There was a post I saw the other day. I can’t remember who’s blog I saw it on so I have no way of finding it. Basically the OP was complaining about ao3 not having a good blocking function, and someone else in the comments was laughing at the irony of being on tumblr and complaining about ao3’s filtration system.
Yes, tumblr’s filtration system is pretty shitty when it comes to curating *types of content* — AO3′s content filtering is obviously vastly superior.
But I’m pretty sure the OP was talking about blocking *people,* not content.
Tumblr is *excellent* when it comes to blocking people.
When I block someone on tumblr, they cease to exist for me. If I accidentally click on a mystery hyperlink to the blog of someone I blocked, I get a big warning asking if I’m sure I want to go there. If I click on a blog of someone who’s blocked me, the blog appears empty.
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I’ve posted at length about this before, but as a POC in fandom, my biggest concern isn’t avoiding any particular genre or kink or pairing. My biggest concern is avoiding stories written by racist authors, who in most cases do not have any self-awareness of their racism, and therefore do not tag any of the racist tropes their stories are riddled with.
Author’s who, for example, write MCU fic in which Tony Stark becomes Wakanda’s white savior, or write “Alternate Universe - Human” fic where all the white characters are interns at a law firm, and all the POC characters are janitorial staff.
God, I’ll never forget this AU fic I read in Stargate: Atlantis fandom where the author made the white protagonists dog walkers and made the non-white protagonists … you guessed it … the dogs that they were walking.
That’s the kind of bullshit I want to avoid, and most effective way of filtering fic like that it is filtering the specific usernames of the authors who write it.
There are ways to do that. In fact my blog has an #AO3 hacks tag which lists 3 options.
Unfortunately implementing these require a considerably higher degree of tech savvy than the average AO3 user is comfortable with. Especially if you want to implement the same filtering across multiple browsers on multiple devices.
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And while I don’t post a whole lot of fic to AO3 and this has never been an issue for me personally, I know that authors don’t have a lot of options when it comes dealing with harassment via fic comments. I think you can turn off commenting on a story, or moderate commenting, but as far as I know, there’s no way to ban specific people from leaving comments.
Each story published to AO3 is equipped with its own comment forum. AO3′s the only site I can think of that has comment forums yet doesn’t allow the moderator of the forum to ban specific users from commenting in it.
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I know much of what I’m saying here is stuff I’ve said before.
Anyway.
I guess my point is that, AO3 is not a social media platform, but it is a media platform. And I think people assume, incorrectly, that because it has less “social” function than a social media platform, that there’s not enough user interaction to justify a block function.
But it’s actually a pretty major concern, especially if you’re a Person of Color in fandom.
They are, apparently, planning to put blocking in place soon, even if it only took them… a decade.
There’s an interesting discussion going on in the notes between @ryuutchi and @elinimate:
elinimate:
it didn’t take them a decade. This is not an issue
that’s been brought up as a major priority until pretty recently. Plus
programming a block isn’t as easy as it sounds. A pure block means a
blocked author doesn’t show up in any fandom or tag you browse fics for
as long as you’re logged in. And everything else needs to keep working
as designed.
ryuutchi:
Blocking has been requested pretty much since the
site’s inception. Maybe it’s closer to eight years, but I’ve been seeing
“why can’t we block people” for nearly the whole of AO3’s existence
Before I say anything, a disclaimer: I volunteer with the OTW as a tag wrangler, but I am not speaking on the behalf of or for the organisation, ao3, its coders, or the tag wranglng committee.
That said:
Implementing a blocking feature takes a lot more work than even elinimate said; a user who blocks me would expect the following:
On their end:
- not see my works
- not see my comments on others’ works or on news posts
- not be assigned to me during challenge matchups and not getting me assigned to them
- not see my bookmarks
- not seeing any of my prompts
- not seeing any of my collection
- not see any of the kudos I’ve left on any work
On my end:
- not allow me to comment on any of their works
- possibly not allow me to see any of their works
- not be assigned to them during challenge matchups and not getting them assigned to me
- not allowing me to see their bookmarks
- not seeing any of their prompts
- not allowing me to post a fill any of their prompts
- possibly not seeing any of their collections
- not let me see their kudos on any work
- not allow me to kudos their work
If that doesn’t sound horrifically complicated enough, there’s also the issue of
anonymous works, private works, orphaned works, and pseuds. Are blocks pseud-dependent? User dependent? Are works orphaned by a person who blocked me still invisible to me? Full orphaning (= no name attached)? Orphaning with their username attached? Would we be able to see and interact with each other’s anonymous works? If no, then doesn’t it break anonymity, in a way? If yes, that could be harassment.
Add to that my concern as a tag wrangler: would I be able to see their tags in my bins so I can wrangle them? If a tag doesn’t make sense out of context, how can I check what it means by clicking on their work?
This isn’t an idle worry, by the way – I’m assuming that if I was blocked, it was likely because we were sharing a fandom space, possibly one of the fandoms I wrangle.
And that’s just me as a tag wrangler! What about a Support volunteer? A policy and Abuse volunteer? If the chairs of those committees are blocked by the user having trouble, and there’s a problem that requires their involvement – what happens then?
Basically, adding a block like what tumblr has requires touching the code of the entire infrastructure of ao3, on each and every level of the site. It takes a lot of planning and a lot of arguing and then a lot of coding. And after that? A fuckton of testing, because dependencies are a thing, and if you change one thing in how the works module works, you might end up breaking the tag wrangling module in fun and unexpected ways.
Nobody’s ever said that ao3 couldn’t use a blocking feature – on the contrary. Everybody in the otw I’ve talked to about it would love having it. The problem is that it’s a lot of work, done by volunteers in addition to their own full time jobs, schools, and families, and the plain fact is that keeping the site functioning as it does now is taking most of the volunteers’ focus. First, ao3 needs to work; then, it needs to do that core work well. Only after that can it work better.
To add to the list (using programming names):
- Are blocks retroactive? If Betty has been commenting on Alice’s works for the last ten years and gets blocked in 2022, what happens to the previous comments and kudos? Is the content hidden or destroyed?
- Conversely, what happens when Alice unblocks Betty? If the content was destroyed, it’s gone. If it’s only hidden, can we guarantee it won’t leak?
- Alice and Betty co-created a work in 2015. Alice blocks and mutes Betty in 2022.
- Who’s listed on the work?
- Where does the work appear?
- Which creator can comment on the work?
- Ibid Series
- Ibid anything else that can have multiple creators.
- Orphan works are truly a sticky spot, because we don’t keep any info on them. Even when you “leave your pseud on it,” that’s not your pseud - it’s a pseud of the same string of characters made on the orphan account. It’s in no way connected to the original account.
- How do we respect orphaning anonymity and blocking? (Probably can’t.)
- Alice blocks Betty’s works. Betty, for malice or incidence (name change due to co-worker nosiness, frex), transfers all her works to a new NotBetty account.
- Is it possible to connect the accounts for the block but not out Betty’s new name? (Probably not - it’d have a different email, and IPs are not distinctive or identifying, and we don’t currently keep a creator chain on the works.)
- Challenges. If I drank, this would kill my liver.
- For a soupçon of the simple questions: Alice is the owner of a challenge, Betty’s a mod, Betty has Cindy blocked,
- can Cindy sign up for a gift exchange?
- Prompt meme?
- Generic collection?
- If yes, does that break through Betty’s block? (Hope not.)
- If no, it becomes obvious one of the mods has Cindy blocked. (And lo, the darkening of the sky on the horizon is the incoming wankstorm.)
- Does it matter if the blocker is an owner or mod?
- Alice and Betty as mods are fine with Cindy, but Delilah as another participant is not, and has Cindy blocked:
- Can Cindy sign up if Delilah’s already signed up?
- Can Delilah sign up if Cindy already has?
- Does Cindy get booted if Delilah signs up?
- Does Delilah get a warning that Cindy’s signed up?
- Does that warning trigger even when participants are still anon?
- (For once in the lifetime of challenges, matching is easy: it won’t.)
- Does it function differently in a small five-person exchange than it does in a large exchange like Yuletide or Kaleidoscope? (Side note: someone needs to resurrect Kaleidoscope once we have block-the-racist-assholes in place.)
- How does blocking work in a completed exchange?
- In an already-matched-but-not-fulfilled exchange?
- Can a mod add a work of a person they blocked but not muted?
- Can a mod add a bookmark of a person they blocked but not muted?
- Alice blocks Betty. Alice creates a tag set.
- Can Betty run a challenge using that tag set?
- Can Cindy add Betty as a mod to a challenge using that tag set?
- If you can decipher the direct link, can you download works as the
- blockee?
- Blocker?
- Fuck caching. Just. If you know, you know. Fuck caching.
- How against the ToS is evading a block? What about sharing that someone is blocked/muted?
- How “silent” is the block?
- Does it clearly let the person blocked know that someone applied the duck tape when they try to interact? (Wank.)
- Does it throw an “error”? (More work for Support.)
- Obligatory “when we get around to coding the (opt-in or I’m gone) PM system everyone seems to want for some wild reason” entry. Straightforward, but still.
Be advised that that is not comprehensive. That’s just off the top of my head.
I will note: Support has a staff account, and longer-term volunteers have dedicated admin accounts that will very likely be unblockable (read: I will fight people over this). None of the Support or PAC people do work on their fannish account, and many of them actually do their volunteer work under a different name than their fannish works.
It’s not that we don’t want blocking and muting. By all the gods, we do - most of us have a little of people who won’t be missed. But an actual working block/mute may possibly the most complicated thing we’ve coded on the Archive, and I troubleshoot challenge matching at least monthly.
TAMPERMONKEY, TAMPERMONKEY, TAMPERMONKEY!!!
For both Chrome and Firefox, install Tampermonkey and AO3 Savior. There’s a place in the AO3 Savior where you can tell it what you don’t want to see, be that pairings, tags, or authors. Then when you pull up AO3, it will show you a Blocked notice, with an explanation as to why, and you can always choose to view it if you want, or just keep scrolling if you don’t.
Seriously, Tampermonkey has made browsing AO3 SOOOO much better for me.
aethersea
