i wish people would stop romanticizing not eating breakfast and not getting enough sleep and being dependent on coffee to function and always being in a bad mood and treating yourself poorly because that behavior is very unhealthy for you
This tool is optional. No one is required to use it, but it's here if you want to know which of your AO3 fics were scraped. Locked works were not 100% protected from this scrape. Currently, I don't know of any next steps you should be taking, so this is all informational.
Most people should use this link to check if they were included in the March 2025 AO3 scrape. This will show up to 2,000 scraped works for most usernames.
Or you can use this version, which is slower but does a better job if your username is a common word. This version also lets you look up works by work ID number, which is useful if you're looking for an orphaned or anonymous fic.
If you have more than 2,000 published works, first off, I am jealous of your motivation to write that much. But second, that won't display right on the public version of the tools. You can send me an ask (preferred) or DM (if you need to) to have me do a custom search for you if you have more than 2,000 total works under 1 username. If you send an ask off-anon asking me to search a name, I'll assume you want a private answer.
In case this post breaches containment: this is a tool that only has access to the work IDs, titles, author names, chapter counts, and hit counts of the scraped fics for this most recent scrape by nyuuzyou discovered in April 2025. There is no other work data in this tool. This never had the content of your works loaded to it, only info to help you check if your works were scraped. If you need additional metadata, I can search my offline copy for you if you share a work ID number and tell me what data you're looking for. I will never search the full work text for anyone, but I can check things like word counts and tags.
Please come yell if the tool stops working, and I'll fix as fast as I can. It's slow as hell, but it does load eventually. Give it up to 10 minutes, and if it seems down after that, please alert me via ask! Anons are on if you're shy. The link at the top is faster and handles most users well.
On mobile, enable screen rotation and turn your phone sideways. It's a litttttle easier to use like that. It works better if you can use desktop.
Some FAQs below the cut:
"What do I need to do now?": At this time, the main place where this dataset was shared is disabled. As far as I'm aware, you don't need to do anything, but I'll update if I hear otherwise. If you're worried about getting scraped again, locking your fics to users only is NOT a guarantee, but it's a little extra protection. There are methods that can protect you more, but those will come at a cost of hiding your works from more potential readers as well.
"I know AO3 will be scraped again, and I'm willing to put a silly amount of effort into making my fics unusable for AI!": Excellent, stick around here. I'm currently trying to keep up with anyone working on solutions to poison our AO3 fics, and I will be reblogging information about doing this as I come across it.
"I want my fics to be unusable for AI, but I wanna be lazy about it.": You're so real for that, bestie. It may take awhile, but I'm on the lookout for data poisoning methods that require less effort, and I will boost posts regarding that once I find anything reputable.
"I don't want to know!": This tool is 100% optional. If you don't want to know, simply don't click the link. You are totally welcome to block me if it makes you feel more comfortable.
"Can I see the exact content they scraped?": Nope, not through me. I don't have the time to vet every single person to make sure they are who they say they are, and I don't want to risk giving a scraped copy of your fic to anyone else. If you really want to see this, you can find the info out there still and look it up yourself, but I can't be the one to do it for you.
"Are locked fics safe?": Not safe, but so far, it appears that locked fics were scraped less often than public fics. The only fics I haven't seen scraped as of right now are fics in unrevealed collections, which even logged-in users can't view without permission from the owner.
"My work wasn't a fic. It was an image/video/podfic.": You're safe! All the scrape got was stuff like the tags you used and your title and author name. The work content itself is a blank gap based on the samples I've checked.
"It's slow.": Unfortunately, a 13 million row data dashboard is going to be on the slow side. I think I've done everything I can to speed it up, but it may still take up to 10 minutes to load if you use the second link. It's faster if you can use desktop or the first link, but it should work on your phone too.
"My fic isn't there.": The cut-off date is around February 15th, 2025 for oneshots, but chapters posted up to March 21st, 2025 have been found in the data so far. I had to remove a few works from the dataset because the data was all skrungly and breaking my tool. (The few fics I removed were NOT in English.) Otherwise, from what I can tell so far, the scraper's code just... wasn't very good, so most likely, your fic was missed by random chance.
Thanks to everyone who helped with the cost to host the tool! I appreciate you so so so much. As of this edit, I've received more donations than what I paid to make this tool so you do NOT need to keep sending money. (But I super appreciate everyone who did help fund this! I just wanna make sure we all know it's all paid for now, so if you send any more that's just going to my savings to fix the electrical problems with my house. I don't have any more costs to support for this project right now.)
(Made some edits to the post on 27-May-2025 to update information!)
Gonna pass this around once more with an addition!
Here is a tool that can be used to poison your current and future AO3 fics if you would like to reduce the chances that your work will be useful to scrapers in the future. You can thank the lovely @all-hail-trash-prince for writing the code and for making it more accessible to those who don't know how to run code.
Here is me doing a very brief runthrough on the current version of the tool (as of this reblog).
I'm not saying you have to use this tool. I'm just boosting it as one potential path forward for those who want to reduce the quality of their fics for future scrapers without reducing the quality for readers on AO3, including those using screen readers to narrate your fics. You can choose to use it for zero fics, one fic, some of your fics, or all of your fics. Entirely up to you if you want to do this.
Poisoning your fics now does not undo nyuuzyou's scrape. The data, while a little less accessible now, is still out there in a few locations. There's no undoing that, and there will always be a copy of the fics scraped by nyuuzyou. Poisoning your fics is a method to protect you from future scrapes. The protection doesn't reduce the risk that you will be scraped, but it highly increases the chance that the scraper will not be able to use your fic for anything useful, including AI training. There's no surefire way to protect your fics short of not sharing them at all, but this tool provides the best balance I've seen of protecting them from unwanted use and still allowing you to share with real readers.
And once more for anyone who hasn't caught it yet: I am not directly affiliated with AO3. This is a third party tool that you may choose to use or may choose to ignore.
While the AI scrapes are very stresfull, I don't think this method of "poisoning" is a good thing for one reason:
The real human reader has to view the fic with workskin on (that's how inserted poison text is hidden visually while being present in the html code of the page that's being scraped).
Personally, I had "Hide work skins" in my account preferences for maybe 6 or 7 years untill I got interested in applying skins to my own works and realised how much stuff I was missing with this setting on. But what's even more important - downloading doesn't apply the workskin, even in html files! So every reader who prefers to download the fics for whatever reason - unstable connection, vpn, they perfer to use their ebook device - all those people will see the "poison text" too.
I think it won't affect TTS if you use it on the web page, since site skin will make sure those bits aren't rendered, but if they download the epub... Yeah.
For sure! As mentioned, it's a personal decision for anyone who wants to, and that aspect is touched on in one of the links above. If you prioritize your readers having a little more freedom in how they interact with your work, then this method isn't for you.
The default AO3 setting is to use the creator's work skin, so this isn't an issue for most people. A good way for authors who choose to use this poisoning method to address those who DO have that setting flipped is to mention it in the opening author's note. It's one simple button to click to enable the custom work skin as a reader who has them disabled by default, and the A/N can be a cue to do that for anyone who doesn't figure it out on their own.
The creator of this code also did recommend making an obvious mention in the A/N that you need to use an alternate download method for the fic. People can still easily download the fic by "printing" it but selecting "print to PDF" to save a copy as it visually appears. Alternatively, you can save an entire webpage as HTML and it will maintain the intended formatting. You just can't click the native AO3 download button on a poisoned fic.
And correct! It doesn't seem to negatively impact TTS. I tested on the only TTS software I have easy access to, but if someone else finds that there's a popular TTS that doesn't cooperate with this method, please let me know.
There's no required way to use this tool if you choose to use it, but in my opinion, the best way is to include a mention of the major potential impacts in the first A/N, including the inability to use the native download button and the requirement to view the work with the work skin enabled.
Not sure why the attitude in the tags since this literally works with the app you mentioned using the basic workaround suggested above.
For anyone interested @ Voice works with this poisoning method as long as you (the reader) use the "Print to PDF" workaround that authors can choose to mention in their A/Ns on poisoned fics.
Works using this method are still going to be inaccessible to a lot of disabled people.
Some of us don't use TTS software because we can generally get around hard-to-read text by, say, downloading an epub and altering the font and the background colors to make it legible or to keep it from triggering a migraine.
Maybe I'm not getting it! To me, it makes the most sense to use an AO3 site skin with the font and background color that is accessible to me. I'm just getting hung up on the why of downloading as an epub just for accessibility if it's only for the colors. (Genuine question, not trying to be a dick. Just trying to understand why you have to do it this way so I can work on improving our methods to exclude fewer people.)
For one thing, my needs change. I might need different colors and sizes depending on whether I have a migraine, what stage the migraine is in, and the like. What works at one moment might not work the next.
I don't want to have to go in and change the skin every time my head begins to work differently. With my ereader app, I can quickly hit a button and change to a different preset.
Also, my browser doesn't show most sites the way they're set up to be shown. I've overridden the fonts and have plugins that remove backgrounds to make the internet more accessible to me. And those settings and plugins don't play well with site skins.
Even if I tried to make a skin, I would have to go in and change my overall settings and then change them back every time I visit and leave AO3.
(And thank you for discussing this. I do appreciate it.)
Some additional critique I'd appreciate some brainstorming on!
I gave this a shot knowing the tools I already have, and I could not get the native print to PDF option to print in any style except the default font and black font on white background.
Whatever solution we go for with this, it needs to at a minimum:
Have a free version so that anyone can use it
Offer the reader's choice of fonts
Offer the reader's choice of background AND font color
Works with either a PDF or an HTML file
If you have anything that you think can do this, please share! I will review and see what actually works.
And if anyone else has accessibility critiques, please share them. Don't be an ass about it, but I do want to know how this current solution is or may possibly negatively affect you. The goal is to continuously improve the solution so it works for more and more people and ideally doesn't exclude anyone.
I hope this reaches every author on this site. If they haven’t written a word in years, only are writing in their head and haven’t put it down yet, are hip deep in their own War and Peace wordcount fic.
“I can read between the lines, and what it says is that distance makes the heart grow fonder, even though you might not know—or, better yet, neglect to accept—that you’re already super fond of the person doing the distancing.”
[or Toph goes home for the summer. Sokka realizes that not having her at his side kind of sucks.]
Also since heated rivalry has been the show of the year bringing back Skams iconic legacy tbh my personal favorite needledrop moment of the entire series isn’t just the iconic neon party make out scene, it’s this one, like this received a 10 hour standing ovation in my household the synergy between their chemistry and this song is out of this world insane
Big warning that my next fic is very self-indulgent and it’s actually just 65k words or so of Sokka being blissfully unaware of his feelings until they’re drop-kicked into his face. I apologize in advance for any inconvenience this will cause.
Just posted the first chapter of the sequel to An Anomaly in Time called “the spillover” ! linked below <3
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
fic summary:
When a loved one goes missing, any evidence or information gathered in the first 72 hours can make all the difference in finding and bringing them back home.
Too bad Bart has been missing for over a week.
(or)
Bart and his 31st century friends are trapped in space. Over on Earth, Jay's fears seemingly turn into reality as the Outsiders investigate the disappearance of their teammate.
(or)
Honestly: Making the most out of that millisecond scene in YJ Phantoms where Jay returned home to find Bart missing, like I TOOK it and RAN cause WHAT THE HELL was YJ thinking by giving us pure nothing burger over this…. anyway please enjoy 💛
Suyin being their daughter would make so much sense because her legacy of zaofu matches what sokka would also influence his child to have (arts, innovation etc…)
ra ra rasputin is objectively the funniest song ever written it's like "rasputin was an advisor to the romanovs and honestly he was a bit of a power-hungry conman (oof)... but you're not here for a history lesson! you want to know how much he fucked, don't you? well i'll tell you: he fucked. he fucked often and severely."