CAN AO3 COLLECTIONS ACTUALLY HIDE WRITERS' WORKS WITHOUT THEIR CONSENT?
about the whole “AO3 collections that let people hide other writers’ works” thing that got writers worried about someone making their works hidden and invisible to audiences without their consent!
okay folks, I must admit that I was confused about it and I still am (a little) confused? but I did some research and I’d like to share what I found.
that said, a disclaimer before we dive in. this is what I think is the case, but I could still get something wrong. so don’t take what I’m about to say as 100% facts. I suggest you do your own research also if you want to be absolutely certain. also feel free to correct me if I got anything wrong.
now let’s get into it!
what is a collection? — on AO3, a collection is for people to exchange and collect works (the latter is kind of self-explanatory), so it’s designed to be for events like fic exchanges and such, but people can also use it to collect fics.
because of this, the owner of a collection can choose if they want to make their collection Public, or if they want to set the collection to “Unrevealed”.
the “Unrevealed collection” is the part people have issues with.
what is an “Unrevealed” collection? — an Unrevealed collection is a collection in which works are hidden, so no one can read them. the only people who can access and read works that are in an Unrevealed collection are the person who created that collection and the authors who wrote the works in said collection. but nobody else can. these works will not show up in tags. they will be completely hidden from viewers.
what is an Unrevealed collection for? — an Unrevealed collection is supposed to be for an upcoming fic event that hasn't started yet. that said, if the creator of a collection chooses to set their collection to Unrevealed forever, then the fics under it will stay hidden forever (unless the authors of those fics manually remove their works from the collection).
the owner of a collection can Public or Unrevealed the collection they created any time they want.
fanfic writers can remove their own works from a collection any time they want.
does this mean anybody can add my works into their collection and hide them from tags, as well as from my readers? — no. this is the part that got writers worried. but from what I’ve read, the answer is no, nobody can add your works into their collection and make your works invisible without your knowledge and permission. in other words, you will have to manually approve a request in order for your works to be in a collection.
you will receive a notification/an email from ao3 when someone tries adding your works to their collection. you can either reject or approve the request. or you can ignore the request altogether.
what if I didn't see the request? / what if the email didn't reach me? — if you didn't see the request, if the email didn't reach you, then as long as you didn't manually approve your works to be added into someone's collection, your works will not be added into their collection.
some writers choose to deliberately ignore collection requests and leave them as "pending" forever, so that they didn't actually reject anybody, but their works are never in anybody's collections either, since they never approve the requests. (and if their works are not in someone's collections, then no one can hide their works and make them invisible.)
the only way someone can hide your works from tags and from your readers and make your works invisible is if you have manually accepted/approved a collection request, and it must be a collection request that is Unrevealed when you do approve it.
in the past, if you allowed your works to be in someone's Public collection, but that someone later changed the collection to "Unrevealed", then your works would be automatically hidden from public views until/unless you manually removed your works from said collection or the collection's owner set it to Public again.
there also used to be a setting that was titled "Automatically agree to have my works added to collection". if this thing was enabled on your account, anybody could add your works to their collection, be it Public or Unrevealed, without your consent.
but because some people were abusing these features with malice (adding writers' works to their Unrevealed Collections without the writers' consent / changing Public collections to Unrevealed to hide writers' works without the writers' consent or knowledge), AO3 later changed its rules.
here's how it works today,
if you allow your work to be in someone's Unrevealed collection (so the collection is already Unrevealed when you approve the request, you you can see whether it's Unrevealed), your work will automatically be hidden until/unless one of these happens:
you manually remove your work from that collection
the owner of the collection changes their collection to Public
but if you allow your work to be in someone's Public collection (so the collection is Public when you approve the request), and the owner of the collection later changes their collection setting to Unrevealed, then your work will not be hidden — because it was added to the collection when the collection was Public. therefore it will always stay Public.
also, the "Automatically agree to have my works added to collection" setting is changed to "Allow others to invite my works to collections"
if you have "Allow others to invite my works to collection" enabled/activated, people can send you collection requests, you can approve, reject or ignore these requests
but if you have "Allow others to invite my works to collection" disabled, no one will be able to send you their collection requests to begin with.
I believe, after all of these, the only thing that can make "removing your own work from an Unrevealed collection (talking about work that you approved to be in said collection when said collection was Unrevealed)" a challenge is if you have orphaned that work. because once a work is orphaned, it is permanent. you cannot undo it. you cannot edit or delete it. basically you can't do anything with it anymore after you orphaned it (which is why I always advise writers to make their works Anonymous instead of orphaning them; you still own your Anonymous work, but you no longer own your orphaned work).
but overall, I'd say there's nothing for you to be worried about when it comes to collections. AO3's rules are fair and good when it comes to keeping writers' works safe and protected! ♡
