I’ve seen several people in the past 2 weeks post in utter confusion about their works disappearing after they were notified that they’d been added to a collection – or not notified at all. This sounds like a deep mystery, but it’s not.
A somewhat new feature on AO3 is the ability to invite works to a collection. Each user can set their preference to either accept all such invitations automatically or decide each one manually. You can also set whether to be emailed about invitations or not. These settings are under your “Preferences” menu, in the “Collections, Challenges and Gifts” section.
Recently, several users have started creating collections instead of using personal bookmarks for a topic. This is fine! These users then started inviting works to those collections. Also fine! That’s what the system was designed for.
Some of those collection owners got excited about the Anonymity function that collections can turn on or off. They decided to make their collections anonymous. To protect anonymity, if a work is listed in a collection that is set to anonymous, the work does not appear on your personal works page. This makes sense if you enter a challenge and it has an anonymous period before reveals – having the work appear on your personal works page would break anonymity pretty badly!
Unfortunately, I think most people setting Anonymity on these new invitation-only collections don’t realize that they’re making people’s existing works disappear from their works pages. If you have “Automatically agree to your work being collected by others in the Archive” and “Turn off emails from collections” both checked, your work might seem to literally vanish. Someone adds it to their collection, you don’t get an email because you turned those off, and you never find out what happened.
All your works in collections will pop up, and all the collections will be listed in the filters.
Skim down to find your missing work, or use the filter list to look for a collection you don’t remember seeing before and filter by it.
Edit your work.
Under “Post to Collections / Challenges”, press the “x” beside the collection’s name.
Save your work.
This will remove your work from the collection – for now. If this happened to you, I highly recommend turning off “Automatically agree to your work being collected by others in the Archive” in your preferences to avoid the work being re-added to the collection by a confused collection owner who doesn’t understand what happened.
Collection owners, please make sure you understand what Anonymity does before enabling it! For most invitation-only collections, it doesn’t make sense to enable that, because the works already exist and have names attached to them on the archive.
This is a helpful FYI! This happened to me – I approved adding Exclusive to a collection because I didn’t know anything other than “yay someone likes my work”, and Roos let me know this morning that my work was showing up as orphaned. I was very worried until I saw this post. Went in and removed it from the collection someone had added it to, and it no longer looks orphaned. Thank goodness.
This is super helpful to know because I’ve been trying to FIND fic and maybe this is accounting for some of the issues. If I get a direct link (like from a tumblr account I happened across) I can get the fic. BUT the story doesn’t end up in tags I follow.
This just happened with a Bucky/Tony story. Drives me batty to suspect that there’s more WinterIron stories I could be reading but don’t know about D:
Hm, @enmuse, that sounds like a different situation entirely. Collections don’t remove works from the tags. Could you contact the Support team at the “Technical Support & Feedback” link at the bottom of every AO3 page, to give them a link to the work and a list of tags it’s tagged with but not showing in? It sounds like a rare but known bug, and they’ll know how best to fix it. (This also goes for anyone else who finds a work older than 2 weeks that’s tagged with a thing but not showing in the tags for that thing.)
Actually, a much quicker solution (speaking as a support volunteer) is to let the author know about the issue in a comment, and suggest they Edit the work or the most recent chapter of the work and then Post Without Preview (they don’t actually have to change anything in the work!) to nudge the Archive into re-indexing the work in question.
If you contact us in Support as a work creator, this is the first thing we’ll suggest you do, and it solves the problem more than 90% of the time. It’s also much faster than the necessary steps on our end to talk to a tag wrangler or database volunteer to shake the archive on our end!
Of course, if this doesn’t work, definitely put in a ticket!
As far as I know this is also a problem if you add works to a new collection that are also in an old collection (usually a challenge) with hinky anonymity settings – I had some trouble with this with the Women of Star Trek collection when I invited works that were also in older collections, where individual works had been revealed but the overall collection was set to Unrevealed or Anonymous. Adding them to the collection reset them to being unrevealed/anonymous.
Also, as someone with tons of pending invitations to my collection, I’m partly reblogging this just because I wish more people knew about collections generally and checked their collection invitations! It’s a really useful bit of the site!
Brinens and Things 