A wave of spambot guest comments claiming to be AO3 volunteers has recently been made across the site. They claim that there has been a data breach and that fraudulent password reset emails have been sent out. In addition, the harassment spambots are now accusing users of being sex offenders.
These claims are not true. These comments are not being made by real AO3 volunteers or users, and AO3 has not experienced a data breach.
These comments copy existing AO3 usernames in order to make their accusations seem more legitimate. They may also try to lure people onto other platforms, similar to the art commission scam.
AO3 volunteers will never communicate with you through guest comments on your work. All important communications from AO3 about your account will be sent via email. More general announcements will be posted on our official social media accounts or published as news posts on AO3 or OTW.org.
If you want to make sure you're doing everything possible to protect yourself and your accounts, our Policy & Abuse volunteers published a news post earlier this year with advice about internet safety best practices: Protect Your AO3 Account.
As always, we recommend that you do not click on any suspicious links or give your contact information to scammers. Instead, simply mark the comments as spam or report them so that Policy & Abuse can remove other comments left by these spambots.
If you aren't sure how to mark guest comments as spam, learn how to handle them below the cut!
As these comments have so far all been from guests, our advice is to flag them as spam to better filter them out. To do that, simply follow the instructions below:
If the comment is on your own work:
Go directly to the comment on your work, either by clicking on the link in your email or in your AO3 inbox.
Click on the "Spam" button to mark the guest comment as spam and remove it from your work.
Note: The "Spam" button only appears when viewing a guest comment directly on your work. This is because the AO3 comment inbox is merely a copy of the work's comments – deleting a comment from your AO3 inbox does not delete the comment from the work itself.
If you see comments like these on someone else's work:
Feel free to let the creator know the comment is from a bot, and that they should mark it as spam.
You can also report the comments as botspam via the Policy Questions & Abuse Reports form linked at the bottom of every page on AO3.
If you are reporting multiple guest comments, please submit only one report, and include all comment links in your report description. (You can get the direct link to any comment by clicking the "Thread" button on the comment, and then copying the URL of that page.)
If you're not sure if something is a spambot comment, you're welcome to contact Policy & Abuse for assistance. Refer to the original post for more information!
The good plot twists aren't the ones that are wild left turns out of nowhere, they're the ones that make all the other little things that didn't quite add up before suddenly click
i need to gush about how incredibly seamless her compositing is in these. Compositing is incredibly hard and time consuming work on a crisp clean digital image. But compositing into what seems to be a scanned photograph that was shot on film? Insane work. The film grain + photo paper texture is matched perfectly as well as the varying softness from being slightly out of focus in different amounts in each image. Each film stock has its own specific tone too some are warmer, others are more purply, or green and they all handle contrast with light and shadow completely differently. There was so much to take into account doing this and i really dont know how she did it other than maybe finding those locations again and shooting with the same film stock on a day with similar lighting. I cannot stress enough that for professional photographers doing complex compositing is mostly relegated to having a fully locked down camera set up in studio under controlled repeatable lighting. Super impressive and a really fantastic photo series truly.
Okay but I don't think "that's not a photograph" is enough for this. That's a reduction linocut and I'm just going to assume a whole lot of the people here won't know what that means or google it. It means that the artist has had a linoleum block and has made this image by carving pieces out of it bit by bit, printing layers upon layers at different stages of carving to get the layered colours on the final print. Hypereaslistic paintings and pencil drawings and such are impressive, but I beg you all to look up how linocuts are done to get an idea of how this has been done.
date your friends - by which i do not mean you must literally date your friends but by which i mean go out to dinner with your friends, buy your friends flowers, tell your friends you love them, write your friends love letters, play your friends songs that make you think of them, help your friends with moving and doctors appointments and listen to their worries and joys. love one another so entirely and i promise the world will feel so much brighter and you will have a community full of love
snowghoul
titsay
yousharknotpass
germansingergirl
discoholicmusic
gummygunk
turnnoffyourmind
kaledo-art
