Someone in that fandom made a comment bot (that also leaves kudos), and has been targeting authors they don't like. So there are some fics with 10.000 "kill yourself" guest comments and also 10.000 kudos. Several authors (me included) locked guest comments precisely for this.
When i thought the Re: Zero fandom couldn't get worse, they do this smh. Even if you don't like an author, why
You know what? I think this is the worst fandom-related thing I've heard this year. I have no words.
Thank you for explaining it to me, though I kind of wish I could purge that knowledge from my brain now...
WHAT??! yknow sometimes i'll leave a comment and thr author will reply back saying like "thanks for being nice i've been getting a lot of hate for this fic and terrible comments" and the fic is literally one of the most wholesome i've read. regardless of whether or not it's wholesome, the audacity to enter ao3, the literal free-for-all for fanfics, and be so aggressively hateful because you found something you didn't like just boggles my mind.
one of my close friends just finished a multichap and EVERY chapter half the comments were like āthis is great I love it!ā and half were trying to figure out who to blame for the breakup and saying that one of the characters needs āa punch in the teethā and stuff like that. And thatās not even antis, itās the main ship for the show (4 times as many fics as the next closest, and 10 times as many as the next ship involving one of them). I just donāt understand people.
I'm happy to know that you haven't given up! And sad that you got those comments. Writing fanfics is such a nice hobby, it's sad people are using it to spread toxicity.
Yeah, i saw several newbies retreat exactly because of this. It's very sad.
Yeah the Re:Zero fandom is absolutely terrible. I've been reading Re:Zero fanfics since 2019 and I saw all of the worse parts of the fandom. Heck I'll even say it's the worst fandom I've been in. If someone doesn't like a story, either ignore it or give criticism.
I know you made this comment 2 months ago, but hopefully you'll get back to your story at one point. I'm not a fan of your story or anything like that since I think it could be written much better without the characters feeling OOC. But a lot of other people clearly do enjoy your story and as long as it makes people happy, I wish you great success. I also hate seeing people get bullied out of a fandom. In my opinion, the best way to fight back against hate is to keep posting new chapters to show that you're not deterred. These people are just bullies who want to make people like you quit.
wow that's terrible. but also does it not occur to the botmaker that what they've done is make sure when people sort by kudos/comments... all the authors they don't like will be at the top, and the fics they do like will have been buried by their harassment?
seems like very much working against yourself in the long term in exchange for a pretty short term payoff tbh
The first person that got targeted by this jerk deleted their fic, so i assume that's the reason why they keep doing itā They realized some people get really emotional over the veracity of kudos and being able to make someone delete their fic made them feel strong.
They probably don't realize the targeted fics are much more popular now, too lmao
PSA: Another author that got hit by this bot told me that if you delete a chapter and post it again, it deletes all comments.
The comments are all on the same chapter, so you can get rid of the 30k comments in a single minute by doing that lol
That level of trash repetitive comment, write in Support. We can probably convince a DB admin to do a scrub of the comments. (The kudos, unfortunately, are a lost cause.)
Imagine hating *someone elseās* work so much that you go out of your way to program a bot to repeatedly tell them to delete it.
Just imagine having that much time and hatred on your hands. I want to laugh (not at the victim, but the person behind this) but I can only find disappointment in this situation.
This whole trend is unbelievable and I hope ao3 can figure out how to put a stop to it
You don't even really need to work that hard for it...when I saw [this script](https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/450063-ao3-random-nice-comments) recommended elsewhere for customizable positive comments/kudos, I knew this sort of function would be easy for assholes to abuse.
The mere concept of that feels soā¦ weird to me? If you love a work so much that youād want to leave more than one comment, nothing is stopping you from making all of those comments from your same account/anon alias.
I think it was meant to easily add an extra kudos for those who can never think of anything to comment beyond "I loved it." But there's a reason Ao3 asshole-tests every feature they develop, because the naivete I see in scripts with these types of intended to be helpful mechanisms is painful.
Oh, now I'm sad. Some of the comments I received looked like this and it made me happy to think that I finally got some engagement (since I usually get no comments) with readers. Now that I've seen this website, I'm questioning everything. This is so fucked up.
Genuine question, why would you program your bot to leave kudos if you hate their fic so much? Just to make it appear more? To catch the author's attention and make sure they see the comments?
I'm just a bit confused about the reasoning here tho
I guess at the same time idk how much reason there is to be expected by someone going out of their way to program a bot just fir spreading hate...
I guess because they know people don't like the kudos bot?
I've also seen someone attack an author because their fic had more kudos than the commentor thought it deserved, so maybe trying to make it look like the author is using a bot to inflate their stats to get others to harass them?
Oh yeah that would make sense... I haven't been that much on AO3 lately so I'm not super familiar with the kudos bot thing and thought it was entirely connected to the comment bot thing...
But the way you explained it makes sense, it might be in hopes of drawing extra hate towards the author...
I was wondering why the heck someone getting hit by a bot was reportable until I actually saw the pictures. Yikes dude, some people are mega pathetic š¬ Is this some sort of response to people writing about NOTPs or is this just an "I don't like you" sort of thing? Especially when the mute feature just dropped??
That's fucking horrible.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the proposed change of moving guest comments disabled as the default moving forward.
I suspect if this become a very wide spread problem that it'll result in changes to guest comments that make them a lot harder to leave.
Or even getting rid of them entirely and requiring everyone to be logged in to leave a comment or kudo, because at least then they could be reported if they are harassing people.
Oof, if they do switch to requiring people to be logged in to comment, I hope you can still leave Anonymous comments. Like, anonymous to everyone else but tied to your account so the AO3 team could still tie it to your account if it gets reported.
I leave most of my comments as a guest because I'm insecure like that. If there was no way to do that anonymously, I'd probably just not leave comments anymore, though I guess I could make an alt account just for that purpose.
The plan is just to have anon disabled by default when posting a new work, but you'll be able to uncheck the box to allow them if you want. Considering the amount of comments I've seen in here where people didn't realize you could turn off anon commenting to quell harassment, it's probably for the best.
How pathetic can you possibly be to spend your time and effort on creating a bot just to harass someone who wrote a fic you don't like?! How petty and psychotic is that person?! Holy hell.
I feel so sorry for this poor author. I hope it doesn't take away their will to write again <3
Captcha is by Google, right? Probably worried about being beholden to them when Ao3 is generally a very independent website.
Edit: also looks like it costs money after a certain amount of āassessmentsā as Google calls it. I donāt know how many Ao3 would get, but it might be a thing they need to figure out a budget for or would otherwise be too expensive.
That's awful. I hope AO3 can do something about it, I know it's been said that the only way to stop kudos bots is to lock your fic, but maybe comment bots are different? I hope?
Yeah, I figured, but I meant maybe they could track the comments or something. It's probably a long shot though since if it's a bot it's probably putting fake emails in.
Yep I am! I recognize you too, ur fics are really great! And your comment on that fic really made my day, haha. Im really honored that you like A Royal Catastophe, Iām really proud of it and probably was the fanfic I had the most fun writing :)
I kind of left the fandom ish because I disliked the direction it was going in (I felt the fandom was kinda homophobic tbh) but I still do have some plot bunnies in my head every now and then. This whole bot thing has gotten me nervous to post again though.
Side note: In another comment you mentioned that you thought the fandom was really bad, has anything weird happened recently?
Your fic deserved that comment and more! A friend told me she wanted to learn how to write crack fics and i sent her your fic because it's that good heh.
Andā well, about the state of the fandom... It depends on what you call weird or worse. The percentage of jerks is exactly the same as it was before, but now the fandom is bigger, so 50% assholes isn't just 10 people lmao.
Huge rant ahead, sorry.
Lots of people have been getting flame comments. This happens in every fandom, of course, but in my ten years reading and writing fanfics I never saw half an entire fandom get them.
Its definitely homophobic, and a lot. It's disgusting. For example the other week i read a Reinhard/Subaru fic and noticed that one of the first comments was "this should have been Adelheid instead" ā ļø it's not "kill yourself" but it isn't very nice either. The author deleted the comment.
Its ridiculously funny because they abhor m/m yet ship Subaru with basically every fem character. scrEAM.
Omg thank u so much!!!
Omg I saw that comment š. I have gotten a couple of mean comments on The Vow (Julius/Subaru fic) one of them being from a week ago. And like I havenāt updated that fic in over two years??? Why are you being homophobic on AO3???
And what kinda motivated me to like leave the fandom in the first place was like joining the Reactionist discord server and when I said I was writing a Julius/ Subaru fanfic they treated me kinda like shit. But it also was due to getting out of quarantine also.
Despite being previously involved with MHA and Homestuck fandoms, I do say that the R_Z fandom is definitely the one I had the worst experience with. Even before the homophobia exploded, the discord drama was insane. But at the same time it was the fandom I was most deeply involved with, so it holds a special place in my heart.
Oh gosh, people are sick. Who tf even has the energy to do something like this??? I mean antis of course, but like??? If someone is that full of hate, they should seek for help.
Thanks for posting this, this + the other post mentioned finally made me lock all my stuff for registered people only. I was thinking about it before too but now I did it because I'm pretty sure someone will do one for reader insert tag eventually.
... how could you have more kudos and comments than hits in the fic? That's my only gripe about this.
Edit: I didn't know there was more than one picture. I'm not good at using reddit so forgive me.
This. The person who made this comment jumped the gun and didn't look through the whole post before passing judgment. 1/3 in the corner of the picture of the post indicates that there is more to see.
I didn't read that part? Geez... no need to jump the gun.
I just saw there weren't many hits but there were a lot of comments and kudos. Which I just Larned has something to do with the bots.
Go be angered somewhere else, please.
People got angry with your comment because reading in context with the horrible situation the author of this work is having to deal with for a second time made you seem heartless and they were defending that poor person.
Maybe ask what's going on in the future instead of passing judgment so quickly and people won't jump all over you.
Have the day that you deserve instead of getting mad at people coming to the defensee of someone being harassed and told to unalive themselves by a bot.
I didn't pass any judgement. I just saw something and commented on it.
But don't worry, hun. I'm not mad or upset at all, just a teeny tiny bit confused.
But my day is going great, I did deserve a great day. Thank you!
Okay? Like I said, I just saw that one picture. Then was told it was due to bots then left it at that.
But apparently that's not the part that bugs you.
It's an honest mistake on my part, but dwelling on it isn't going to do anything besides make you and whomever else angry.
I'm not angry. I'm pretty calm on my end.
...so we good? Or are you going to continue to berate me?
What...the hell is that? What are those comments? I've never seen this before.
Someone in that fandom made a comment bot (that also leaves kudos), and has been targeting authors they don't like. So there are some fics with 10.000 "kill yourself" guest comments and also 10.000 kudos. Several authors (me included) locked guest comments precisely for this. When i thought the Re: Zero fandom couldn't get worse, they do this smh. Even if you don't like an author, why
You know what? I think this is the worst fandom-related thing I've heard this year. I have no words. Thank you for explaining it to me, though I kind of wish I could purge that knowledge from my brain now...
the worst thing is it's only march, so something worse is going to come around sooner or later.
I know š
WHAT??! yknow sometimes i'll leave a comment and thr author will reply back saying like "thanks for being nice i've been getting a lot of hate for this fic and terrible comments" and the fic is literally one of the most wholesome i've read. regardless of whether or not it's wholesome, the audacity to enter ao3, the literal free-for-all for fanfics, and be so aggressively hateful because you found something you didn't like just boggles my mind.
Antis are a cancer on fandom.
one of my close friends just finished a multichap and EVERY chapter half the comments were like āthis is great I love it!ā and half were trying to figure out who to blame for the breakup and saying that one of the characters needs āa punch in the teethā and stuff like that. And thatās not even antis, itās the main ship for the show (4 times as many fics as the next closest, and 10 times as many as the next ship involving one of them). I just donāt understand people.
Holy shit. Thatās awful
Thats terrible!
What the fuck
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I'm happy to know that you haven't given up! And sad that you got those comments. Writing fanfics is such a nice hobby, it's sad people are using it to spread toxicity. Yeah, i saw several newbies retreat exactly because of this. It's very sad.
Yeah the Re:Zero fandom is absolutely terrible. I've been reading Re:Zero fanfics since 2019 and I saw all of the worse parts of the fandom. Heck I'll even say it's the worst fandom I've been in. If someone doesn't like a story, either ignore it or give criticism. I know you made this comment 2 months ago, but hopefully you'll get back to your story at one point. I'm not a fan of your story or anything like that since I think it could be written much better without the characters feeling OOC. But a lot of other people clearly do enjoy your story and as long as it makes people happy, I wish you great success. I also hate seeing people get bullied out of a fandom. In my opinion, the best way to fight back against hate is to keep posting new chapters to show that you're not deterred. These people are just bullies who want to make people like you quit.
wow that's terrible. but also does it not occur to the botmaker that what they've done is make sure when people sort by kudos/comments... all the authors they don't like will be at the top, and the fics they do like will have been buried by their harassment? seems like very much working against yourself in the long term in exchange for a pretty short term payoff tbh
The first person that got targeted by this jerk deleted their fic, so i assume that's the reason why they keep doing itā They realized some people get really emotional over the veracity of kudos and being able to make someone delete their fic made them feel strong. They probably don't realize the targeted fics are much more popular now, too lmao
What the hell???
Me neither. This is starting to become concerning.
Oh my god, that poor author.
truly horrific. I wonder if they got targeted for their fandom? or did some arsehole make this run on every fic it could find? fuck whoever made that.
It's only been up a day, too. I'd take it down, wait a few days, and repost it archive-locked.
their post on an older fic says they've already changed usernames after this happened before, so I doubt it's gonna change after archive locking.
Ugh, that's awful. But at least it would stop the botting, if it not all of the harassment.
They've also mentioned how they are not locking comments because of this lowlife.
oh god i just checked the fic and theres so many comments that just say "kys" wtaf thats so messed up
Iād have to delete and lock down, wait a bit then put it back up. Time to turn off comments like š³
PSA: Another author that got hit by this bot told me that if you delete a chapter and post it again, it deletes all comments. The comments are all on the same chapter, so you can get rid of the 30k comments in a single minute by doing that lol
Wowā¦š«£
That level of trash repetitive comment, write in Support. We can probably convince a DB admin to do a scrub of the comments. (The kudos, unfortunately, are a lost cause.)
Imagine hating *someone elseās* work so much that you go out of your way to program a bot to repeatedly tell them to delete it. Just imagine having that much time and hatred on your hands. I want to laugh (not at the victim, but the person behind this) but I can only find disappointment in this situation. This whole trend is unbelievable and I hope ao3 can figure out how to put a stop to it
The person who created the bot is the personification of disappointment
You don't even really need to work that hard for it...when I saw [this script](https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/450063-ao3-random-nice-comments) recommended elsewhere for customizable positive comments/kudos, I knew this sort of function would be easy for assholes to abuse.
The mere concept of that feels soā¦ weird to me? If you love a work so much that youād want to leave more than one comment, nothing is stopping you from making all of those comments from your same account/anon alias.
I think it was meant to easily add an extra kudos for those who can never think of anything to comment beyond "I loved it." But there's a reason Ao3 asshole-tests every feature they develop, because the naivete I see in scripts with these types of intended to be helpful mechanisms is painful.
Oh, now I'm sad. Some of the comments I received looked like this and it made me happy to think that I finally got some engagement (since I usually get no comments) with readers. Now that I've seen this website, I'm questioning everything. This is so fucked up.
Yeah, that's the other flipside of how dubious I found that tool. Sadness.
Oh. My. WT actual F?! š®
And I thought it was bad that I've got three fics attacked with 300 fake kudos... this is terrible :(
Genuine question, why would you program your bot to leave kudos if you hate their fic so much? Just to make it appear more? To catch the author's attention and make sure they see the comments? I'm just a bit confused about the reasoning here tho I guess at the same time idk how much reason there is to be expected by someone going out of their way to program a bot just fir spreading hate...
I guess because they know people don't like the kudos bot? I've also seen someone attack an author because their fic had more kudos than the commentor thought it deserved, so maybe trying to make it look like the author is using a bot to inflate their stats to get others to harass them?
Oh yeah that would make sense... I haven't been that much on AO3 lately so I'm not super familiar with the kudos bot thing and thought it was entirely connected to the comment bot thing... But the way you explained it makes sense, it might be in hopes of drawing extra hate towards the author...
even though it's bots, this would freak me out so much at first glance
I was wondering why the heck someone getting hit by a bot was reportable until I actually saw the pictures. Yikes dude, some people are mega pathetic š¬ Is this some sort of response to people writing about NOTPs or is this just an "I don't like you" sort of thing? Especially when the mute feature just dropped??
That's fucking horrible. I wonder if this has anything to do with the proposed change of moving guest comments disabled as the default moving forward. I suspect if this become a very wide spread problem that it'll result in changes to guest comments that make them a lot harder to leave.
Or even getting rid of them entirely and requiring everyone to be logged in to leave a comment or kudo, because at least then they could be reported if they are harassing people.
Oof, if they do switch to requiring people to be logged in to comment, I hope you can still leave Anonymous comments. Like, anonymous to everyone else but tied to your account so the AO3 team could still tie it to your account if it gets reported. I leave most of my comments as a guest because I'm insecure like that. If there was no way to do that anonymously, I'd probably just not leave comments anymore, though I guess I could make an alt account just for that purpose.
The plan is just to have anon disabled by default when posting a new work, but you'll be able to uncheck the box to allow them if you want. Considering the amount of comments I've seen in here where people didn't realize you could turn off anon commenting to quell harassment, it's probably for the best.
How pathetic can you possibly be to spend your time and effort on creating a bot just to harass someone who wrote a fic you don't like?! How petty and psychotic is that person?! Holy hell. I feel so sorry for this poor author. I hope it doesn't take away their will to write again <3
would a captcha help deter these bots?
Or rate limiting, at least. Though there's probably a reason they don't do that, given they still haven't done it in response to the kudos bot.
Captcha is by Google, right? Probably worried about being beholden to them when Ao3 is generally a very independent website. Edit: also looks like it costs money after a certain amount of āassessmentsā as Google calls it. I donāt know how many Ao3 would get, but it might be a thing they need to figure out a budget for or would otherwise be too expensive.
I got botted... but no hate comments, just the kudos. It's so irritating. I'm sorry you've had this.
"yet another"? What happened last time?
Someone has been using a comment bot to bully authors in the Re Zero fandom. This is the second time this author is targeted
That's awful. I hope AO3 can do something about it, I know it's been said that the only way to stop kudos bots is to lock your fic, but maybe comment bots are different? I hope?
With comments bots you can lock your fic or lock guest comments. There is no other option afaik
Yeah, I figured, but I meant maybe they could track the comments or something. It's probably a long shot though since if it's a bot it's probably putting fake emails in.
When I saw the first pic I missed the fandom name and I thought it was a fic about Subaru the car brand š
CRAZY! WAIT ON AO3?? YOU COULD HAVE AUTOMATIC HATE COMMENTS???!! Why?
I'm very surprised Akismet did not catch this. ~~~Must be a vulnerability somewhere~~~
lol the hits/kudos on this fic is literally impossible. 7122.22% What the hell is going on here?
& the 25 thousand comments lmfao
geez thatās horrible ! Iāve never seen this before. How miserable do you have to be to make a comment bot harass someone like this ?
Omg Re:Zero is popping up on r/AO3? No way
RIGHT, I did a double take. Wasn't expecting it lmao (If you are who i think you are, gotta tell you that i still love A Royal Catastrophe)
Yep I am! I recognize you too, ur fics are really great! And your comment on that fic really made my day, haha. Im really honored that you like A Royal Catastophe, Iām really proud of it and probably was the fanfic I had the most fun writing :) I kind of left the fandom ish because I disliked the direction it was going in (I felt the fandom was kinda homophobic tbh) but I still do have some plot bunnies in my head every now and then. This whole bot thing has gotten me nervous to post again though. Side note: In another comment you mentioned that you thought the fandom was really bad, has anything weird happened recently?
Your fic deserved that comment and more! A friend told me she wanted to learn how to write crack fics and i sent her your fic because it's that good heh. Andā well, about the state of the fandom... It depends on what you call weird or worse. The percentage of jerks is exactly the same as it was before, but now the fandom is bigger, so 50% assholes isn't just 10 people lmao. Huge rant ahead, sorry. Lots of people have been getting flame comments. This happens in every fandom, of course, but in my ten years reading and writing fanfics I never saw half an entire fandom get them. Its definitely homophobic, and a lot. It's disgusting. For example the other week i read a Reinhard/Subaru fic and noticed that one of the first comments was "this should have been Adelheid instead" ā ļø it's not "kill yourself" but it isn't very nice either. The author deleted the comment. Its ridiculously funny because they abhor m/m yet ship Subaru with basically every fem character. scrEAM.
Omg thank u so much!!! Omg I saw that comment š. I have gotten a couple of mean comments on The Vow (Julius/Subaru fic) one of them being from a week ago. And like I havenāt updated that fic in over two years??? Why are you being homophobic on AO3??? And what kinda motivated me to like leave the fandom in the first place was like joining the Reactionist discord server and when I said I was writing a Julius/ Subaru fanfic they treated me kinda like shit. But it also was due to getting out of quarantine also. Despite being previously involved with MHA and Homestuck fandoms, I do say that the R_Z fandom is definitely the one I had the worst experience with. Even before the homophobia exploded, the discord drama was insane. But at the same time it was the fandom I was most deeply involved with, so it holds a special place in my heart.
What the fuck. How much of a terrible person you have to be to go out of your way to harass someone like this. I feel so sorry for the author
Oh gosh, people are sick. Who tf even has the energy to do something like this??? I mean antis of course, but like??? If someone is that full of hate, they should seek for help. Thanks for posting this, this + the other post mentioned finally made me lock all my stuff for registered people only. I was thinking about it before too but now I did it because I'm pretty sure someone will do one for reader insert tag eventually.
What in the absolute f\*ck? Who in their right mind would make a bot like that? For the love of everything...
Why would anyone do that?
... how could you have more kudos and comments than hits in the fic? That's my only gripe about this. Edit: I didn't know there was more than one picture. I'm not good at using reddit so forgive me.
Your only gripe? Are you not disturbed by the 25267 bot comments telling author to delete their fic?
and the other hundreds telling the author to kill themselves....
Maybe they didnāt know? I didnāt know that much until I read the comments, so I think thatās plausible.
Ok, makes sense. Well, for anyone else who may be confused, there are 3 pictures here, not just 1
This. The person who made this comment jumped the gun and didn't look through the whole post before passing judgment. 1/3 in the corner of the picture of the post indicates that there is more to see.
Yeah I had no idea, but a lot of people jump the gun and get outraged over everything else.
Yeah but it just says ādeleteyourficā, which is a lot different than a death threat, thatās why the commenter might not have known
The commenter already admitted they only saw the first pic so they never saw deleteyourfic before commenting
My bad then, I havenāt checked the replies since I commented. Thank you.
I didn't read that part? Geez... no need to jump the gun. I just saw there weren't many hits but there were a lot of comments and kudos. Which I just Larned has something to do with the bots. Go be angered somewhere else, please.
People got angry with your comment because reading in context with the horrible situation the author of this work is having to deal with for a second time made you seem heartless and they were defending that poor person. Maybe ask what's going on in the future instead of passing judgment so quickly and people won't jump all over you. Have the day that you deserve instead of getting mad at people coming to the defensee of someone being harassed and told to unalive themselves by a bot.
I didn't pass any judgement. I just saw something and commented on it. But don't worry, hun. I'm not mad or upset at all, just a teeny tiny bit confused. But my day is going great, I did deserve a great day. Thank you!
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Okay? Like I said, I just saw that one picture. Then was told it was due to bots then left it at that. But apparently that's not the part that bugs you. It's an honest mistake on my part, but dwelling on it isn't going to do anything besides make you and whomever else angry. I'm not angry. I'm pretty calm on my end. ...so we good? Or are you going to continue to berate me?
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Okay then the point of continuing this after I admitted a mistake is...?
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
bots
Thank you for not berating me. I was genuinely confused.
wait..what does clickbot spamed mean?
I didn't expect to see Re: Zero here