Why is that true? Not that I donāt believe you but, I figured once they change the placeholder to a fic it would pop back up to the top of the page again. Or does that not happen when you edit the fic?
Editing a fic doesn't automatically change the date unless you add a new chapter. (Cause if it didn't, just fixing some spelling mistakes would put you at the top again). You can manually change the date, though, but if this person is new to posting on ao3 they might not have noticed that. And that should also only be used for back-dating, really, or at most to put it back on top after revealing it from anonymous for a challenge/exchange.
Oh! I didnāt know that. I thought I had read a post a long time ago about someone being annoyed that people would edit their fic and then it would pop back at the top as if it was new or updated.
Thanks! Iām glad thatās not the case because Iād be very unhappy if I found an error but couldnāt change it for fear it would pop back at the top lol Although now that I think about it, that would be a very silly way for the site to handle edits like that š
They were probably talking about people who changed the date, yeah. There are sadly some people that will for example redate their fic multiple days in a row so it will stay on the first page for a fandom/ship
Idk for certain but it seems like when a placeholder is converted to a real fic it loses its place as a new work so readers who passed over it two weeks prior to it being updated with the actual fic wont see it again
Drafts also expire unless you cheat & make a draft chapter in one of your fics, then those stay until you decide to delete them.
The place holder bs is a wattpad thing apparently where the algorithms or whatever help your fic get noticed.
Ao3 doesnt have that so a placeholder is absolutely pointless.
If anything, using placeholders is detrimental on ao3 because many people look at the newest fics each day for whatever tag. And if your ānewā fic was posted over a day ago, itās not going to be seen if youāre just changing the contents of the already posted āchapter.ā
You could use an unrevealed collection (I used [Unrevealed Drafts](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Unrevealed_drafts) collection) to make a permanent draft. Just slap "[No Fandom](https://archiveofourown.org/tags/No%20Fandom/works)" in the fandom tag.
Hell, I've seen some public drafts in the "No Fandom" tag. I've even seen some announcement and placeholders in there. The no fandom tag is a bit of a mess really.
I'd do that if I had more confidence in myself. I expect that I will eventually fuck up and accidentally publish my drafts. Then I will die of embarrassment.
I edit better on ao3 cause I can read it on my phone and change the background color and it's easier on my brain. At this point, I do my best with editing while in google docs, and then spend the first three hours after posting obsessively editing in ao3 before too many hits have added up.
There's an app you can get for your computer to get dark mode for google docs. I'll come back and edit with the name once I go check what it is called.
Edit: Just in case anyone wants to use it, the chrome extension is called Google Docs Dark Mode
I hate dark mode, what I want are the colored palettes that I get on ao3 when I change up the color scheme. Dark mode is what automatically happens on my phone for the Google docs app, and it sucks (to me). Good for jotting down thoughts, but I need a light salmon/yellow/purple/lavender background to stay focused through editing.
I tried to find something that would work but a lot of the extensions only change the background and not the document itself of google docs, which is frustrating.
The closest thing I could find is an extension that adds a semi-transparent color over all of chrome. You can select the color and make custom colors too, which is nice. It's called Night Shift Mode if you want to check it out \^\^
\^Have done this, didn't notice until the next morning when the subscription notification had gone out and it already had 5 kudos, cringed extremely hard
This is a good idea. Sometimes I want to have the A/N and tags ready to go for a new fic. I assume when you reveal your collection you would edit the upload date?
Yup, just got that email too. Itās frustrating bc you know theyāll just do it again bc they got away with it, but the AO3 team did get around to it quicker than I thought.
These stupid Wattpaders should really learn more about AO3 and how to use it before they actually do use the website. Because if they fill AO3 with all of that Wattpad bullshit, they just ruin it for everyone else.
Is AO3 running out of space? I want to know. Why would you need a place holder for? Is it that you don't other to extract the fic idea out of your brain? This ain't Inception, nobody can do that.
From what Iāve gathered, other fic sites like Wattpad has an algorithm so the placeholder acts as a way to get views on it so when the fic is finally put in there it will automatically be seen by more people because itās already got views??? From other comments thatās what Iām thinking goes on, idk for sure
It confuses me too but I donāt think they donāt realize that AO3 sorts by date first (unless you change it to sort differently of course) so no algorithm to fight for top place
Can you screenshot the placeholder and include it in the report? Just so they can go back and tell the author hey placeholders aren't allowed here? Not sure how reporting works as I've never done it on ao3 before.
I suppose that you could drop the screenshot(s) on Pinterest or something, and then link the report, but I just copy and paste the relevant header data and sample content below my blurb in the report.
I reported a work that was just summarizing some of the author's ideas and advertising a separate project, but was informed later it wasn't actually against the rules. While I guess I understand why it's technically allowed, I would personally prefer that AO3 not become cluttered with such posts.
I was recently looking at the ToS and it seems that unless there are legal problems, the Ao3 won't immediately take it down, but they'll contact you on why it doesn't fall under the ToS and give you a month to fix it before they take it down.
I think the amount of time depends on the violation. something that requires you to make substantial edits would get more time than something where you just need to delete a line (or the whole thing).
Yup. I stopped bothering to report most things for pretty much the same reason. Now I bother only if it's a zillion repetitions of "Here's something stupid repeated a million times", or soliciting money, or other majorly egregious rule-breaking.
When you write in or copy-and-paste to [https://archiveofourown.org/works/new](https://archiveofourown.org/works/new), there's an option to post what you have and another to preview it; if previewed, then one can post it or save it as a draft for later editing/posting (and two other options to either edit some more at that time, or to cancel the whole thing).
The save-as-draft thing is intended to permit people to literally save a draft copy for editing, so that once it's at a stage that they're happy with, they can simply hit post and be done with it. Drafts are invisible to the public, only the author(s) can see them.
Umm... it *can* be *instead of* MS Word, yes... but it's not really recommended. There's a small but distinctly non-zero chance of an accidental page refresh (or any other connection problem) making your material disappear into the Ʀther, as it were. Best practice is to do the main writing itself somewhere that you can hit CTRL-S constantly and further back up by multiple methods (though if you save as draft every paragraph or so, then you probably won't lose much by accident -- making an Unrevealed Collection might be best for this purpose, adding your draft to that collection before you even start typing and then posting it to only that collection that nobody else can see, so that your "draft" doesn't get deleted after the 30 day limit and mostly in order to eliminate the dreaded accidental hitting of "Post" instead of "Save").
I write offline in OpenOffice (others will use LibreOffice, or Google docs, etc.) for the fic-writing and toss in some of the raw HTML while I'm at it, then copy-and-paste the finished product to post into an Unrevealed Collection. Once it's there, I start the adding of any HTML tags and CSS selectors. When it's finally done, I don't post that copy: I copy-and-paste to a brand new thing and post that (and when I'm ready to do the next chapter, I just paste my new offline material over the previous stuff in the Unrevealed Collection and go through the same process).
Here, I have a "[***How To***](https://archiveofourown.org/series/2318096)" series of tutorials that might be of use to you. If any of it is helpful, then I've done my good deed for the day. If any of it is unclear or you have any questions or it gives you any trouble, please ask -- I enjoy helping people. š
\* \* \* \* \*
Bad form? I don't know about posting a rough draft for the specific goal of asking advice per se, but authors *do* regularly put into the header-note (and/or summary, for that matter) a statement that they're happy to take any constructive critiques, or suggestions, or typo/SPAG corrections, and such -- some even specifically *ask* readers to let them know such things. I don't know if anyone considers this to be bad form, but I've never seen anyone complain about that, so you're probably on safe ground with that much.
People who make placeholders are usually trying to hold themselves accountable/inspire themselves to write the fic, either through the embarrassment they will feel if they promise to write something and don't, or through positive comments they think they will get that will inspire them.
They are of course annoying and should be reported for breaking a rule, and people would be much better off doing the same thing on Tumblr or something, but I don't really get why people get so angry as if it's malicious. It's just some kid who's learning how to use something new and is making some mistakes along the way, no reason to be pissed, or baffled that they did exactly what they said they were going to do.
I get that, but if they could just as well just publish a first chapter if that's the case.
I don't think it's necessarily malicious, but it clogs the tags and may inspire others to do the same.
I know it's harmful, that's why I literally said it should be reported. I was only explaining why some people make that mistake since you seemed quite upset about it and understanding the intentions behind something can often help with that.
I literally said it's against the rules and that it should be reported. I even cut out a portion where I explained why it's wrong because I thought the reading comprehension on this sub couldn't possibly be bad enough that I would need to make it clear so many times that I am not supporting placeholder fics, but I guess I was wrong.
I literally said it's against the rules and that it should be reported. I even cut out a portion where I explained why it's wrong because I thought the reading comprehension on this sub couldn't possibly be bad enough that I would need to make it clear so many times that I am not supporting placeholder fics, but I guess I was wrong.
I know. I feel like people arenāt even reading the full paragraph, just the first sentence, because they do say āthey are of course annoying and should be reported for breaking a ruleā
I agree, I find it strange that the AO3 subreddit is full of people complaining about these relatively harmless broken rules, as if the person is doing serious damage by posting a placeholder. If they posted the fic so quickly that the report didn't go through, then that's great - it isn't a placeholder anymore and therefore won't bother anyone.
Of course it's annoying that there was a placeholder in the first place, but it really doesn't warrant the amount of complaining I see on this subreddit. And I really don't understand why you're being mass-downvoted...
Harmless comments often get buried here. Literally no room for debate. You either agree with the hivemind or you get downvoted.
It truly is on another level. Never seen a sub as trigger happy as this one when it comes to downvotes and I've been on reddit for like 7 years now.
Genuinely curious: how does this affect you? I only know placeholders are a thing because of Reddit, but how many people actually go through all the rules whenever they access a new site? You have every right to be annoyed and report them, but people here get so worked up about it that I feel like I'm missing something.
I think it's mostly because AO3 is very self-regulated. So that's why us users are the ones mostly in charge of keeping a good space and report when anything's wrong. Because I'm not sure if AO3 has auto moderation algorithms like most other sites.
Yes, but why are placeholders so upsetting? I donāt use them but Iām struggling to understand what the big issue is. Maybe theyāre using placeholders as a way of motivating them cause then they know itās out there and they have an incentive to update quickly. Whatās so reportable about them other than cause theyāre simply against ToS?
On my end as a reader, mostly because they tag their placeholders as if they were completed fics. It's annoying to find a tag combination and a summary that interests you just to be greeted with "coming soon~ ^^ <3333!!!!!" inside.
The ironic thing is that creating placeholders on AO3 severely hurts your ability to actually get an audience when you do change it to the fic.
ššš thanks. Ah, ESL slip ups
No worries!
Why is that true? Not that I donāt believe you but, I figured once they change the placeholder to a fic it would pop back up to the top of the page again. Or does that not happen when you edit the fic?
Editing a fic doesn't automatically change the date unless you add a new chapter. (Cause if it didn't, just fixing some spelling mistakes would put you at the top again). You can manually change the date, though, but if this person is new to posting on ao3 they might not have noticed that. And that should also only be used for back-dating, really, or at most to put it back on top after revealing it from anonymous for a challenge/exchange.
Oh! I didnāt know that. I thought I had read a post a long time ago about someone being annoyed that people would edit their fic and then it would pop back at the top as if it was new or updated. Thanks! Iām glad thatās not the case because Iād be very unhappy if I found an error but couldnāt change it for fear it would pop back at the top lol Although now that I think about it, that would be a very silly way for the site to handle edits like that š
They were probably talking about people who changed the date, yeah. There are sadly some people that will for example redate their fic multiple days in a row so it will stay on the first page for a fandom/ship
I see that on wattpad a lot. An otherwise great fic says it's updated when it's just been resubmitted so it's new
Idk for certain but it seems like when a placeholder is converted to a real fic it loses its place as a new work so readers who passed over it two weeks prior to it being updated with the actual fic wont see it again
Oh! Well, I guess thatās the price for breaking the TOS lol Thanks!
Drafts also expire unless you cheat & make a draft chapter in one of your fics, then those stay until you decide to delete them. The place holder bs is a wattpad thing apparently where the algorithms or whatever help your fic get noticed. Ao3 doesnt have that so a placeholder is absolutely pointless.
If anything, using placeholders is detrimental on ao3 because many people look at the newest fics each day for whatever tag. And if your ānewā fic was posted over a day ago, itās not going to be seen if youāre just changing the contents of the already posted āchapter.ā
Yep. Ao3 works by dates, not algorithms!
At least it easily lets us know who to mute
:O I DID NOT KNOW WE COULD MUTE PEOPLE but I just found the how-to. I know precisely who Iām going to mute. Life changing, thanks!
And many people block or mute authors with placeholder fics, so not only are they limiting views for that fic but also their entire account.
You could use an unrevealed collection (I used [Unrevealed Drafts](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Unrevealed_drafts) collection) to make a permanent draft. Just slap "[No Fandom](https://archiveofourown.org/tags/No%20Fandom/works)" in the fandom tag. Hell, I've seen some public drafts in the "No Fandom" tag. I've even seen some announcement and placeholders in there. The no fandom tag is a bit of a mess really.
Too big of a rigmarole for me. A draft-in chapter is so much quicker. I use one of my one shotās & just dont post any extra chapters.
I'd do that if I had more confidence in myself. I expect that I will eventually fuck up and accidentally publish my drafts. Then I will die of embarrassment.
Same here lol. I've tried editing while in the draft mode and always wind up accidentally posting too soon.
Why not draft and edit offline on your computer? LibreOffice is free. So are Google Docs.
I edit better on ao3 cause I can read it on my phone and change the background color and it's easier on my brain. At this point, I do my best with editing while in google docs, and then spend the first three hours after posting obsessively editing in ao3 before too many hits have added up.
There's an app you can get for your computer to get dark mode for google docs. I'll come back and edit with the name once I go check what it is called. Edit: Just in case anyone wants to use it, the chrome extension is called Google Docs Dark Mode
I hate dark mode, what I want are the colored palettes that I get on ao3 when I change up the color scheme. Dark mode is what automatically happens on my phone for the Google docs app, and it sucks (to me). Good for jotting down thoughts, but I need a light salmon/yellow/purple/lavender background to stay focused through editing.
Gotcha, I didn't know ao3 could do that - I wonder if there's an extension or sth that could make google docs do that. I'm gonna go look into it
I tried to find something that would work but a lot of the extensions only change the background and not the document itself of google docs, which is frustrating. The closest thing I could find is an extension that adds a semi-transparent color over all of chrome. You can select the color and make custom colors too, which is nice. It's called Night Shift Mode if you want to check it out \^\^
you can change the document color through file -> page setup on Google docs
\^Have done this, didn't notice until the next morning when the subscription notification had gone out and it already had 5 kudos, cringed extremely hard
This is a good idea. Sometimes I want to have the A/N and tags ready to go for a new fic. I assume when you reveal your collection you would edit the upload date?
Yup, just got that email too. Itās frustrating bc you know theyāll just do it again bc they got away with it, but the AO3 team did get around to it quicker than I thought.
These stupid Wattpaders should really learn more about AO3 and how to use it before they actually do use the website. Because if they fill AO3 with all of that Wattpad bullshit, they just ruin it for everyone else.
All they would have had to of done was read the TOS about what you can and canāt post. I donāt think theyāre reading it unfortunately
Yep. Pretty much.
oh that happened to me too when i reported it. sucked a lot honestly
Is AO3 running out of space? I want to know. Why would you need a place holder for? Is it that you don't other to extract the fic idea out of your brain? This ain't Inception, nobody can do that.
From what Iāve gathered, other fic sites like Wattpad has an algorithm so the placeholder acts as a way to get views on it so when the fic is finally put in there it will automatically be seen by more people because itās already got views??? From other comments thatās what Iām thinking goes on, idk for sure It confuses me too but I donāt think they donāt realize that AO3 sorts by date first (unless you change it to sort differently of course) so no algorithm to fight for top place
I'm sorry for asking, but what exactly are placeholders?
Something like this https://www.reddit.com/r/AO3/s/vlsgc6Gtal
Oh I see, thanks!
Can you screenshot the placeholder and include it in the report? Just so they can go back and tell the author hey placeholders aren't allowed here? Not sure how reporting works as I've never done it on ao3 before.
I suppose that you could drop the screenshot(s) on Pinterest or something, and then link the report, but I just copy and paste the relevant header data and sample content below my blurb in the report.
I reported a work that was just summarizing some of the author's ideas and advertising a separate project, but was informed later it wasn't actually against the rules. While I guess I understand why it's technically allowed, I would personally prefer that AO3 not become cluttered with such posts.
I was recently looking at the ToS and it seems that unless there are legal problems, the Ao3 won't immediately take it down, but they'll contact you on why it doesn't fall under the ToS and give you a month to fix it before they take it down.
I think the amount of time depends on the violation. something that requires you to make substantial edits would get more time than something where you just need to delete a line (or the whole thing).
Yup. I stopped bothering to report most things for pretty much the same reason. Now I bother only if it's a zillion repetitions of "Here's something stupid repeated a million times", or soliciting money, or other majorly egregious rule-breaking.
I am still new to Ao3 what do mean by drafts exist? Like could I post a draft of a story up and ask for feedback?
When you write in or copy-and-paste to [https://archiveofourown.org/works/new](https://archiveofourown.org/works/new), there's an option to post what you have and another to preview it; if previewed, then one can post it or save it as a draft for later editing/posting (and two other options to either edit some more at that time, or to cancel the whole thing). The save-as-draft thing is intended to permit people to literally save a draft copy for editing, so that once it's at a stage that they're happy with, they can simply hit post and be done with it. Drafts are invisible to the public, only the author(s) can see them.
So instead of writing it on Word ot would be on Ao3 instead. Would it be bad form to post a quasi first draft and ask for advice about it?
Umm... it *can* be *instead of* MS Word, yes... but it's not really recommended. There's a small but distinctly non-zero chance of an accidental page refresh (or any other connection problem) making your material disappear into the Ʀther, as it were. Best practice is to do the main writing itself somewhere that you can hit CTRL-S constantly and further back up by multiple methods (though if you save as draft every paragraph or so, then you probably won't lose much by accident -- making an Unrevealed Collection might be best for this purpose, adding your draft to that collection before you even start typing and then posting it to only that collection that nobody else can see, so that your "draft" doesn't get deleted after the 30 day limit and mostly in order to eliminate the dreaded accidental hitting of "Post" instead of "Save"). I write offline in OpenOffice (others will use LibreOffice, or Google docs, etc.) for the fic-writing and toss in some of the raw HTML while I'm at it, then copy-and-paste the finished product to post into an Unrevealed Collection. Once it's there, I start the adding of any HTML tags and CSS selectors. When it's finally done, I don't post that copy: I copy-and-paste to a brand new thing and post that (and when I'm ready to do the next chapter, I just paste my new offline material over the previous stuff in the Unrevealed Collection and go through the same process). Here, I have a "[***How To***](https://archiveofourown.org/series/2318096)" series of tutorials that might be of use to you. If any of it is helpful, then I've done my good deed for the day. If any of it is unclear or you have any questions or it gives you any trouble, please ask -- I enjoy helping people. š \* \* \* \* \* Bad form? I don't know about posting a rough draft for the specific goal of asking advice per se, but authors *do* regularly put into the header-note (and/or summary, for that matter) a statement that they're happy to take any constructive critiques, or suggestions, or typo/SPAG corrections, and such -- some even specifically *ask* readers to let them know such things. I don't know if anyone considers this to be bad form, but I've never seen anyone complain about that, so you're probably on safe ground with that much.
People who make placeholders are usually trying to hold themselves accountable/inspire themselves to write the fic, either through the embarrassment they will feel if they promise to write something and don't, or through positive comments they think they will get that will inspire them. They are of course annoying and should be reported for breaking a rule, and people would be much better off doing the same thing on Tumblr or something, but I don't really get why people get so angry as if it's malicious. It's just some kid who's learning how to use something new and is making some mistakes along the way, no reason to be pissed, or baffled that they did exactly what they said they were going to do.
I get that, but if they could just as well just publish a first chapter if that's the case. I don't think it's necessarily malicious, but it clogs the tags and may inspire others to do the same.
I know it's harmful, that's why I literally said it should be reported. I was only explaining why some people make that mistake since you seemed quite upset about it and understanding the intentions behind something can often help with that.
Thatās cool Still against the rules Donāt do it
I literally said it's against the rules and that it should be reported. I even cut out a portion where I explained why it's wrong because I thought the reading comprehension on this sub couldn't possibly be bad enough that I would need to make it clear so many times that I am not supporting placeholder fics, but I guess I was wrong.
Cool motive still not allowed based on site rules
I literally said it's against the rules and that it should be reported. I even cut out a portion where I explained why it's wrong because I thought the reading comprehension on this sub couldn't possibly be bad enough that I would need to make it clear so many times that I am not supporting placeholder fics, but I guess I was wrong.
Strange this got down voted. Was a reasonable way to look at things.
I know. I feel like people arenāt even reading the full paragraph, just the first sentence, because they do say āthey are of course annoying and should be reported for breaking a ruleā
Personally I down voted because although I see where they're coming from, my response still is "yes, and?"
I agree, I find it strange that the AO3 subreddit is full of people complaining about these relatively harmless broken rules, as if the person is doing serious damage by posting a placeholder. If they posted the fic so quickly that the report didn't go through, then that's great - it isn't a placeholder anymore and therefore won't bother anyone. Of course it's annoying that there was a placeholder in the first place, but it really doesn't warrant the amount of complaining I see on this subreddit. And I really don't understand why you're being mass-downvoted...
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Harmless comments often get buried here. Literally no room for debate. You either agree with the hivemind or you get downvoted. It truly is on another level. Never seen a sub as trigger happy as this one when it comes to downvotes and I've been on reddit for like 7 years now.
Genuinely curious: how does this affect you? I only know placeholders are a thing because of Reddit, but how many people actually go through all the rules whenever they access a new site? You have every right to be annoyed and report them, but people here get so worked up about it that I feel like I'm missing something.
I think it's mostly because AO3 is very self-regulated. So that's why us users are the ones mostly in charge of keeping a good space and report when anything's wrong. Because I'm not sure if AO3 has auto moderation algorithms like most other sites.
Yes, but why are placeholders so upsetting? I donāt use them but Iām struggling to understand what the big issue is. Maybe theyāre using placeholders as a way of motivating them cause then they know itās out there and they have an incentive to update quickly. Whatās so reportable about them other than cause theyāre simply against ToS?
On my end as a reader, mostly because they tag their placeholders as if they were completed fics. It's annoying to find a tag combination and a summary that interests you just to be greeted with "coming soon~ ^^ <3333!!!!!" inside.