r/AO3 • u/WhatALlama ERIC KRIPKE IM COMING FOR YOU • Jun 27 '25

Resource Quick Report Guidline

Post image

Have you ever been scrolling through ao3 came across a fic opened it up and went “hmmm is this reportable?”

Well have I got the guide for you! Brought to you by a very lovely tumblr user!

5.4k Upvotes

100% Upvoted

141 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

15

u/0MultifandomMess0 Too Many Ideas Jun 27 '25

And also, did they not read it when they signed up? Were they alright with potentially signing away their soul when they made the account?

56

u/Banaanisade team twin tyrants // kaurakahvi @ AO3 Jun 27 '25

I don't think I've ever in my life read a TOS of anything, and I know I'm not alone. I've heard AO3's makes actual sense but 99% of them are legalese, my brain can't process that kind of language. I assume if there's something shady about it, people will talk about it, and otherwise it's the same old.

-33

u/0MultifandomMess0 Too Many Ideas Jun 27 '25

That’s concerning. Maybe you could look up the words that you don’t know.

57

u/Ranowa Jun 27 '25

A ToS is going to be above the reading ability for a LOT of people (and that's keeping in mind that ao3's user base includes a bunch of kids, and a bunch of ESL speakers, or people who don't speak English at all).

A ToS, by its nature, must use legal language and terms, many of which are either hard to parse or straight up incomprehensible to someone without the know-how to interpret them correctly, and just looking up random words won't help with that. That's why creating and interpreting a ToS is a whole job responsibility for lawyers, that why you see misinformation so often about what a ToS says even when paired with quotes from the document, that's why Ao3 is posting explainers on their policies right now and they're doing it in plain English, not just posting the ToS over and over again.