Five Things GenreCat Said

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with GenreCat, who volunteers as part of the Policy & Abuse Committee.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

The Policy & Abuse committee is responsible for interpreting and enforcing the Terms of Service on AO3. When users report content that they believe isn't allowed on AO3, that report comes to us. We then investigate independently and determine if the report is about something that is actually against AO3's Terms of Service. If it is, then we'll contact the person who posted it and tell them what they need to remove and why. If it's not a violation, we'll let the reporter know, and provide information about how they can avoid seeing similar content in future. We also answer questions about what is or isn't allowed on AO3.

Because we're an all-volunteer team, and not a very large one, the wait-times on tickets can be lengthy. Here's some advice if you want your ticket to be processed more quickly:

1. Provide us a direct link to the thing you want to report. If that's a work, provide us a link to the work. If you want to report multiple works, provide links to each work in your report description. If it's a comment, select the 'Thread' button on the comment to get the direct link to that comment. If you only report the user's profile instead of the thing they posted, we have to go track it down, which immediately makes a case take longer.
2. Don't report more than one user at a time (unless they're co-creators on the same violating work). Having multiple unrelated users on one report complicates the paperwork for us.
3. Don't encourage other people to also report it. We investigate every report we receive, and we don't make rulings based on how many people reported it. All mass-reporting does is give us more admin work that has to be handled before we can actually address the problem.
4. If you're reporting plagiarism or copyright infringement, give us a link to the source material. Please don't make us guess!
5. Be succinct. We only need a short description of what and where the problem is -- a single sentence is usually sufficient.

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

I usually do PAC work every day, sometimes in long chunks and sometimes just quick check-ins. If I only have a short period of time, I'll catch up on messages from other volunteers and check new tickets that have come in. If there's tickets that haven't been categorized, I'll categorize them—categories help PAC volunteers decide what tickets to work on next. If there's higher-priority tickets, I'll quickly glance at them to attach evidence and see if there's something that we can resolve quickly.

When I have more time to work in a stretch, I'll review cases that other volunteers are handling and sign off on their plans of action, or I may pick up new tickets of my own to handle. I also spend quite a lot of my time working on documentation. PAC is constantly reviewing portions of our internal policies, training, and guidance material, which I like being involved in; it helps us determine better methods of doing things and ensures that we stay consistent in our rulings.

What made you decide to volunteer?

I'd been on AO3 for about a decade, and I'd always wanted to volunteer, because I feel like AO3 is a really important thing for fandom to have. I've been in fandom long enough to remember how slash fiction was banned or highly censored on a lot of older sites explicitly because of homophobia, and compared to that AO3 was a much-needed breath of fresh air. However, the stars had never quite aligned for me to apply—until the middle of 2020, when like many people, I suddenly had a lot more time where I was supposed to be at home. So when the next round of applications opened, I sent mine in.

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?

The OTW is a very big organization, and it has a lot of inertia. At times, trying to push for necessary change—procedural or cultural—has been very frustrating. However, since I've joined the OTW I've seen this improve a lot, both within PAC and within the OTW overall. I'm very hopeful that we've got a brighter future ahead of us.

On a much less serious note: in terms of tickets that are challenging, personally it is the ones that are labelled only 'spam'. This is because many, many things get called 'spam', so I never know what the ticket is about until I go and investigate the link. A small sample of things I have seen called 'spam' includes: donation requests, duplicate postings of works, fanworks that have deliberately terrible grammar and spelling, fanworks that have the wrong pairing tag, comments consisting entirely of emojis, works that are just "WIP coming soon", works that are solely requests for prompts, copyright infringement, plagiarism, works with dozens of extra fandom tags, death threats, and comments from actual spambots. Some of these are violations, some of them aren't. It's nice to have a better idea of what I'm getting into before I open a report. So a request for anyone reading this—if you're reporting actual spambot spam, please say 'spambot' somewhere in your report instead of just 'spam'! And if it's not an actual spambot, please include an extra 2-3 words of description. Your ticket-handler will appreciate it!

What fannish things do you like to do?

I spend a lot of time reading and writing fic! Fellow PAC volunteers introduced me to several new fandoms in the last couple of years, the biggest of which are MXTX's novels. One of the things I love about big fandoms is that there's so much fic, it would be really difficult for me to work through it all—there's always something new to read.

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Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out earlier Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.