IMPORTANT! I have been warned by AO3 (Patreon)

2 days ago, I received one of the scariest emails in my life. It was from the AO3 Policy and Abuse team, stating that my works violate their TOS due to the mentioning of my Patreon.

This is the text: “Section IV.B. of our Terms of Service states: "Promotion of commercial products or activities is not allowed." […] Solicitations for direct or indirect commercial advantage are not permitted on the Archive. This includes all links or references to commercial sites (such as Amazon, Patreon, or Ko-fi) as well as the monetization features of non-commercial sites (such as Tumblr Post+, Twitch Prime, or DeviantArt Shop); any mention of collecting donations, offering paid commissions, or selling published works; previews for paywalled content; and any other language which one might interpret as requesting or having requested financial contributions, whether for yourself or others.“

Remember the bold part, it will be important later.

But TD, doesn’t almost everyone post links that lead to a Patreon, whether indirectly or not, or at least mentions that they have one, even if they do not say their username?

Yes. That is also why I assumed it was allowed. TOS are honestly difficult to understand sometimes, so I tend to orient myself on what other people are doing, and if they have been doing it for a long time (12+ months) without consequences, I think it is reasonable to assume that this type of promotion is allowed. This was a lack of judgement on my part. Someone reported my work, and that is that.

Luckily, Patreon is not the reason why I have been doing this. It was always about the comments and positive feedback I have gotten. Which is why this next part stings so much.

“We require you to edit out all instances of commercial promotion from your account within 7 days. This includes anything that might be in any of your other works (including all tags, notes, and comments posted by both you and others), any of your series, and on your profile page.”

I asked for clarification on this, and they really want me to just delete any comments that mention the Patreon. Which really sucks because some of them are very long and made & make me super happy, losing them is what I am really sad about. Especially since it will mostly be just because of 1 word.Which is why my plan is to copy them, delete the original, and then post them again with the offending part removed. I will also upload a PDF here in a couple days with all the original comments that had to be removed. That way, we can preserve them in some way at least.

I sent a second E-Mail trying to ask whether there was a different way or if this was okay, however I haven’t gotten a response. I’ve been told that the team responsible consists entirely of volunteers and is rather small, meaning I cannot rely on their assistance in deciding what to do.

As you can read, I have 7 days to do this before my work is at risk, and when you are reading this, I am currently already working on editing everything.

“You are permitted to link to your profiles on non-commercial sites but you are not permitted to imply that these profiles on non-commercial sites link to commercial sites even if they do, and some links to non-commercial sites may constitute violations if the main purpose of the link is to evade our rules.”

This obviously leaves a lot up for interpretation, whether replacing the Patreon with something like a link.tree would be allowed or not. Whether I could say that I also post on Wattpad, and that a Patreon like is there or not etc. Hence, I will not do this at the current time. I would rather be safe. The reason why I asked this to the Policy team is because it would give me an option to replace the removed text with, saving the coherency of comments & notes.

The main problem is this part: “and any other language which one might interpret as requesting or having requested financial contributions, whether for yourself or others.“

I have not gotten clarification, but as you can tell, this can mean anything. Me saying that I had to remove something to adhere to AO3 TOS would already be a violating of this, since it implies that I have mentioned something financial in the past.

This means I am basically being censored in this regard, and since you guys are also not allowed to say anything in that regard, I cannot even tell people if they ask why their comment got deleted or why there is something removed in the notes.

I understand that the goal of rules like that is to be vague in order to protect the site, however it causes problems such as this because it is up to a small team of volunteers to interpret these kinds of things. Which is very scary considering all the work I put into this and how much it means to me and you, that it could just be gone.

What does this mean in short? And for the readers?

·         I have to remove all mentions of the word Patreon, be it in the Notes or in anyone’s comments. Also phrases that imply that a Patreon exists. I will do my best to preserve as many comments as I can.

·         In the future, please do not mention, allude to or anything else that could be interpreted as a hint to the Patreon or whatever. It sucks, but until I get clarification on how strict this is, we will all have to act like it never happened, at least on AO3. It feels a lot like censorship, and weird since that means that no one can learn from my mistake and it will overall just create a weird vibe around my work, and I hate that. People will guess all kinds of things what happened, and maybe stop reading because they think I did something horrible, when in reality it was something minor like a Patreon.

I really hope this will not hurt the commenting culture we have going.

Comments are what motivates and drives me, and even if one of your past comments gets deleted, please do not get discouraged from commenting in the future. I will do my best to leave the comments open, but I don’t know what AO3 will force me to do in order to protect my work.

I think that was everything so far, if I forgot anything I will add it in a future post. This is all very scary and new to me, as I have never had such a problem before, but please know that I will do everything to keep my work publicly available.  

Please notify me if you lose access, but I am really hoping it does not come to that.

I will now start editing everything. Wish me the best of luck that everything will turn out fine. Ideally, we can all continue as always and besides these edits and this scary moment, nothing has to change. Let's hope for that. Because I want to keep posting on AO3.

Best wishes to all of us,

TD23