#ao3-anonymous

[ao3-anonymous]

Isn’t the data you just posted the same as the data last week?

Thank you, eagle-eyed anon! Yes, yes it was but now it has been fixed, so the newest post for 02/05/2024 is accurate.

And while I was trying to figure out why the same data showed up twice, I found a bunch of other issues in my code, so keep reading if you want to hear about the 10 other things I fixed while I was fixing that issue (thanks ADHD!)

As it turns out, it was the exact same info as last week because there was an issue in my workflow that caused it to not run properly so the data in the spreadsheet that powers the dashboard was stale.

But that prompted me to ask myself "didn't I build in a notification system that's supposed to let me know when something fails?" and when I investigated I realized they had stopped working last June and I never noticed (it sends EITHER a success or failure email every week, so I really should've noticed).

When I investigated that, I realized June was when I split the backend data sources between two Google Sheets because they were getting so big - originally I had them in separate tabs of the same sheet. However the notifications were still set up for only the original sheet, so I fixed that.

Also while I was looking at the sheets, I realized there were still a bunch of "Uncategorized" fandoms in the data, even though I removed that category from the workflow after realizing that they don't have fic counts on that Category page. So instead of pulling fic count, I was accidentally pulling a bunch of years and passing them off as fic count. I fixed that a couple weeks ago, but I didn't clear old data so I did that now.

THEN when I finally remembered the original problem I had been solving, I started trying to figure out whether the data hadn't been recorded for 2/5 at all (I save it in a JSON first) or if the sheet just hadn't been properly updated. While doing some checks, I realized that most of the categories had data for 2/5 EXCEPT Video Games & Theater?? Which honestly I still haven't fully figured out why, but I was able to manually run the size scrape for those two pages again, so at least they have data now.

Finally, while I was re-running the scripts to try to figure out why it wasn't running for Video Games, I had it start printing out various pieces in the loops and noticed it was taking forever to get through a category and seemed to go slower and slower by letter. Turns out a small error in my code had it looping through all the fandoms for a category starting with a specific letter (A) but then instead of moving on and doing B next, it was doing (A, B), then (A,B,C) etc. This wasn't actually causing errors of any kind in the results, but it was slowing the whole thing down and unnecessarily writing over the size count 25+ times for the fandoms at the beginning of the alphabet, so I've now fixed that.

The best part is even though I just wrote all of this out, I'm still not quite sure where in there I fixed the issue that caused the stale data in the first place lol. But at some point I fixed some other things, re-ran the "write_to_sheets" script (which I of course tried first thing and it didn't do anything) and this time it worked and actually updated. So hooray! And clearly this whole thing is being held together by spit & glue (it was a project I set for myself when I was learning Python) so maybe I should go back and rewrite some things now that I'm actually paid to do coding for my job and have a bit more experience. If you're still reading, KUDOS TO YOU and hope you enjoy my little project. [[Maybe leave me a heart in the comments if you do, because I accidentally spent way too long on this tonight and it's super late and I still have actual work to do (YIKES).]]

[meanao3thoughts]

a feel like the new generation of fanfic readers NEED to understand that clicking on a fic (interaction) does nothing. ao3 has no algorithm. your private discord discussions of fic do not reach the authors. if you do not actively engage with writers they will stop posting. this isn’t social media this is community.

[incognitopolls]

Hypothetical scenario: someone is on Ao3, looking for fanfiction to read. This person only speaks/reads English, and they set the language filter to only show fics written in English.

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[starmocha]

duuude mc making him delirious. next day at the hospital he's stillbworked up. mc sends him a text, it's her day off. he's loving, asks her how she's doing. she sends a 'fine 🥰' and he notices she's typying for a while, he's already holding his breath when she sends 'I can still feel you everywhere' with a pretty picture of her lower body, his shirt pulled up, her hand on top of her pink cotton panties. 'especially here' is the fatal blow that makes zayne think of an emergency and head home.

....oops........ 😔👉👈

Afternoon Lessons

Zayne asks Greyson to take over. No reasoning, no explanation, nothing. Greyson finds it odd that Zayne seems to be in a rush to leave, but seeing as the young surgeon has always been a workaholic dedicated to his job, Greyson dismisses this peculiarity, assuming there must be something urgent to make Zayne leave the hospital on short notice.

There is an urgent matter.

Zayne's minx of a wife has decided to play with fire this afternoon, so it's time she learns her lesson about teasing her husband like that when he is at work.

The moment Zayne arrives home, he comes into the living room, seeing his darling wife lounging on the couch in just her little pink cotton panties and his shirt, half-unbuttoned, and her breasts on display as she poses for some risqué selfies.

His phone buzzes.

She freezes.

Zayne opens the text message he has just received and smirks.

"My love, what was your intention for sending me these lovely photos of yourself?"

Slowly, she turns around on the couch to face him as he walks to her. She feels butterflies in her belly when she notices that hint of arousal in his gaze. Right when he sits down on the couch, she yelps in surprise, not expecting him to grab her suddenly and lay her over his lap, his hand has already pulled her panties down enough to expose her ass. Instantly, his large, calloused hand made contact, the slap has her crying out in both surprise and pleasure.

"Has my good girl decided to be naughty today?" he leans over to whisper in her ear, unknowingly making her stomach coil at how deliciously sensual his voice sounds in this moment. His lips find her neck as he continues in a lazy murmur, "That won't do...she could get me in trouble at work."

"Za-Zayne!" she cries out his name when he slaps her ass again, the sting hurting so good, she could feel a dampness between her legs.

Zayne smirks again, his lips on her shoulder. "One spank for every photo you have sent today."

She gasps, nervously trembling at his stern words.

She had sent him thirteen photos total.

[strawlessandbraless]

got any fic recs that feature dean worshipping castiel (physically and/or emotionally) ? tysm

Oh, can do chief 😉

There may be a little bit of mutual worship in some of these fics, hope that’s ok, but here ya go:

you're holy to me by serenityfails

Eleven Erogenous Zones of a Fallen Angel by almaasi

i know the end by unicornpoe

for which no words exist by MediaWhore

maybe i like pleasure pain by tothewillofthepeople

Love is awful, and then it isn't by ImYourHoneyBee

the way back to you by Castielslostwings

Coals Aglow by imogenbynight

Being Led Home by someonetoanyone

When The Pressure Gives Way by Redamber79

Love in the Morning by Chiyume

Sweet Spots by LokiNeedsHugs1031

Tag List

@worrynoodle @dean-you-assbutt-cas-loves-you @whimblixseven @mercurialkitty @justjayisfine0 @mypeopleskillzarerusty @you-needajelloshot @readingthebones @my-comical-romance

Comment, DM me, or send ask if you’d like to be tagged in my fic rec lists. It will only be used for these fic recs, no other posts.

[frownyalfred]

seeing an orphaned fic that’s only 48 hours old like

[brucedefender4eva]

Could we get your thoughts on this fic pliz :

https://archiveofourown.org/works/63644935

Mmm painful and delicious, yummy yummy in my tummy!

I love how the author gave us Bruce’s thoughts and explanations on why he did certain things, meaning we can sympathize and understand Bruce but that’s only because we’re privy to what’s in his head unlike his kids.

Each conflict is incredibly realistic, not just for normal people, but for the dangerous secretive life that they live.

I love love love how Alfred was angry at the kids for treating Bruce like shit and ultimately isolating him. Not enough fics include Alfred being on Bruce’s side. I’d say a majority have him scolding Bruce of placing all the blame on his shoulders.

If anyone were to come help Bruce that wasn’t apart of his family, it would be Clark. Their love for each other here is portrayed beautifully. I love Clark reassuring Bruce and loving him no matter what

And of course, in the end, Bruce forgives his children. I personally would’ve loved to see more groveling, maybe Clark refusing to let the kids see Bruce so broken, but that’s only would realistically never happen. Bruce would’ve forgiven his children even if they didn’t say sorry and Clark understands that as well.

In the end, the only thing he needed was them.

Such a great fanfiction! Thank you for bringing it to my attention!

[fun-with-god-p]

interest.

[ekingston]

Hi; I don't know if you're still following the word-stream stuff, but the app is back online on the app store as "booktok - books and podcasts". The reviews marking it as having AI scraped data are still on the page itself, even though the name has changed, and duckduckgo still directs to their page if you look up "word-stream audiobooks"-- although if I don't know how long that will last. The website is seemingly gone, but the app still presumably has access to all the stolen works in the database.

Best regards, -someone else whose fics were stolen

yup

word-stream is back

it just calls itself—in an obvious attempt to profit from the TikTok upheaval—BookTok, now. and it’s not just the app, either: the whole website is back online, same as it was just before Cliff Weitzman took it down.

(in case you missed it, here are the original story & the update.)

fortunately (so far) the fanfiction category hasn't been re-added, but if you go to the store page for the app you can see that it’s still using 'fan-created universes' as advertising.

Weitzman didn't register the app under his own name this time, but through something called 'Oak Prime Inc'. hilariously, however, the email address listed in BookTok's privacy policy still refers to word-stream.com, so if Cliff was trying to scrub the connection between Speechify and his BookTok app, he didn't do a very thorough job.

here's the thing (and i'm about to put this up in a separate, more easily digestible post): if you take a look at the terms & conditions of Cliff's other platform, Speechify, it claims a truly comprehensive license to use the works uploaded to that platform in any way Cliff sees fit, including publishing and monetizing it elsewhere. and i keep seeing posts on Reddit and Bluesky from both readers and writers, happily using the Speechify app to read fanfic, advanced reader copies and their own yet-to-be-published work to them.

this is a BAD IDEA. Cliff has already proven that he will take work authored by others without their permission and redistribute it wholesale if he thinks it might make him money.

Cliff is the financial beneficiary of both Speechify and word-stream/booktokapp. it seems pretty obvious to me that he's trying to claim, via Speechify's terms & conditions, that every work uploaded to Speechify is his to do with whatever he pleases, which naturally includes moving them to this other platform so he can charge people for two subscriptions instead of just the one.

thank you so much for keeping an eye on this, anon, and for reaching out!! like i said, another post will go up today about the above, but i'm going to ask you all to help ensure that my posts & my name aren't the only ones giving voice to this message. when i tried to approach people about this issue on social media, often the—completely justified!—response was 'why should I take your word for it?' and Wikipedia only allowed the mention of Weitzman's copyright infringement to remain on his page when 'The Endless Appetite for Fanfiction' was listed as a source.

it can't just be me. DON’T take my word for it. do your own research (i would love to be proven wrong about this!), talk to your friends, engage with posts on social media similar to the ones i mentioned above (those are just some examples, don’t pile on to the OPs!) and make sure people know what they're jeopardizing. help me protect authors from money-grubbing shitheads like this one.

[slavhew]

Dirk in the middle of a therapy session

in all seriousness tho if you want dirk therapy hours. keep ur eyes on my ao3 account ive got some real stupid self indulgent 13k-odd words cooking and ill try to post it sometime this month

Edit: it is DONE and just shy of 14k. Go go go

[ao3-anonymous]

Hey, can I ask how you pull the data into your dashboard from ao3? I’m just another curious data nerd - thanks!

Sure! I use a webscraper (Beautiful Soup) to scrape all the fandom category pages (e.g. https://archiveofourown.org/media/TV%20Shows/fandoms) and basically use a bunch of string functions to parse through a giant piece of HTML to pull every Fandom Name and it's associated fic count.

(Note: some people have pointed out that occasionally the number on the Category page does not match the number at the top when you click through and I have no idea what causes this discrepancy. Take it up with AO3 lol. I just use whatever the Category page says.)

I have the scraper set to run once a week on Monday, so I just match up the new count with previously collected data and calculate fandom size change from there! I store the raw data in a bunch of nested dictionaries in a JSON locally, which then powers a Google Sheet where the calculations are run. The dashboard is then connected to the Google Sheet as a data source!

I pretty much taught myself Python just for this project initially (although now I use it at work too and am getting a pay raise for it - thanks ADHD!) so it's definitely not the most elegant solution, but it works!

The only part of the workflow that isn't fully automated is the weekly Tumblr post - I have a script that creates the post, but if I set it to run automatically, the images never come out right. So I have to remember to click the button once a week, which I'm not great at (thanks ADHD), so that's why they don't always come out on Mondays.

Hope that helps! LMK if you have any questions!

[purble-turble]

If art requests are still open, would you draw Shadowpeach from your old "Please Dont Cry" story?

Ooh yes, thank you for reminding me of that old prompt fill, it’s one of my favorites~ …and also extremely relevant to the current chapter I’m working on for A Test of Time hehehehh :U

[incognitopolls]

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[kidovna]

Do you have any Arcane fanfic recommendations???

[rolling my sleeves up] if you haven’t already, Please Read This!! it’s my favourite post-canon fic and i’ve recommended it to every friend of mine who is into arcane rn. i’d honestly recommend any fic by the author. i love their characterisation of all the arcane characters so much!

you can find more recs in my bookmarks!

[strawlessandbraless]

Since this worked so well last time do you have any fic recs where Dean and Cas watch movies together?

Anon I’ve been reading fic for this ask for nearly two weeks and I still feel like I’m missing some obvious choices. But this is what I got:

there is rest for the wicked by fleeceframe

knowing is the easy part by gothyringwald

Movie Night by thalius

Life Skills by ilovehowyouletmefall

Talk Some Sense To Me (Kenopsia) by ImYourHoneyBee — I find a way to put this fic in every fic list but there is actually a very comical scene where Dean and Cas watched legally blonde with Claire

Of Future Plans & Paradoxes by destielfluffnstuff

Cas and Chill by xylodemon

This Isn't Where We Intended to Be by PorcupineGirl

Our Old Heroes by AdelaClancy

Whoa There Cowboy by almaasi

As always please feel free to add your own fic recs or even your own fics, we love self promotion here!!

Tag list

@whimblixseven

[bigidiotenergytm]

Giving Poseidon the biggest kiss rn , literally kissing him all over mwah mwah mwah

OH........ that's not.....................,,,,,,,,,,

btw this counts as my version of the like you mean it poseidon meme