#kudos bot

[wordsandrobots]

I noticed what looks like kudos-bot behaviour on Child of the Dawn this morning so I have temporarily locked it to registered users only. Hopefully I'll only have to do this for a day, maybe two.

Alternatively, if four guests did spontaneously decided to give the fic kudos in the space of an hour, thank you and apologies for taking it away from you. But most likely, it's just another damn scraper blue-bottling about the place.

[kraken17]

Reading laylajeffany's and boojangs' posts I couldn't help but be surprised, because my only knowledge of the whole "kudos bot/AO3 web crawler" mess was that it had been around for three years at least but was a relatively harmless nuisance.

But searching for info on what is happening to them and other authors, I find that for the last year or so there has been another bot and that it is being deliberately targeted at specific fandoms and authors to inflate and unbalance their Kudos counts and make them targets for harassment campaigns using accusations of self-promotion or other bullshit.

Apparently the theory is that it could be related to content scrappers trying to steal fanfics for their own purposes (?). What is the logic behind doing something that forces authors to make their content private and lock their stories, I don't understand. Alternatively, there are people who are just plain assholes and mean-spirited like that, who probably just want to cause harm/stress.

[numptypylon]

Ao3 Kudos Bot at work

So, I got 5000 kudos in 12 hours, evenly distributed across all my fics, in a small fandom deep in hiatus. Obviously, these are fake, there just aren’t that many readers, and some of these stories are niche oneshots posted a year ago.

I’m sure some of you have noticed or experienced it yourselves, but I haven’t seen any posts about it on here, and this kudos bot has hit our little fandom HARD over the last few days. Every other newer fic is affected, although not all to the degree mine have been, some experience bursts of 40-100 kudos on a single fic. This is just a psa, if this happens to you, or you’re confused with the numbers you see with others. The writers themselves are not doing this, it’s a third party.

I do NOT want these kudos, they’re meaningless and not reflective of real reader interaction, and it feels really shitty to have these forced on you. This is not harmless, certainly not to me, but not on a larger scale either. 1) It makes it impossible for me to gauge my real stats, it’s hit every single one of my fics. 2) it’s demotivating because it’s burying the real guest kudos, I don’t know if any of them were real so I can’t be happy about them. 3) it’s unfairly promoting my fics relative to others, which I feel horrible about. Kudos is the most common metric for readers to sort by, and I don’t want to benefit at the expense of others. 4) It’s undermining the system at large, making kudos a useless metric by which to judge stories. 5) I worry people will suspect me of doing this myself and that I look dishonest, and it’ll be at best a reader-deterrent and at worst get me reported.

Ao3 is not able to do anything at present, was the response I and many others got. I understand it’s run by volunteers and resources are limited, and this post is not meant as a complaint. But I wanted to show the scope of this, because in a small fandom, this is a massive impact, fics don’t GET that many kudos, and it’s already at a point where kudos are meaningless, just a few days into this. And the bot is still at it.

Have other fandoms been hit this hard? Is it just less visible in larger fandoms? I’ve talked about it in discord servers and reddit and not gotten much response from outside the tdp fandom, but enough to know that it’s not EXCLUSIVE to tdp.

[walkawaytall]

I do not and never will understand the kudos bot thing that trolls through AO3 seemingly at random. Just…why??? I know good and damn well 38 people did not kudos Just Tauntauns last night. That fic had a target audience of me and is not particularly beloved. (To be clear, all three of these obviously got hit, but the other two would have mainly had me raising my eyebrows and wondering if they got linked somewhere or something. While I love Just Tauntauns, I’m under no delusions regarding its relative popularity. There is simply no way this wasn’t the work of a bot.)

[hjbender]

The AO3 kudos bot has been hitting my thorki fics, particularly my In Side Out series, pretty consistently for a while now—I don’t know for how long; it’s 3-4 kudos daily on average, which didn’t grab my attention like some people who have reported guest kudos in the double or triple digits.

I hate it, but I went ahead and locked those fics (and a couple new ones whose kudos counts seemed disproportionate). Hopefully it’ll break the cycle.

Kind of annoyed that the ratio on my most popular works are now meaningless, but I didn’t even know about the AO3 bot—or crawler, or whatever it is—until last week, so consider this a PSA to all AO3 authors who may not already know. Check your kudos, or make sure you've got the "Turn off emails about kudos" unselected in your preferences. If you’ve been getting small but daily kudos from guests over a long period of time, like me (I had to check my AO3 kudos notification emails over the last month to verify), you might be a victim.

Anyway, I've got some spare invites if anyone needs/wants an AO3 account. Just send me an ask 👍

[casterisks]

...I just had to lock a fic I've been working on for a few months now.

I really hate doing this, I want my work to be accessible.

I published my work yesterday, put 4 chapters up, then got a really sus amount of kudos.

this is a comparison of my newest work and my old work, both of the Lego Ninjago fandom. The newest work is a rewrite of the old.

There is a CLEAR difference in the ratio here, the amount of hits on the first screenshot. The original fic was edited over the course of several months (approx jan- november) my newest fic has only been out for a day.

I have set my newest fic to registered users only, hopefully to block this spam.

From what I understand, kudos work differently from hits.

I LOVE CHECKING MY WORK, EVEN IF IT'S MOSTLY GUESTS. I LOVE HAVING MY WORK OPEN TO EVERYONE.

If it's a bot or some specific person: DON'T SPAM KUDOS ON A FIC. IT'S KILLING MY ENJOYMENT OF MY HOBBY.

I'm someone who does small time works, and it KILLS me to have to do this, but until the weird spammy traffic stops I'll have to deal with this. This issue has been going on a while and it's frusterating that ao3 won't do anything.

17 hits and 58 kudos just doesn't add up at all, I'm relieved I checked it before I was spammed more but.. Ugh..

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Please support my work, I have put in two months of my life to work on this, and it sucks to see all that effort seemingly go to waste. PLEASE register an account if you haven't, it's not that hard. Trust me, it helps me and other fanfic authors keep track of our work.

I'll probably try putting it back up publically in a week or so when this all cools down.

[lunarblue21]

did the kudos bot just hit CI: Lacrimosa and Five Times and Tiger's Heart all at once on ao3?? NOOOO THOSE WERE MY FAVOURITE AND BEST-WRITTEN ICE AGE FICS THE KUDOS BOT WASN'T SUPPOSED TO TOUCH THEM!!! D:

Also... did all or most of my fics get hit? But why? I haven't linked them anywhere in ages!!! D: Except for Five Times but none of the others... I'm gonna lock all my most important fics...

Edit: it's also depressed me to the point that I was on a huge roll with L17 and almost to chapter's end but now I have the kudos bot hitting all my fics archived on ao3 looming over me and the desire to write more on L17 is just... gone, today. 😭

[inonibird]

...Okay, this is wild, but looks like Part Three of Sahuldeem got hit by the infamous kudos-bot that’s been making the rounds on AO3, because yeah no, there shouldn’t have been such a big influx of kudos overnight vs how many hits it got. I’m going to make all three parts available for registered users only for a bit here (only Part Three seems to be affected but from what I’m seeing some people end up with multiple fics getting bombed by this bot). I do not want these unearned kudos, but I also don’t enjoy the idea of preventing unregistered guests from reading my fic. Hopefully this is temporary, and hopefully AO3 comes up with a better answer for this soon. :/