PSA: Bot Comments Are Taking Over Ao3

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

More Posts from Nikolas-redacted and Others

nikolas-redacted

1 year ago

Anytime i see a bunch of pride flags i have to restrain myself from saying "where mexico" bc i doubt anyone will know I'm referencing this

225K notes View Post

nikolas-redacted

1 year ago

This a Moonmelon, scientifically knows as asidus. This fruit grows in some parts of Japan, and is known for its vibrant blue color. What you probably don’t know about this fruit is that it can switch flavors after you eat it. Everything sour will taste sweet, everything salty will taste bitter, and it gives water a strong orange-like taste. It’s also very expensive…costing about ￥16000 JPY (which is about 200 dollars).

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nikolas-redacted

1 year ago

So, I follow this “bad commercial interior design” Facebook page and-

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nikolas-redacted

2 years ago

get in losers, we're going to annotate classic literature with gen z vocab

Reblog this if you didn't even know Facebook was down.

158K notes View Post

nikolas-redacted

1 year ago

Cas: i love you 🥺

Dean (especially) for the past few days on tumblr dot com:

[ID: a newscaster on TV, sitting at a desk and holding papers with both hands while looking at the viewer. The words “breaking news” are written in all caps on the screen behind him. End ID]

81K notes View Post

nikolas-redacted

1 year ago

52K notes View Post

nikolas-redacted

1 year ago

breaking: lil nas x to rebrand as lil nas twitter

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nikolas-redacted

1 year ago

being a student during peak pandemic was so fucking surreal like. "it's not an excuse to fall behind" I cannot stress enough to you how much A Worldwide Plague Upending Life As We Know It is literally one of The Top Three Reasons to fall behind

69K notes View Post