I like AO3 as much as the next fan...

[ratcreature]

...but it does not currently "archive" fanart (or anything besides text-based fanworks). You can embed and list other fanworks there in an index, but they are *not* preserved.

I want to headdesk every time I see some Tumblr post advising people to back up their "fanworks" to AO3 in the current round of freakouts over Tumblr's corporate overlords and their possible agendas, that pretends as if everything worked like fanfic.

I have fanart on AO3 that will be broken image links if Tumblr goes down, because I embedded some from Tumblr when my own website was particularly glitchy.

Comments

[larissabernstein]

One day in the hopefully not too distant future we will see a hosting option on the AO3 for vids, art, podfics etc. instead a mere embed. I believe in this fervently!

Till then, there's at least Critical Commons or Viddertube as a safe haven for vids, Soundcloud for podfics, and Dropbox for artwork. Fanart is the most difficult to embed imho, as image hosting sites tend to delete images after a while (months or years). Hosting your art on your own Dropbox is the safest option so far.

[ratcreature]

Well, AO3 had been saying fanart would come soon-ish when they opened, then it appeared as a goal in their first AO3 plan iirc and they mentioned it in one of their blog posts, but I never heard anything about the plans in the years since. They seem to have quietly dropped it. Not officially as a goal but as a thing that is actually worked on in any meaningful way. Meanwhile the whole interface that is set up is in this officially still beta phase is geared to fic. So I'm not holding my breath about imsgr capability on AO3.

I don't use Dropbox so I have no experience with that. What happens to embedded stuff when you stop paying them? For my own, I have allowed robots to index and archive, so should my site vanish my art could be found by people following the missing links on the Waybackmachine.

[astridv]

yeah, mine is stored on lj, same thing. sometimes a link just goes defunct without reason.
hey, i just noticed you can now share posts on dw, interesting. are you okay with that, just in case? i gotten used to it.

[ratcreature]

Unless they changed something, the "sharing" on DW is not like reblogging or such on Tumblr, or even the function you can opt into on LJ, the button just sends emails to people with a link to that entry.

I'm okay with all kinds of linking and reblogging, I'm against reuploading my files elsewhere, which people did with my art on Tumblr with some of my fanart when I didn't have it posted there.

[astridv]

>sends emails to people with a link to that entry.

Oh. That seems pretty pointless...

I had the same happen to me, that's actually the reason I joined tumblr... I figured if my stuff is on there, it should be posted by me so at least I get the feedback. Seemed to have worked, too.

Recently I've had someone take one of my fanarts, remove the color digitally, color it in grey and post it on twitter, yelling "I drew this!!!" and tagging the actor in question. I had to blink a couple times when it crossed my dash.

Then of course when I called her out she first tried to attack me for calling her a plagiarist, instead of saying sorry.

And now there's someone in aos fandom who so obviously runs photos through the polar edges filter and sometimes overlays them with pencil and yells "I drew this!!!" and tags all the actors. And people actually fall for it. Someone carefully tried to call her on it but she just had a mini hissifit as expected.

[ratcreature]

I don't really post fanart these days so there isn't stuff to plagiarize (my art motivation has died for some time now, somehow it never recovered from the nosedive it took after my father's death), but I've had stuff happen on an occasional basis even before the Tumblr era.

I guess it is one of these unavoidable sucky things you have to deal with when you post things on the internet. Like once I got a rape-threat troll comment on a Superboy/Robin piece for "making Superboy gay" or something.