Oh no! Where are all the cookies? @cookiepotofchaos - Tumblr Blog

I am laughing so hard at a moment in this game for 3rd place between South Africa and Ghana where a player on each side got into a bit of a scuffle. The referee came over to have a word with them and they immediately put their arms around each other and gestured earnestly as if to say "Look, we're good, we're friends" 😂

melodious-oblivion

A huge win for the Afghani WNT, and a shockingly decent thing by FIFA. If you haven’t read the book “my beautiful sisters” yet, I would recommend it highly.

arcandoria-archived

crossposting from bsky - glad I stopped using spotify when I did and that I unlinked it from my discord, but still

[ reddit thread | bsky post ]

fanlore-wiki

Fanlore Monthly Editing Challenges - January

Returning for 2026 Fanlore will be having monthly editing challenges! Each month you can earn a shiny new badge for completing the suggested editing task.

January's editing challenge is add three example fanworks to any page.

To find out more about how to participate in the monthly challenges, and how to claim your badges, please check out the challenge's help page.

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We value every contribution to our shared fandom history. If you’re new to editing Fanlore or wikis in general, visit our New Visitor Portal to get started or ask us questions here!

fanlore-wiki

Featured Article: Cease and Desist by Fox Against Fan Sites

This week’s Featured Article is all about the Cease and Desist by Fox Against Fan Sites. In the mid-1990s, the rise of the internet meant a surge in online fan websites. 20th Century Fox launched an aggressive legal offensive against those fan websites, targeting the use of official images, sounds, and logos from shows like The Simpsons, The X-Files, Millennium, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Fox’s campaign began in October 1995, when their legal team sent Simpsons fan Jeanette Foshee a cease and desist letter, demanding she remove hundreds of Simpsons character icons she had created and shared freely with other fans for personal use. That kicked off a string of escalating cease and desist letters, which resulted in the takedown of a Millennium fan site a year later. Not all sites were forced down by Fox, and fanfiction and fan art were not targets; however, some fans took down or abandoned their websites and fanworks out of fear of being targeted. By 1997, the verb “Foxed” had become the catchall term for being threatened with legal action for copyright infringement.

The majority of fans did not support Fox’s aggressive tactics, feeling betrayed and villianized, and when Lucasfilm began targeting Star Wars fan sites, fans began organizing in protest, creating pro-fandom banners and spearheading campaigns to protect fan websites, some of which caught mainstream media attention.

Want to further explore this pivotal moment in fandom history? Dive into the controversy on Fanlore!

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We value every contribution to our shared fandom history. If you’re new to editing Fanlore or wikis in general, visit our New Visitor Portal to get started or ask us questions here!

christinaroseandrews

Okay, I will preface this with the GIGANTIC disclaimer that I promise I know how this looks, and I *swear* this is not personally motivated:

Hey everyone, it looks like there's some hinky stuff going on with LiveJournal in a way where it might be shutting down relatively soon -- and if not, who knows what will happen to it?

Obviously most of us aren't active users there right now, but a lot of us were active users there at some point, so... if you want to save your blog, this thread includes a few ways on how to do it, as well as a lot more detail on exactly what's going on.

(We also suggest screengrabbing or saving the page of any fics that you care about that are based there, as well as anything else you might have bookmarked.)

Just in general, as a reminder, despite what the old adage is: the internet is not forever. So back up anything you care about!

Note: edited to add screengrabs below the cut in case anyone doesn't want to click on the link.

ambular-d

Warning from the nice lady at Dreamwidth, in case it hasn't already made it around to anyone via other channels: it looks like the shambling corpse of LiveJournal is getting ready to keel over for good. Anything you may have over there that still holds any meaning to you, get it out while the getting's good.

Link to her post will be in the first comment, in case Tumblr is still doing the stupidity with links to outside websites.

sigrid-of-solstheim

Fanfiction writers be like:

"here's the immensely time consuming 100K word novel-length passion project I'm working on between my real life job and family! It eats up hundreds of hours of my one and only life, causes me emotional harm, and I gain basically nothing from it! Also I put it on the internet for free so anyone can read if they want. Hope you love it!" :)

I've seen a higher than usual number of people on my social media pages talking about being hit by one of the nastier comment bots so I thought I'd share this Fanlore article:

The increase in access to AI tools has likely been one of the causes of the rise in comment bots on AO3 in the past few years.

Some of the comment bots are programmed to say some awful things. Others are set-up to try and scam people. Some are just odd.

The Fanlore page linked has a lot of information about a range of Comment Bots operating on AO3 at the moment, for anyone who wants to get an idea of what comment bots look like.

#ao3 #Fanlore

have-you-been-here

In a rare pair tag, ao3, the internet

Have you been here?

I have been here

I have not been here

Voting ended onAug 16, 2025

sapphic-squid

Okay it’s been enough time I’m ready for the wilds season 3

allthingswhumpyandangsty

just a heads up to my fellow writers out there that AO3 is currently fighting off bots commenting on people’s works to tell them that AO3 will delete their fics “due to the works being deprecated”, and the deletion will affect their accounts unless the authors delete the fics themselves first. IT IS A SCAM. AO3 will NOT delete your works. please do NOT fall for these bots!

I’ve been told the reason why these bots are doing this is due to copyright infringement issue where they’re trying to steal your works (possibly to train AI but this is just a guess) ‼️‼️‼️and once you deleted your fics, it will be either very difficult or impossible for you to claim ownership of your own fics when they were already deleted.‼️‼️‼️

a reminder that AO3 will never contact you through your comments section (in case they claim to be one of the moderators). AO3 will only contact you through your email address which you use to register your account, and it will be from AO3’s official handle. not some sketchy ass @

so if you get a comment telling you you should “delete your works to protect your account because AO3 is doing blah blah blah” report that comment. don’t delete your works.

PLEASE DO NOT FALL FOR THESE SCAM.

AO3 IS NOT DELETING WORKS.

DO NOT DELETE YOUR WORKS JUST BECAUSE SOMEONE CLAIMS THEY KNOW SOMETHING.

voxofthevoid

Wow, now there's a bot going around on Ao3 telling people that the "moderators" will delete works from "deprecated" fandoms and impose bans.

Fearmongering bullshit, but it's fearmongering bullshit that seems to be taking advantage of the recent spotlight series in order to trick authors into deleting their fics.

Just. Why.

What the hell does anyone get out of making these bots.

xemylixa

There's a theory already that this makes it easier for copyright infringers (edit: plagiarists) to steal fanfics because you can't prove the authorship of a deleted work. (edit: this comes entirely from the ao3 subreddit and is pure conjecture! should have specified that! but it would fit the previous pattern)

This is pure evil

Spread the word

p.s. The comments look something like this:

p.p.s. There's no "new" policy that bans original works, either. Everything that was allowed, is still allowed. This is a "please read our TOS ffs" awareness campaign - not a surprise rugpull. Don't delete anything, please. It's an archive.

(edited once again to add image ID - completely forgot)

cookiepotofchaos

Unfortunately, the AI comment bots are constantly evolving and this is the latest thing. Do not delete your works, it is nonsense. Do not worry about your original works. There's some more information on Fanlore (linked below) about some of these infuriating frequent bots.

You can check the TOS Spotlight post I've also linked to learn about what is a non-fanwork and would be deleted, but it's not what these comment bots are portraying it as.

https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/31732

#ao3