that three people in the world will read, because those three people are going to be fucking pleased that it exists