verushka70

FYI, over the past few days I have had someone else requesting to change my AO3 password 3 times.

I don't know if this is happening to anyone else, but... I just thought I'd warn people.

I think it is a person rather than a bot, because it seems a bot would be more likely to just keep sending and sending requests (meaning, more than 3 in 5 days).

But you never know. If it is a bot, it could just be going down a long list of hundreds or thousands of usernames and coming back around to mine after going through the list.

Be careful out there!

This helpful warning of a comment scam being perpetrated by bots in fic comments on AO3 was originally posted on tumblr by allthingswhumpyandangsty.

I'm copying/pasting it here verbatim; original post linked above.

" just a heads up to my fellow writers out there that AO3 is currently fighting off bots commenting on people’s works to tell them that AO3 will delete their fics “due to the works being deprecated”, and the deletion will affect their accounts unless the authors delete the fics themselves first. IT IS A SCAM. AO3 will NOT delete your works. please do NOT fall for these bots! ( rest of the post behind the cut )

I am not sure why allthingswhumpyandangsty mentions 'copyright infringement issue' - maybe they meant IP infringement? "Copyright infringement" is something fandom and fic are often accused of - despite falling under Fair Use.

AIs trying to vacuum up fanfic in order to "train" AIs, along with tricking the authors into deleting the fics, only to later plagiarize them... I'm not sure what that is called, other than plagiarizing and scamming. Is that copyright infringement, or intellectual property theft, or both? I'm not familiar with the legal aspects, other than what I've read in fandom spaces re: Fair Use.