Archiving: Operation Mustache

[razielim]

I'm trying to figure out the best way to post a bunch of old fanfics on Ao3 without alerting all the people who have subscribed to my account?

I'm finally thinking of reversing my decision to delete all Supernatural fics (and oh god I just remembered I also deleted all the Teen wolf ones. Fine. Supernatural and Teen Wolf, jfc).

Here's the thing - I didn't know you could subscribe to people, so way back when, prior to deleting them, my initial approach was to consolidate them into chapters of a single fic, one fic per ship - a fic with all Wincest ficlets, a fic with all Drowley ficlets, etc.

Cue one of my mutuals sending me an ask on tumblr like "Gabriel, you gave me a heart attack seeing so many update emails."

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

NO.

Not doing that again. I finally figured out how to look it up, and there are 500 people who would get notifications if I simply posted and backdated new fics. I would die. Of guilt or something.

So. I have two options I'm considering.

• One. Create a new account. Post old fics to new account. Add my main account retroactively. Abandon the fics from the new account, leaving only my main. This seems like something a crazy person would do, but it should work. I think.
• Two. Create a false identity. Affix a fake mustach-oijgojgoijg I'm kidding.
• Two. Post them as part of a hidden collection and "reveal" later. Do people get notifications about reveals by people they subscribe to? I don't know. Sounds dangerous, if you're into that sort of thing.

Anyone happen to know the best approach? Because otherwise I'm going to start drafting the weirdest fucking request to Ao3 Support.

Comments

[yuuago]

Hi there! I saw your post on the Latest Things page.

The only way I've heard of to upload fics and not have Ao3 send out notifications for it is to upload them to a secondary account, then add your main account as an additional author, and then remove the secondary account as the author. This seems to be what you're suggesting in option 1. I haven't tried it myself, but I've heard that it does work. You may need to give some time in between transfers to ensure the notification doesn't go out.

About this: Do people get notifications about reveals by people they subscribe to?

Yes, they do receive notifications when someone they're subscribed to has fics revealed from a hidden collection. These notifications are consolidated - if a bunch of them are revealed at once, subscribers will only receive one email. So that's an option if you don't mind them receiving one email, but it isn't useful if you want to prevent upload notification completely.

Hope that helps! I really wish there was an easy option to upload something without letting the Entire World know that you're doing it, but there isn't, to my knowledge.

[razielim]

That's actually very helpful! Especially the bit about delaying before transferring between accounts, and the reveal consolidations. I could definitely live with only one email being sent out instead of 50+. Thank you very much for responding!!

[ex_flameandsong751]

Just as an fyi, when I've posted multiple works in a close timeframe where AO3 sent out one e-mail for three or four works instead of three or four e-mails, those three or four works bundled in the one notification e-mail tend to get less traffic for awhile [unless it's chapters of the same work, the rare occasions when I post more than one chapter to a fic in a day]. Eventually people who want to read your stuff will get caught up, but most people aren't going to scroll down an e-mail to look at all the links. That's probably still better than them getting fifty e-mails in a day at which point you'll just lose subscribers [my subscriber count usually goes down by one or two if I do more than two updates in a day, which doesn't happen often, then it goes back up a few days later].