injokes I don't get

[ratcreature]

So what is the "Do Not Archive (The Magnus Archives)" tag on the AO3 supposed to indicate?

Obviously it doesn't have the normal meaning like that label had on lists, since the stories are already posted on a fanfic archive, and they don't seem to have anything obvious in common wrt content when I look at the works. I wondered whether it was maybe a kind of "don't podfic" label because of the archive tapes in canon, but I saw at least one podfic with the tag, so that's not it.

I'm also wondering whether to participate in the Rusty Quill Secret Santa 2019, which includes The Magnus Archives. It allows fanart, and the requirements look fairly low-key and manageable, and I never seem to produce even sketches anymore without outside pressure, so that might be fun.

Comments

[sholio]

Unless there's something going on I'm not aware of (always possible!), I'm pretty sure this is related to a completely ridiculous fad that took off on Tumblr recently, where writers add tags like that to their fics to indicate that other people are not allowed to copy and repost them to another site. (Other variants include "do not copy" and the like.) It looks like the fandom name got added in disambiguation.

I find it utterly silly, because copying someone else's fic is already both plagiarism and against common fandom etiquette, and someone who's going to do it isn't going to pay attention to a tag, but ... Tumblr. What are you gonna do.

[james]

Recently there has been trouble with a Russian archivist taking hundreds of stories from AO3 and re-archiving them on their own site, which also featured ads and the like, for which the Russian archivist was getting profit. People naturally objected to this, and there was very little they could do about getting their stories taken down (I gather it was possible, but difficult? And no guarantee of success?) One of the things suggested to make it easier to get things taken down is to explicitly state you don't given permission for your story to be re-archived on another site simply because it's on AO3.

That might be what those authors are doing.

[jain]

A number of the voice actors and others who work at Rusty Quill like to check out the fanart, fanfic, etc. being created for TMA. From early on, though, they were sensitive to the fact that not everyone is comfortable with that level of creator-fan interaction. Accordingly, "Do Not Archive" is the tag early fans of the show came up with to indicate "If you're from Rusty Quill, please don't read this fic/look at this art/open this post."

[st_aurafina]

What jain says - it's what you tag your fanwork with if you don't want Rusty Quill reading it.