hey there! I was on Ao3 and couldn’t give any of your work. Do you know what happened???
Hi!
Yes, they are now visible to registered users only. If you log on you'll be able to see it and they'll all have a lock beside it. They're still there!
I didn't want to do this, and I thought about it for a long time, but I wanted to protect my fics from any type of bot scraping, and at least this puts up a little bit of a barrier (though not completely unfortunately).
I don't want to train AI with my writing but I was reluctant to do this still because I know that means some people will not be able to access the fic because of that. And now there was another website called Rivd that was scraping fics off AO3 and reposting them to their website (luckily it looks like that one is offline already) and that was the tipping point for me. I've had fics reposted to Instagram before and couldn't do anything about it (they're still up!). A lot of times these requests involve giving your legal name and details to someone for a take-down request. Websites like Rivd are not going to care.
So do log on if you have an account. If you absolutely for some reason cannot make an account and log on, just message me on here or discord and I'll happily send you a link to a Google doc. I'm not trying to keep humans out, just the bots.
TLDR: they're now for registered users only because of bot scraping and fic stealing