The Board’s decision on meta has sparked a great deal of conversation, externally and internally, and we appreciate the detailed comments many people have left. Over the course of internal discussions among the affected committees, we've determined that "fandom nonfiction" is a more useful term than “meta” to explain the kinds of works covered by the Board vote. We invite your feedback on these proposals. We will be collecting feedback for two weeks, and then will incorporate that feedback into a policy for Board approval.

Continue reading on AO3 News

The following is a post created by the Tag Wrangling Committee to address some ongoing questions and discussions involving tag wrangling on the Archive of Our Own.

The question has been raised in various places of how sustainable the Archive of Our Own’s tag wrangling system is, and whether it will continue to be viable as AO3 continues to grow and the number of fandoms and tags increases. The AO3 wrangling committee would like to address some of the concerns we’ve heard, from AO3 users as well as wranglers (including the staff).

In all honesty, it’s a fair question, and one without a clear or simple answer. The AO3 tag wrangling system is a special beastie, and because of its uniqueness, it is difficult to judge questions of long-term sustainability, since there is no real precedent to look to. But we have high hopes for it, which so far have been met or exceeded by our amazing team of wrangling volunteers.

To better understand our position, it may help to understand what makes the wrangling system special, and why it was implemented this way in the first place.

Why do AO3 tags work like they do?

The AO3 tag wrangling system was specifically designed as a compromise between the two standard tagging/organization models for online archives: a regulated taxonomy, versus a 'folksonomy'.

A regulated taxonomy – such as what's currently used on fanfiction.net – allows creators to tag their work with a limited number of pre-determined options (such as genre or characters). This system is very good for keeping things ordered and preventing misspellings and otherwise inconsistent labeling. However, it also requires constant maintenance to add new tags as new fandoms arise, and greatly restricts what users can label or sort by. The latter condition can be especially problematic if data is not kept up-to-date. (For instance, on ff.net many fandoms have no character lists, and other fandoms don't include all characters, especially those recently introduced.)

A "folksonomy" - the tagging system used on most social bookmarking sites and Tumblr - allows users to tag their content with any tag of their choosing, and users can see all works using any given tag. This system has the advantage of flexibility and currentness - its tags are always up-to-date with user preferences - but can make browsing difficult. (For example: on Tumblr, if you want to see most posts about kid!Loki, you also have to look up "kid loki" and "bb!Loki" and will still miss the posts tagged "bbloki.)

When designing the tag system on AO3, both of these systems were considered. But both have significant drawbacks in meeting the demands of both creators and browsers of a growing multi-fandom archive.

Options & drawbacks

User tagging could be limited to only approved tags. This then puts the burden on the users to specifically request new tags to be added; it also requires wranglers to work quickly to make tags available as needed. For active fandoms like Homestuck that see on order of five new relationships a day, these requests could quickly become overwhelming. To keep up with such demand, we would need a ridiculous number of volunteers, and/or a way to prioritize requests, limiting new tag creation to the most popular fandoms/most requested tags. Assuming users could post works without tags, many people wouldn't bother tagging their works at all if the tag they wanted wasn't available and they didn't have time to submit it. Works would also be left without tags if a user did submit the request, but failed to go back to add it to their old works when the tag was finally entered in the system.

To get around this last issue, we could regulate the tags – a user could enter any tag they like, but it must be approved before appearing on AO3. In that case, wranglers become the inadvertent gatekeepers of fandom, deciding what tags are or are not shown to users. Is "Feels" worthy of being displayed? What about "Wingfic"? Maybe we don't want to allow "Incest" or "BDSM" - we're not that kind of archive (obviously we totally are, but you get the idea!) And there would still be a period of time when the tags wouldn't be visible or useful, so an enormous team of volunteers would still be required to overview the tags in a timely fashion.

Another option is to let users enter whatever they like and display all those tags, but moderate them by telling people how we want them to tag, and removing all the tags that don't fit, or requiring users to change them. Again, the burden on the moderators would be considerable, having to monitor the over half-million works on the AO3. It would also be difficult to justify regulating tags when the spelling, grammar, and format of posted works are not likewise moderated (and to do so would require modifying AO3's Terms of Service).

Otherwise we could take the opposite tack and not organize tags at all: allow users to enter any tags they like, display and filter by all these tags, and let people who want to read John Watson/Sherlock Holmes search for "John/Sherlock" and "sh/jw" and "Johnlock" and any other permutations they can think of. But this method becomes frustrating for browsing users who don't know or don't remember all the permutations. It's also a burden on creators who want their work to be found by as many people as possible, but have the same issue of not knowing or remembering the many variant names for the same concept. (It's worth noting that this is not an unviable system - Tumblr, Pinboard, Pixiv, and many other sites use similar systems; and AO3 could switch over to it with relatively little tweaking, if necessary.)

Or we could let users enter whatever tags they like, and display all those tags however the creator or bookmarker wants to display them. Then, behind the scenes, volunteers can organize and link tags together so the most commonly used and useful-for-browsing concepts are more readily available to the largest number of people – both creators and audience – with the smallest amount of required effort. This is how the AO3 tag wrangling system works.

But is this system sustainable?

It's impossible to be sure, but after observing wrangling on the beta archive over the last four years, the tag wrangling committee believes that yes, the AO3 tag wrangling system is sustainable in the long-term. To begin with, our volunteer pool is currently as large as it’s ever been (at close to 160 wranglers), and keeping more than level. When recruiting is open, we average more people volunteering than retiring, and get a surge with most donation drives as well. The AO3's expansion this year does mean there are more tags than ever, but it also means there are more fans willing to offer their time to keep those tags in order. And the fandoms with the most activity are also those with the most fans, so it's more likely for us to be able to find wranglers for them.

Additionally, archive growth doesn't correspond directly to an increase in tag wrangling work. The vast majority of new works posted on AO3 fall into two categories: very small fandoms – under 20 works – that require occasional wrangling rather than ongoing maintenance; or very large fandoms, which often are the best-wrangled, because we have lots of wrangling volunteers familiar with them! Looking at fanfiction.net, half the available fandoms there are under the 20-work threshold; and on the Archive, while there are currently close to 5000 fandoms without an assigned wrangler, fewer than 300 of these have more than 20 works.

Even large fandoms may not produce many new tags. A popular fandom with a small core cast of characters may get 100 new works posted a day, but only one new relationship tag, because all the other works used existing tags. Fandoms from 'closed' canons (canceled shows, etc.) tend not to get many new tags because they aren’t introducing new characters. And many fandoms share tags – see the X-men metatag, which has 13 different sub-fandoms, but a number of the characters and relationships among these overlap and only need to be wrangled once for all the fandoms.

What if wrangling isn't viable in the long-term?

It is undeniable that as AO3 grows, wrangling becomes an increasingly greater task. We don’t believe it’s insurmountable, however. Nor do we believe that there is any real danger of the tag system collapsing entirely.

AO3 tag wrangling is designed to assist and facilitate users in labeling and finding works, but for the most part it is not crucial for these purposes. Many aspects of AO3 tags are still functional without any wrangling at all. An unwrangled AO3 tag acts like a Tumblr or Pinboard tag, showing all works and bookmarks using that tag. AO3 search brings up results both for wrangled tags and the text of unwrangled tags, and unwrangled tags can likewise be used in the new filters.

In other words, if all wranglers quit and all wrangling on AO3 stopped this instant, existing tags would continue to work as they do now, preserving the work wranglers had done up until this point; and all new tags on AO3 would still be as useful as tags on Tumblr or LiveJournal or any other service with flat tags. The filters of older but growing fandoms would be sparse, new fandoms would lack filters and only appear in the "Uncategorized" section, and a user would have to look for "Fullmetal Alchemist", "Full Metal Alchemist", and "Hagaren" separately to find all works; but the basic functionality of calling up all works with a tag would remain.

Obviously an end to all wrangling is the worst-case scenario and not one we expect to pass. The greater concern is that the wrangling committee and volunteers will keep working, but the bulk of the work will become too great for us to keep up with. The current wrangling system is definitely not perfect, and one of the wrangling committee’s primary goals is to look for ways to improve it and make it more sustainable.

So what does the future of AO3 tags look like?

The wrangling committee is working to improve the tag and wrangling experience both on the front-end (for users) and the back-end (for wranglers). On both sides, the two aspects of tags we're most concerned with at the moment are internationality and additional tags.

Currently, AO3 wrangling primarily deals with English-language/Roman alphabet tags. To be a more useful archive for fans around the world, we are developing better methods of sorting and linking tags across languages. We want to display tags of all languages in the appropriate filters and the auto-complete, while preserving the links between tags with the same meanings. We also need to develop better guidelines for non-English-language tags.

Our second focus is on the issue of Additional Tags (or "Freeforms", as wranglers know them). Presently we are seeing several hundred new additional tags on works and bookmarks added to AO3 daily.

It's important to note that these tags do not interfere with the wrangling of non-freeform tags. AO3 is designed to handle tags of different categories such that wranglers can view fandom, character, and relationship tags separately from freeforms; and the former get priority. Wranglers can also sort tags by number of uses, to easily see which freeforms are popular enough to warrant making them canonical. The majority of new freeforms are not made canonical and never will be; they are single-use, notes-style tags that only require being checked off a list by a single wrangler. This process is not as streamlined as it could be, and one of our top priorities for the back-end is features to simplify it.

On the front-end, we're looking into ways for users to limit the display of freeforms, such as by making the view of single-use freeforms optional. At this point we have no plans to limit what tags users are allowed to put on their works, beyond what is mandated by the AO3 Terms of Service; but we want to give users better ways to view the particular tags they're interested in. (If you are looking for ways to limit them now, you may find the skins linked in this post helpful.)

Users & wranglers unite!

As well as improving the efficiency of the wrangling interface to make it easier for wranglers to do our job, we believe that a major way to keep wrangling sustainable is to employ the help of all users to keep tags in line. To that end, we’re seeking to open up aspects of the wrangler interface to regular users. We've already made wrangling connections visible to all users on AO3, and publicly posted our wrangling guidelines to explain what tags we make canonical. We also would like to find better ways for users to contact us – any message sent to Support concerning tags or wrangling is already forwarded to us, and we respond to messages on our Wrangler Twitter as well, but we hope to have more direct lines of communication. This might include allowing users to leave notes on individual tags, or other methods to call attention to specific problems.

Now that bookmarks are filterable, it's possible for users to filter for tags other than those the creators put on their works, allowing users to label and categorize works even if the creators don't opt to. We’re also considering giving all users limited wrangling capabilities, such as sorting tags into fandoms, making synonyms to existing canonical tags, or suggesting new canonical tags following the guidelines for wranglers to approve. Such features would require moderation from wranglers, but would take some of the burden off us (as well as potentially encouraging more users to volunteer for wrangling.)

So when will this happen?

Most of these improvements require new features to be coded. This requires the attention of the AD&T committee’s diligent coding and testing volunteers, and must be prioritized against the hundreds of other features and bug-fixes also in demand. It is also contingent on having available coders and testers - the wrangling code is some of the more complex on AO3, so relatively few coders have the skills and experience to make significant changes to it. So it may be some time before changes appear on the beta archive; but new tag features are under development now.

In the meantime, the wrangling committee relies on all its awesome wrangling volunteers to keep up with the tag load! Thus far they have been more than up to the task, and we are confident that with improvements, the wrangling system will remain functional for both wranglers and users as the AO3 continues to expand in the years to come.

Mirrored from an original post on AO3 News. Find related news by viewing our tag cloud.

Over the past few months, the OTW Board has been brainstorming about how to promote diversity and inclusiveness throughout the OTW and its projects. This has meant evaluating the status of many diversity-related projects already in process to see how we may help them along, as well as exploring new ideas intended to promote the growth of diversity as our mission and aims further develop.

Diversity is an important part of the OTW's mission to "serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms." With members in 23 countries and more than 7,500 fandoms represented on the AO3, we're already serving fans from a wide variety of backgrounds; we want to make sure we are serving them well, and that we're building an organization that is welcoming and responsive to them and to others who may use our services in the future. Diversity enriches the OTW as well. A large and diverse pool of volunteers, members, and supporters is crucial to the OTW's long-term sustainability. Incorporating multiple points of view into decision-making processes helps us to more fully consider the potential impacts of our actions and create a better product, whether that product is a website or an outreach or advocacy effort.

One of the measures we have agreed upon is to work toward increased transparency, including in the early stages of projects. In that spirit, we've compiled this list of ideas — several of them inspired by earlier public feedback — that arose in our brainstorming sessions. Some of these ideas are already being implemented, while others will take planning and time to bear fruit. The list is far from an exhaustive answer to the question, "how can we make the OTW more diverse and inclusive?", but it is a beginning, and we intend to keep working on it.

A quick note on outreach. We are trying to balance between our desire to reach out, make our projects available to more fans, and actively seek input so that we can understand what more fans want and need; and the realities that our time and energy are limited, and we don’t want to be intrusive. We would like for communities which aren’t currently using the OTW’s projects to learn about them and to enjoy them, but we’re aware that presenting our projects in communities where we’re not yet known might come across as presumptuous rather than inviting. We hope to recruit more ambassadors who are willing to represent OTW projects in their own fannish communities; if this might be you, please let us know.

We welcome your feedback on these ideas and any other suggestions you may have. We cannot promise to act on all suggestions. However, we will read and consider all the feedback we receive, and we'll continue to share our progress with you as we work to make the OTW and its projects more inclusive of fans from a diverse range of backgrounds and fannish communities.

Organization-wide

• Actively prioritize and consider the potential diversity-related impact of initiatives and decisions.
• Encourage initiatives such as the forthcoming OTW community survey (discussed in this recent Symposium post) to help us plan strategically by identifying areas of need and potential resources for addressing them.
• Increase transparency about the work of the OTW Board by posting first-hand accounts by Board members in the OTW blog. (This would supplement our existing series of Spotlight posts that highlight the work of various committees and volunteer teams.)
• Offer public "open house" chats to take questions and feedback, and open training sessions to increase awareness of volunteer opportunities within the OTW. (This has recently been implemented; see, for example, this transcript from a session on AO3 coding and challenges.)
• Invite a series of fans from various communities (fandoms, countries, online platforms, etc.) to host public brainstorming sessions about how the OTW can best serve those communities.
• Related to the previous point: Publicly solicit suggestions about how/where to do outreach to fandoms where we could be of help.
• Encourage wider-ranging communication within the OTW by creating an internal discussion forum where staff and volunteers can talk about broad issues that affect the organization but aren’t necessarily part of their daily work. This could also function as a social space to encourage community-building across committees. (This has been implemented.)

Archive of Our Own (AO3)

• Redesign the "Post New Work" interface to better accommodate diverse types of fanworks: images, video, audio, text, etc. (This is currently in progress.)
• Develop fan art hosting capabilities. (This is currently in progress; we recently solicited public feedback on our draft content policies for artwork.)
• Translate the AO3 interface into multiple languages. (One of our coders is currently working with the Translation committee to build this functionality.)
• Improve the AO3's functionality for browsing works by language. (This is in progress. At present, you can find works in particular languages via the Languages page or by using the drop-down filter on works pages.)
• Redesign the display of meta information to clarify the relationship between a translated work and the work of which it is a translation. (This is in progress.)
• Improve the visual design of the AO3 to appeal to a broader range of fans, and encourage fans to submit public skins that reflect their fannish aesthetics. (This is in progress. The skins system is currently being redesigned; once that's done it will be much easier for users to submit public skins. The possibility of a skin-designing challenge is under consideration.)
• Establish an official forum where AO3 users can brainstorm about desired features and interact as a community. (This is the most tentative item on the list. We don’t yet know whether it’s feasible, but we include it here because several users have suggested it and we want to let them know their suggestion has been heard.)

Fanlore

• Recruit staff and volunteers who can help us do outreach to fan communities which are currently underrepresented on Fanlore. (This is an ongoing effort; please see the recruitment post if you are interested in volunteering.)
• Implement a Fanlore wiki forum, where users can ask questions, find answers, introduce themselves and meet one another. (This was suggested in the comments to a post on the Fanlore dreamwidth community; it's currently under discussion.)

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC)

• Publish articles on subjects drawn from a diverse range of fannish communities and practices. (TWC is doing well on this front; you can view our back issues here, and we're currently soliciting manuscripts for special issues on Transnational Boys’ Love Fan Studies and Appropriating, Interpreting, and Transforming Comic Books.)

Fan Video and Multimedia

• Explicitly encourage inclusivity of a broad range of fannish traditions, such as fan art, vids, anime music videos, political remixes, fan films, fan trailers, machinima, podfic and audiobooks, and others, in our fan video and multimedia projects. To this end, we've recently revised and expanded the fan video section of our website, and the Vidding committee is working with International Outreach to invite fan creators from diverse communities and traditions to embed their works at the AO3.

If you have questions or feedback about this list, or if you have other suggestions to offer, please leave a comment. If you're interested in volunteering with the OTW, please contact Volunteers & Recruiting. Thank you!

This post is also available in Español.

In our last newsletter, we mentioned that we were evaluating the policy on hosting original fic on the Archive of Our Own. This has generated a lot of awesome and passionate discussion, but also a lot of confusion, so we'd like to clarify a few things. (A personal note from Rebecca Tushnet: I phrased the inquiry badly, and I apologize. I'm 100% committed to supporting transformative works, as is everyone on the Archive.)

To address one of the main causes for concern -- we are all on the same page in terms of caring about fanworks FIRST. That is why all of us here are working on the OTW and the AO3. That is our main goal and that is always going to be the main goal. The question we're chewing over is not whether to make the AO3 also into a site for hosting original works but what to do when fans using the AO3 also use it to post works which aren't clearly transformative works, but which are considered part of the fannish experience by some fans.

We're talking about things like anthropomorfic, works which are in a mixed archive that needs rescuing via Open Doors, doujinshi from yaoi fandom, and other examples (there’s a longer discussion below, if you want to read on). There are a lot of works in this grey area which are hard to pin down. Among other things, this makes our current policy a practical problem of enforcement. We don't want people who are posting works that they consider fannish to have to wonder if Abuse is suddenly going to show up and say "take that down." This is the reason why we started to consider changing the policy -- not because we actively want to host original fiction.

Many people have expressed a concern that loosening the policy on original works might weaken our legal position. We would not even be considering a change if we felt in any way that this would be the case (see below for a more detailed explanation of why we're not concerned on this score). We also wouldn't consider a change if doing so would consume more of our resources. In fact, it's the other way around. What would consume more of our resources in this case would be policing fannishness. We don't have a giant Support and Abuse team (we always are looking for more volunteers!) and we don't really want to be making fine-line judgments about the fannishness of content.

Obviously we would have to reinstate a more aggressive policy and come up with some way to police it if original fiction did somehow start to take over the archive or consume too many resources. But we think that this is very unlikely. The archive is fundamentally designed for fanworks, and that's what our coding resources are always going to go towards.

Specifically -- since this also seems relevant -- this is not a choice between hosting original fic vs. hosting fanart or vids. If it were, of course we would choose fanart and vids, without question. We're already working on that; but this conversation has no bearing on that at all. Hosting fanart and vids is a major technical project that we are working on (as fast as we can!). A lot of design and content policy and coding groundwork is being done towards that goal and has been for some time. You can help us out on that, in fact, by giving us ideas!

Your comments and suggestions are very welcome, either now or later on. All proposed TOS changes are posted for public comment, and we are only now beginning to consider what a change might look like.

For those who are interested in even more detailed discussion, read on to learn why we are thinking about this now.

The archive is not a place for all fictional works and it will never be. Since we began planning for the Archive, though, some fans have been asking for the ability to archive certain non-canon-based works along with their canon-based works. Archivists with mixed collections have told us that they want to use Open Doors, but want to make sure that their contributors are all welcome on an ongoing basis. We try to take such requests from fans seriously, just as we decided very early on to accept real-person fiction despite the fact that the legal and social issues surrounding RPF differ substantially from those surrounding fictional-person fiction.

We're thinking about various types of fannish activity (in art and vids as well as text) and how we can write a policy that is inclusive of those traditions while not opening us up to original creative works in general.

We are also running into persistent problems of blurry edges and enforcement, as noted above. In practice, archive users seem to be using the tag "original" in multiple ways.

1. Mission

The main question is whether a change would interfere with our mission, something we take very seriously. The OTW is committed to protecting fanworks and serving fans, and fans define themselves (and the things they create) in a lot of different ways. In particular, we are trying to do a better job of making welcome international fans and fans from other communities that clearly are making transformative fanworks, but that don't always look exactly like the fannish communities many of our Board and volunteers come from.

When we started getting input on this topic, we found that in many parts of fandom, the distinction between original work and fanfic is kept very clear; in other parts of fandom, this distinction is extremely unclear, and archives (the kinds of archives which might ask Open Doors for help preserving them) include both kinds of works.

Here are some examples on a spectrum -- probably to each of you some of these will seem more worth hosting and protecting, and others less so, but hopefully they illustrate the broad grey area we are concerned about:

• Some Xena writers have embraced the idea that "the characters of Xena and Gabrielle were in fact archetypes that could be explored in different times and diverse cultural backgrounds." In such "uber" fic, it is apparently common not to mention Xena or Gabrielle by name, not to have flashbacks or other direct references to the show characters, and otherwise to proceed by creating new archetypal female heroes and companions. The context provides the fannish linkage.
• In major fannish challenges like Yuletide that we want the archive to be able to host, participants often push the edges of fannish sources -- things like the song "Jesse's Girl" become inspiration for stories, without really being something we can call fandoms.
• Similarly, in Anthropomorfic, we have stories not just in the fairly clearly defined Mac/PC fandom, which has a source, but about characters like "Fandom" and "LJ", and pairings like "Coffee/Milk/Sugar" which don't clearly fall into the category of transformative fanworks, and yet are part of clearly fannish experiences like the Porn Battles and challenges.
• In Japan, "BL" ("Boys Love", often called "yaoi" outside of Japan) fandom includes a broad range of creators and formats. Fanfic/art/comics and original fic/art/comics are often seen as two genres of the same fan activity. Also, Doujinshi (sometimes referred to as Japanese "fan comics") are defined mostly by production, distribution, and audience rather than by content. (Some feature original characters; some feature pre-existing ones.) The crucial distinction is that they are self-published outside of the mainstream manga industry. Both English-speaking and German yaoi fandoms similarly have a genre of original work, sometimes called "original fandom," that is very popular and strongly connected to fanfic-producing fandom.
• Jane Austen fandom boards often integrate original work into their forums, mostly Regency romance. In at least one board, the sub-forum for original fic is for original fic and fanfiction of other canons that are not Austen. They're similar in style, similarly considered, and written and read by the same people.
• Some writers of original slash consider their work to be a variant of their fanfiction, and it's hard to draw an obvious line between for instance, an RPF story with the characters renamed, versus a completely original slash story.

In short: if someone strongly considers their output fannish, we don't want to be the fandom police telling them that it isn't. We don't want to have a policy that would force Open Doors to say to a fannish archivist who needs our help that we would only save half her archive, even if we think the archive as a whole is an important part of fannish history and the stories in the archive talk to one another even if some are original and some are specifically fannish.

2. Our legal and nonlegal missions are overlapping, but not identical

Not all fan fiction, even very narrowly defined, needs the legal advocacy to which we are committed: Jane Austen fanworks, for example, are based on sources in the public domain, and they are welcome on the archive, along with works based on multiple other public domain sources. RPF for 18th century people, too, has no conceivable legal issues.

Additionally, though we've seen some concerns expressed on this point, we do not think that allowing non-canon based fiction weakens the Archive's legal position any more than allowing fiction based on public domain sources or RPF does. Transformative works are valuable for the specific insights they offer, whether into a work or a whole culture, and that's true even though there are also good stories that don't count as transformative works. If a particular fanwork were challenged, we would defend the choice of that particular source.

3. Resources

The Archive is designed for fanworks and fandom; all our features are designed to serve them best; that is our continued commitment. Our tech people do not anticipate a technical/hosting/tagging burden from allowing the kinds of original works under discussion. If that changed, we would always prioritize core fanworks (though we would not remove any works already in the archive that didn't violate the content policy -- that is, there would be no purging).

In terms of resources, enforcing a ban also presents continuing challenges. For example, if an author selects a fandom and claims that a work is just an extreme AU, like the Xena Ubers discussed above, we would rather not start evaluating content. We might not even have staff familiar with the fandom.

Side note: This issue has also provided a useful preview of art policy: our discussions have made it pretty clear that we don't want to spend much time judging a creator's choice of connection with a fandom in visual art, any more than we'd want to evaluate whether a piece of fan fiction was in character. So, if White Collar inspires a fanartist to draw a picture, absent any other concerns, such as spamming, we would honor "White Collar" as a fandom tag for that artwork.

If we moved to a rule that works on the Archive are allowed as long as they fit into some identifiable fannish tradition, even if they don’t belong to a specific canon, we would alleviate most or all of our enforcement issues. Deciding whether something is meta/commercial spam/a personal journal is easier than deciding whether fiction by fans is "fannish enough." We also anticipate enforcing our noncommercialization policy strictly: authors would not be allowed to promote sale of non-Archive works by "advertising" on the archive with stories.

4. Where do we go from here?

For those who are concerned about original fiction, we would welcome your suggestions for policy lines that we would be able to easily enforce. We encourage your thoughts on how you would deal with some or all of the gray-area categories mentioned above, from anthropomorfic to original slash.