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

[ex_flameandsong751]

I've seen people on AO3 who have an alt and state something on the profile like "this is my porn account because my mom/grandma/whatever reads my main" or "this is my account for This Other Fandom so people who subscribe to me aren't getting updates for shit they don't care about" so conceivably you could make a second account and link to it on your profile like "all my old SPN/Teen Wolf/etc stuff is here". There's no rules against that. I mean you could also do the approach of secondary account, add yourself, remove secondary account later too, but that's a big extra step because then you have to approve said requests to add you as co-author on your main and you're going to get bombarded with e-mails.

I wouldn't recommend contacting Support because they're already bogged down with various abuse tickets and it'll take weeks if not months for them to get back to you [they tend to only reply right away if you got a comment with hate speech or threats and even then, "right away" isn't right away] and they'll probably tell you the exact same thing, because they would have to change their code to not ping your subscribers umpteen times otherwise, and they can't really do that.

[razielim]

Ahhhh... good point about Support. It's one of the few websites where talking to peers for solutions IS considered the better option that writing a ticket. And very effective, as proven by the replies here! As opposed to many other situations in life where the exact opposite is more effective.

I have zero impulse control, however, so I wrote this post, sent support a message an hour later, and then the next morning opened a second account. What a bunch of fuss I've kicked up... But the archiving is happening, at least!

You're SO RIGHT about it being a BIG extra step to use the second account. Having opened it and started with just a couple fics, I'm already thinking it's not worth it. Probably better to just reveal a collection and have the one batch email go out than give myself hours of extra labor.