Source

hey guys sorry but is the wordpress guy in charge of tumblr literally at burning man right now shitting in buckets????

PSA: bot comments are taking over ao3

The above examples have been provided with the authors' permission to demonstrate what these look like.

Basic rundown:

They are all 3 sentences long

Perfect grammar, capitalization, and punctuation

Like absolutely flawless English teacher-style writing with only a single exclamation mark, ever

No mentions whatsoever of character names, settings, situations, or anything that could be tied to the story

The usernames may be identical to people who exist on ao3, but the name is not clickable, and no profile is associated with it EXCEPT when you directly search for that name. What this means: the comments come from an unregistered (not logged in) reader, bots scrape the site for real usernames, attach that to the comment, and post

Please spread the word about this so authors can filter comments and report them accordingly

There has been some speculation about why this is happening at all, and the best guess is that this is a feature that AI-training story-scraping tools are implementing to try and make their browsing traffic look legitimate

Fangirls say goodnight and then go read fanfics until 3am

raise a glass to the posts you love that end up deleted. to the fanart and fanfics you lose track of and can't locate. to the blogs you used to look through that ended up unexpectedly disappearing. to the things you didn't archive because you always assumed they'd be there.

loudspeaker interference ATTENTION ALL SHOPPERS THERE IS A FUCKING BEAST LOOSE IN THE HARDWARE AISLE

I for one think the symbiotic relationship between Tumblr and AO3 is beautiful

Kung Pow Penising is now illegal

"You can't be a lurker on tumblr." Yes, you absolutely can. I've been quietly reblogging things since 2014 and I haven't interacted with anyone in years.