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
You guys just have to trust me on this one and click here okay?
but how are the redditors doing having experienced their first November 5th-like week on the hellsite?
like are y'all still alive?
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.
[Image ID: The Destiel confession meme edited so that Dean answers 'The actors of Garth and Benny from Supernatural are getting married' to Cas' 'I love you'. /End ID]
i CANNOT believe this is real
However, we may need to do some work to optimize our shiny new Cloudflare setup -- we'll keep you updated on any issues or downtime.
July 11, 2023 - 16:35 UTC
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