People keep requesting to add my fic to collections and I don’t know if they know this, and I don’t know if people who allow their own stories know this, but once you add your story to a collection, the owner of the collection can perform fuckery with your story.
Like, I’m REALLY glad that collections exist, and I’ve put my work into some collections when I made those things specifically for those collectuons. Collections are a useful tool for things like bangs, where the stories need to be hidden until the reveal….. but that also means that the person in charge has the ability to hide your works from the public. Like, without you agreeing, because you already “agreed” to that by submitting to the collection. Which means works you previously had available suddenly disappear from where people can find them.
What I’m saying is please stop random requests to random people to be in your random collections. I know you probably don’t have ill intentions, but there’s no way to tell. And if you’re getting requests to be part of random collections, please be aware that if you approve them, you won’t be the only one in control of some elements of your posted stories, including whether or not they “exist” to the average reader. If they mark the collection as “unrevealed,” you story stops being accessible to the public. And they have the option to mark the collection “anonymous” which I’m pretty sure turns the author from being You to being Anonymous.
And I say all of this because I have seen this happen to people. I have had friends whose stories “disappeared” because they approved a random collection invite and the collection owner turned everything “unrevealed” (likely without even knowing or understanding that it would hide it for EVERYONE not just hide the collection so no one would see they had it, it’s not like a private bookmark). And while I haven’t seen anyone do this maliciously (at least none I can prove) I can see where it could be USED maliciously. So please, just be careful out there.
I wish AO3 had a way to auto decline collection invites- they gave us a way to auto-accept, so I don’t understand why the opposite isn’t true. If I wanted my story to be part of a collection, I’d submit it myself.
Uhh okay, so someone replied to this that they didn’t know how to remove a work from a collection.
Copy and past the following link, and where it says “yourusernamehere” type in your AO3 pseud.
https://archiveofourown.org/users/yourusernamehere/collection_items?approved=true
This should take you to a page where your works that have been approved for collections resides. You can remove your works from collections by selecting “rejected” instead from the drop down menus.
If the direct link doesn’t work: go to your AO3 dashboard, click “collections” on the side bar, click “manage collected items” button at the top right, click “approved” button at the top right, and you’ll be at the right page to remove your works from collections.
hey! so from someone who tried her hand at making a collection to collect fics centered around a specific theme, I found out a super cool thing! you can create collections of bookmarks.
want to add a fic you love to that super-specific collection you made for Fics With Werewolves Set In London? bookmark it and add the bookmark to your collection!
no fuss, no muss, no permission required from the author (since it’s YOUR bookmark), no chance of fucking up their fic (since it’s YOUR bookmark), presto chango, you have a collection that rocks but doesn’t rock a poor fic writer’s boat!
Thank you for this info, this is very valuable (and relieving) knowledge.
So please, as readers, this is a MUCH BETTER option!!
that IS better!!! and I haven’t investigated it much, but it also seems like this would give you an easy way to make both Secret Private Collections (either with the collection settings or by making the bookmarks themselves private) AND public shareable collections – because, look, I also don’t like having my work put into random collections, but I have used those collections to find fics on a theme I was interested in, public collections are a legitimately useful thing to have! it’s just the actual mechanics of how collections are built that’s the problem. so. BOOKMARK COLLECTIONS!
Tags:
#AO3 #the more you know
Brinens and Things 