fanfiction.lol^{fun, silly, low-stakes fandom}

Hi there, as you know from the homepage, my name is Brennan :) I decided since we've doubled in size in the past day due to the AO3 outage, I thought it would be good to write a post to get new folks up to speed.

Unlike all the other (wonderful and awesome) AO3-fork fan archives, we are very new! I only started this website around half a year ago. We are small, and most likely going to stay small. I'm a writer myself, and you can read some of my thoughts on why I started fanfiction.lol here:

• Announcing Fanfiction.lol: A Manifesto on Human Creativity and AO3
• The Internet Needs More Cross-Pollinators
• Be a Lover: Make Sure the Quiet Wheel Gets the Grease
• I Need To Stop Making Promises I Can't Keep

That said, we have no invitation queue. Feel free to register and start posting your fics to your heart's content.

Key differences from AO3:

• I run this site on a computer in my basement, meaning that it must abide by Canadian law—this has nothing to do with morals or judgment. Please read our terms of service and content policy. Other than what's illegal, please write and share anything! Fanfiction.lol is designed for beginners, experiments, and anything else.
• We try to be inclusive, and have a lot more options in regards to both content warnings and pairing options. If you feel like there's something we've missed, please let me know! Regarding warnings, these are to inform users—again, irrelevant to morals or judgment.
• We have a blanket generative AI ban, meaning you must write everything you publish here.
• We do tags rather differently here! My Head Tag Wrangler Jar wrote a detailed and helpful guide to our tags you can read here, with follow-up posts on ambiguous tags and AUs and poly ships.
• Similarly, we only have one full-time tag wrangler, so please be patient as she tries to organise everything.
• This is a multi-language archive, and we add new languages when requested. If yours isn't listed as an option, please contact me!

A note on performance: this site runs on modest home hardware, and the sudden influx has meant some upgrades. I've migrated the app server to Puma with multiple workers (plus a worker-killer to keep memory in check), and put rate limits in place, which means downloads are limited to 10 per minute per IP, and there are throttles on commenting and general requests to keep things responsive for everyone. If the site ever feels slow or you hit a limit, that's why. Please be patient, it's my basement PC doing its best.

I have been trying to deal and remove all the annoying spam comments regarding commissions that I've written about previously, but we have had a new influx of these as well. Please report them if you see them! On the technical side, I've added a custom keyword-based spam filter that runs alongside Akismet, it uses a list of phrases common to these commission scams (Discord handles, "add me", fanart pitches and the like) and automatically rejects comments that match, which catches things that Akismet misses. Offenders get banned and their IPs blocked. If a spam comment slips through, please report it rather than engaging.

The wonderful and awesome SquidgeWorld Archive mentions that they "survive on about $3,000 in donations per year - what AO3 takes in in about an hour during one of their fund drives." Fanfiction.lol survives on nothing! And that's okay with me :) Our only expenses are the yearly cost of the domain name, and more recently, a Resend email premium plan due to the uptick in emails we need to send out, which is $30CAD/mth.

If you would like to donate and support, here's my ko-fi, but it is very unnecessary even with all the new users.

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, feel free to email me at [email protected]. Despite the fact this makes me no money, I am dedicating most of my time to ensuring this site stays online and works as an alternative until AO3 is back up and running.

Please have a happy and wonderful Halloween!