How to stay safe on AO3 with the current anonymous harassment fics
I'm sure many people have seen that there is a person or a group of people posting triggering content while purposely mistagging them and posting under anonymous. This makes it hard to avoid or to report because they're toeing the line of AO3s rules.
This is NOT a ship war thing. This is happening in both the Buddie and Bucktommy tags. So please don't go blaming the other ship's fandom. Let's not turn this into another argument. We're both being targeted with this harassment so it's time to set ship war aside for a moment.
To keep triggering details minimal: these fics often include Christopher in triggering content, mostly tagged as Explicit and Creator Chose Not To Use Warnings. Some have triggering stuff in the summary, others don't and are pretending to be a regular Buddie or Bucktommy fic.
Since not everyone knows the tips and tricks (including me) of AO3, here are some ways you can avoid these fics. If anyone has more ways, please feel free to reply or reblog (preferably with text in the reblog instead of in the tags so it's easier to find for others and doesn't get lost)
Avoid the red flags. Now, this does not mean every fic out there with these things are harmful! But the harmful ones do tend to have these. Being posted by anonymous is the biggest reddest flag there is (more on how to avoid in n2). Often these fics are under 1k words. Not rated and E rated seem to be most commonly tagged including 'Creator Chose Not To Use Warnings'.
Filter out anonymous through filters
How to filter out anonymous: add -creators:Anonymous in the 'search within results' filter. You can find this under 'more options'.
This is different than a work skin. While a work skin changes how a specific work will look (think those tweets or texts in fics) the site skin changes the way the site itself looks. Most likely you've already seen some at the bottom of AO3, dark mode is also a site skin. But aside from changing how things look, you can also filter out specific things, including triggering tags and anonymous fics.
You can find skins on your dashboard. Add the following code:
.work:not(:has(.heading>a[rel=author])) {
According to Reddit this should hide fics with Anonymous always. Orphan fics and regular accounts are not affected. This is because anonymous fics don't have an author link like orphan and normal fics have.
Having this code added in your site skin (don't forget to turn it on) means you don't have to use the filters for it anymore. The site will automatically hide it.
You can decide if you do it temporarily or permanently. While researching I found posts about this same issue in the 911 fandom from 11 months ago, so it keeps happening. But you can always turn a skin off or delete them. If you already use a public skin like dark mode, you can search the code on google and copy it to paste in the site skin you're making. There are also a ton of posts and blogs about different codes if you want to experiment with other permanent filters or the aesthetic. Afaik you can add and mix a lot of things into one skin.
Recommendation posts and bookmarks
If you still don't feel safe or don't want to do the mentioned ways, you can always search for recommendations posts from people you trust or go through people's bookmarks. Bookmarks have a filter option, so if you go through the bookmarks of your friends/mutuals/an author you like and they have a ton of bookmarks (*ahem, excuse my 700+) you can use these filters the same way you do when you're looking for fics regularly.
If you already use it... See this as your sign to tackle that tbr ;)
But if you don't, adding fics to your marked for later is like adding books you want to read (or reread, though you can use bookmarks for those as well) in bookshelves. Sadly, marked for later does not have filters (the day they add those is the day I will know peace)
You can add any fic you want and as many as you want. This way you can easily find fics you want to read at a later date. I often go through recommendations posts and add the fics I want to read to my marked for later. 9 times out of 10 when I read a fic, I read it from my marked for later.
You can find the marked for later button both in the top and the end of a work. And if you read the fic, you can click in 'mark as read' and it will disappear from the list. The list is under 'history'.
(shout-out to @sofa-king-lame you were at the top of the list haha)
Subscribe to your favorite authors
This way you get links to their new works in your email and you can read them straight away without having to filter and search on AO3.
Create rec posts for others
If you want to help your fellow readers, you can create recommendation posts here on Tumblr to help them find amazing fics in a safe way!
I might be missing something, so as I said, feel free to add more ways!
I know several people have reported fics to AO3 and I myself have sent them a ticket about how this situation can be avoided. But sadly, as much as I love AO3, they tend to protect anonymous trolls with their guidelines and it is tough to successfully report these type of fics because of the 'creator chose not to use warnings' tag and the fact that offensive works aren't against the rules. It's always 'curate your own safe space' except when it comes to this, it's impossible to do so with the way anonymous fics are protected since you can't block them or have an easier 'no anonymous fics' button in the filters.
However, hopefully AO3 will agree that this massive amount of anonymous rage bait fics maliciously posted to trigger people is harassment. From what I've seen anonymous users are not anonymous for AO3 volunteers/abuse team so they could give the user or users doing this consequences if they want to. Let's hope @ao3org wants to.
To people who regularly post anonymous fics that are not harmful, I'd recommend creating a 'burner account' and naming it anonymous with some numbers, that way your works won't be filtered out but also not traced back to your main account and you won't lose as much interactions
