Renegade crew of reylo+ shippers sharing fav fanfics and making a proudly POC podcast. Find us on twitter! Ko-fi is our praise kink! We could never expect this, but if you feel inclined, you can buy us a coffee. Smut to music is another one of our kinks, check out our spotify account!
Alright! Sorry for being so absent today! I was building a tool so you can all check your own names on demand.
I am asking that you not talk about it on Hugging Face. I'm sure word will get there eventually, but I'd like to avoid them accessing this as much as possible. Feel absolutely free to spread around Tumblr.
AO3 search tool is here! Use page 1 to search scraped fics by username. Use page 2 to search by work ID (which you'll need to do if you're looking for an anonymous work).
Or you can use this version, which is strongly recommended if you've published more than about 20 fics on the username you're searching.
If you're unsure which to use:
The first link is better if your entire username is a common word. For example, if you're username is just "bread" then you probably can't search yourself in the second link. The first version is way slower, so I recommend trying the second link first and using the first link as a backup option if the second fails.
The first link contains a page to search by work ID. This is good if you have an anonymous or orphaned fic, since that's not going to appear by searching your username.
The second link is better if you have a LOT of fics. It will give you a count of fics so you don't have to add them up. It will show the top 2,000 work results found.
If you have more than 2,000 published works, first off, I am jealous of your motivation. But second, that won't display right on the public version of the tools. You can send an ask or DM to have me do a custom search for you if you have more than 2,000 total works under 1 username.
You can also ask or DM if your entire username is a common word, because you're likely to get drowned out of the search results in that case. Try the tool first, but if it returns a lot of author results for your search, and YOUR name isn't in the results, ask me! There's a decent chance you're in there, but one of the tool's weak points is searching extremely common words.
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 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. Version 1 is 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. Version 2 typically loads results within 1 minute 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 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.
"It's slow.": Unfortunately, a 13 million row data dashboard is always 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. It's faster if you can use desktop, but it should work on your phone too.
"My fic isn't there.": If it was published after March 15th, 2025, that was likely after all of the scraping took place. 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. I am continuing to look for methods to reduce the chances of a work getting scraped anyway, and I will share on this blog if/when I find something that works.
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.)
(Made some quick edits to the post on 04-May-2025 to update information a bit!)
It's one of the last few things we can have as a society that's free. You can engage, for free. People give you things (art, stories, etc), for free.
Don't buy into the consummerism just because it's everywhere else.
You don't have to consume everything you interact with. You don't have to use things, just because they exist.
You're allowed (still, for now), to have things that are enjoyable for free.
Do you realise how insane the world is? We don't have many places where we can just be, for free anymore, but ao3 is. Did you notice we don't have ads in ao3? We don't have pop ups? Where ELSE do we not have that?
Where else can you just go and not have to wait for a commercial to be over or for ads to be on the sidelines?
I don't think the younger people understand, but the whole of internet used to be like this. YouTubers would do Youtube for free, just because. You couldn't monetise your internet presence before.
Ao3 is like a little preserved corner of the internet where the old internet used to be, and it's being attacked by people who do not understand that free things are allowed to exist without judgment.
Please don't ruin this for us.
Some of us need it.
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