Ao3 open doors + kink meme imports
Nov. 2nd, 2021 08:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yuuagoThe Disney Kink Meme (![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
disney_kink) is being imported to Ao3 via the Open Doors project*. This was actually announced last year over on the kink meme itself*.
To my knowledge, this is the first time a kink meme's been imported to Ao3. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)
A while back, the topic of "Hey, what ifhetalia_kink was imported via open doors?" came up in conversation - I think with kanadka. I had some mixed feelings about the idea of kink meme imports at the time. I still have mixed feelings!
There are some things specific to kink memes that seem to me like they'd be tricky to accommodate.
Prompts - Ao3 does have a prompt meme function. I've used it once or twice, but not extensively. It has some limitations, the most important one in this case being anonymity. There is no way to truly post a prompt as anon, because you can't post prompts without an account. There is a checkbox to have your prompt show as anonymous, but this is not true anonymity. When it comes to archiving prompts, that isn't an issue, but if an imported kink meme is intended to be open for receiving prompts after importing, that could make things tricky. I feel like having true anonymous as a prompt option is really important for a kink meme.
This seems to not be a huge issue with Disney-kink because they don't have enforced anonymity for prompts/fills, so the checkbox for "semi-anonymous prompts" would probably fulfill its needs if it's going to continue to be open for prompts after import. But for a kink meme with mandatory and enforced anonymity, like the Hetalia one, it seems like it would be a sticking point. (Frankly, the idea of a Hetalia kink meme without enforced anon gives me hives.)
Fills - This is less of a structual issue, but. For works posted anonymously, there could be problems with claiming de-anoned works. Like, somebody could de-anon their works, but if the original was posted as anon, there's nothing to prove that the person posting the work on Ao3 (or on a DW archive in my case) is the person who wrote them. There's nothing to prove that any person who says they wrote a fic posted anon on LJ/DW is actually the person who wrote it. Admittedly, it's unlikely that someone would plagiarize in this way, and it's probably a subject that's come up before with other Open Doors projects, but it just feels weird to me.
...Anyway. With regards to the Hetalia kink meme, this isn't something we need to worry about. It's sluggish/inactive here on Dreamwidth, but the account owner is still keeping the lights on (I spoke with them a while back), and I've been renewing its DW subscription to keep it searchable. I think it's unlikely to get imported unless Dreamwidth threatens to go belly-up. I don't see that happening.
As for the Disney kink meme - I'm interested in seeing how this will work out in practice. Like I mentioned before, there haven't been many (any?) other kink meme imports, so I'm really curious to see how they'll integrate the prompt function. ...And who knows, maybe after all the fics are imported to Ao3, I'll find something to read, heh. That's definitely one advantage to importing like this - stuff being filterable/more easily searchable, rather than having to be manually indexed.
If this works out well, it might lead to other kink memes getting imported in the future. That could be interesting.
[EDIT Nov 07]
hetalia_kink has replied in a discussion thread about imports on FFA. They say they have no plans to consider importing unless DW becomes as unstable as LJ. So there's now an official word on that.
disney_kink) is being imported to Ao3 via the Open Doors project*. This was actually announced last year over on the kink meme itself*.To my knowledge, this is the first time a kink meme's been imported to Ao3. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)
A while back, the topic of "Hey, what if
hetalia_kink was imported via open doors?" came up in conversation - I think with kanadka. I had some mixed feelings about the idea of kink meme imports at the time. I still have mixed feelings!There are some things specific to kink memes that seem to me like they'd be tricky to accommodate.
Prompts - Ao3 does have a prompt meme function. I've used it once or twice, but not extensively. It has some limitations, the most important one in this case being anonymity. There is no way to truly post a prompt as anon, because you can't post prompts without an account. There is a checkbox to have your prompt show as anonymous, but this is not true anonymity. When it comes to archiving prompts, that isn't an issue, but if an imported kink meme is intended to be open for receiving prompts after importing, that could make things tricky. I feel like having true anonymous as a prompt option is really important for a kink meme.
This seems to not be a huge issue with Disney-kink because they don't have enforced anonymity for prompts/fills, so the checkbox for "semi-anonymous prompts" would probably fulfill its needs if it's going to continue to be open for prompts after import. But for a kink meme with mandatory and enforced anonymity, like the Hetalia one, it seems like it would be a sticking point. (Frankly, the idea of a Hetalia kink meme without enforced anon gives me hives.)
Fills - This is less of a structual issue, but. For works posted anonymously, there could be problems with claiming de-anoned works. Like, somebody could de-anon their works, but if the original was posted as anon, there's nothing to prove that the person posting the work on Ao3 (or on a DW archive in my case) is the person who wrote them. There's nothing to prove that any person who says they wrote a fic posted anon on LJ/DW is actually the person who wrote it. Admittedly, it's unlikely that someone would plagiarize in this way, and it's probably a subject that's come up before with other Open Doors projects, but it just feels weird to me.
...Anyway. With regards to the Hetalia kink meme, this isn't something we need to worry about. It's sluggish/inactive here on Dreamwidth, but the account owner is still keeping the lights on (I spoke with them a while back), and I've been renewing its DW subscription to keep it searchable. I think it's unlikely to get imported unless Dreamwidth threatens to go belly-up. I don't see that happening.
As for the Disney kink meme - I'm interested in seeing how this will work out in practice. Like I mentioned before, there haven't been many (any?) other kink meme imports, so I'm really curious to see how they'll integrate the prompt function. ...And who knows, maybe after all the fics are imported to Ao3, I'll find something to read, heh. That's definitely one advantage to importing like this - stuff being filterable/more easily searchable, rather than having to be manually indexed.
If this works out well, it might lead to other kink memes getting imported in the future. That could be interesting.
[EDIT Nov 07]
hetalia_kink has replied in a discussion thread about imports on FFA. They say they have no plans to consider importing unless DW becomes as unstable as LJ. So there's now an official word on that.
Yuu. Fic writer & book lover. M/Canada.
no subject
Date: 2021-11-03 04:56 am (UTC)Plus, idk, I feel like it takes away a lot of context to just drop things as separate files on AO3. There's stuff that I'd be fine with moving to AO3 under my name or a sock, and have done so, and there's stuff that even anon I'd rather was just... left in it's little corner of the internet.
But... I don't have any say in that, I guess.
no subject
Date: 2021-11-03 12:55 pm (UTC)I get the impression that part of the motivation in this specific case is a desire to have it hosted somewhere where there is no entry comment limit and all material is indexed automatically. But since I haven't spoken with the KM owner I'm just guessing.
Agreed re: some things are better left where they are. The concept still seems kind of yikes to me, but...! Here we are, I guess.
no subject
Date: 2021-11-03 02:09 pm (UTC)Just... If I knew there was a possibility the whole thing would get yeeted to AO3, I probably wouldn't have posted some of that stuff at all :(
(Not that I'm on Disney Kink, but I'm on quite a few others, if this is going to be a THING).
no subject
Date: 2021-11-04 02:02 am (UTC)This sure does raise some questions about importing projects like this. It's probably been discussed a lot before, but the anon factor makes potential issues more obvious.
no subject
Date: 2021-11-03 04:16 pm (UTC)So - fair disclosure here - awhile back I was corresponding with Open Doors but not for any kinkmeme, it's for an older fandom (and I'm sure you'll never guess which one, Yuu /o\) where in the pre-AO3 days one pair had a small site run off the eFiction software. That software apparently allows the admin to extract a SQL database of (author, fic) pairs and other meta data, etc, but all we have is an archival copy of the website - so, just html files, no SQL access or underlying backend at all. The process I was given was, OD gets someone who was familiar enough with the fandom (that was me) to go through the archival copy of the website and match up who had already imported their fic to AO3 so that the remainder would be added to the collection. As you can imagine, that needs some domain knowledge of the fandom in question. But then 2020 happened and it continues to happen so that project will have to wait.
But like! The only reason we are able to do this is because the original admin passed away. There's supposed to be like a thing with OD whereby if the original admin did not necessarily grant permission, then no permission is given. How does this work in a Dreamwidth setting? I suppose someone contacted the KM user?
All this to say: I have ... no fucking idea how this would even begin to work with Dreamwidth. Scraping Dreamwidth is - okay, I guess you could do that, it's not a complete nightmare, but isn't it kind of a nightmare? Like a little one? I think it was gramarye awhile back who'd done a complete scrape of the Hetalia kink meme (and a bunch of others) to make it somewhat searchable, and they'd included some sort of logic query that if there was a link posted, mark it as 'filled'. But that wasn't foolproof accurate. (No shade, the kink meme is huge, and I don't expect anyone to have clicked through and made sure there were solid connections at every point in the network, I imagine they did some subset and called it a day - well, it's what I'd do, anyway.) So anyway, just collecting a full list of fills can be difficult, given different kink meme rules - if they have posts for fills for past parts, if they have many parts, etc.
But how... how the hell are we going to get that aforementioned domain knowledge with an anon kink meme? Like you correctly point out, some people did de-anon their fics, but many didn't, and how could one person or even a subset of people know who deanoned and which (author, fic) pairs have already been imported? And some of these anon fills never had titles, so you couldn't be search+matching on that... I don't even know if one could reliably search+match for the text itself, in case the person (during the deanoning process) did some edits - as I have heavily done in all my deanons, I basically treated the kinkmeme as a first draft kinda place! Like. What kind of wild west scraping + search/match import kind of shenanigans would have to happen here. I guess maybe what I'm really asking is, what is it about the Disney kink meme that has made this doable for them, was it the size? Was it the careful curation by the admins? Was it the fact that the admins were very well-connected and have since been able to connect some fraction of fills to deanons with accuracy?
And that doesn't even start to begin with claiming and deanoning post-import. Like you point out, how does this work. I don't even know how it works in a classical OD import project, because we never got that far, but I got the impression from them that it was largely, 'someone emails us and we trust them'. That's also not foolproof accurate, but very OTW to assume good faith and not plan at all for bad actors. I've got stuff on the kink meme I still haven't deanoned, and while I am unlikely to deanon it, I don't want others to claim it? Weirdly? Idk if that makes me weird or selfish or anything. I just know, I didn't post my fill thinking, 'why yes I do hereby abandon and relinquish all property of these words until such time as I rightfully re-claim them through the deanon process'.
idk, man! Between this and Fanlore's wild pictures-of-fans arguments, I'm starting to get the impression the OTW in general is very, 'archive everything at all costs' which doesn't a priori trump people's consent to have their stuff archived, buuuut the haste with which these things happen does low-key give me the impression that the consent aspect is like. a secondary consideration. And that they only stop to consider it when there's pushback. :/
no subject
Date: 2021-11-03 04:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-11-04 03:07 am (UTC)For this specific situation: The mods of the Disney kink meme reached out to OD; I took a look on the KM and there was discussion of it back in 2019. So it was definitely initiated from the KM admin end.
You have a good point that scraping DW is a challenge. I remember Gramary's Hetalia-kink scrape; it was SO helpful, not foolproof, but... still. Man, I miss that.
I guess maybe what I'm really asking is, what is it about the Disney kink meme that has made this doable for them?
I don't have any solid answers, but I can hazard some guesses.
1. The Disney kink meme is small. At least, from my perspective. It has just over 31k, and at least 4k of those comments are definitely not prompts or fic (offtopic post, friending meme, etc). They have 4 prompt posts, and none of them were maxed out. Compare this to the behemoth that is Hetalia-kink, with over 988k comments.
To be honest, Disney-kink is small enough that I'm looking at it and thinking - it would be possible to import it manually, no scraping required. It's not elegant or fancy, and it's a recipe for RSI, but it's small enough that I'm looking at it and thinking, "Yeah, that's doable, it'd take me about a month if I did it in my spare time".
2. Lots of logged-in fills. Like I mentioned, anon is not mandatory at DK, and at a glance it looks like logged-in fills far outnumber anonymous fills. So, this means that for a significant amount of material, the authors could theoretically be contacted, provided they still have access to their Livejournal/Dreamwidth accounts.
3. Indexing: It's at least partially indexed, at least up to a certain date, and the indexing includes listing the authors. I don't have a good grasp of their indexing system, but it looks like they were thorough when it comes to keeping track of fills (up to a point), so that would likely be useful in determining what material is fanwork and what is not.
It'd still be tricky to determine what's already been imported vs what is not, but given the above, not impossible, I think.
You did mention: I don't even know if one could reliably search+match for the text itself, in case the person (during the deanoning process) did some edits - as I have heavily done in all my deanons, I basically treated the kinkmeme as a first draft kinda place!
Moving from the topic of DK specifically, this is something that did come to mind re: the discussion about the Hetalia kink meme. Some works have been de-anoned at Ao3, but like you mentioned, the text won't necessarily match. The fic that immediately came to mind was "When the Sixth Day Comes"; the version on the kink meme is a complete story, but when Madamefolie de-anoned it on Ao3, she decided to heavily revise it. And... never finished revising and posting it! So the version on Ao3 isn't complete! (ALAS.) And like... in the situation of a theoretical import, what happens in a case like that? I don't know! [/throws up hands]
So. There's that. And the claiming issue. It kind of bugs me that like... Anonymous works will be automatically imported. This leaves anon authors with a few options:
- Let Ao3 import the work as anon
- Get ahead of the game by posting it oneself
- Contact Ao3 and inform them that Author doesn't want these specific works imported, thereby de-anoning, even if to a small amount of people. And Ao3 is just... going to believe that this random person is the author, even though nobody can prove it? Apparently?
- Not hear about it and then discover months or years later that works have been crossposted to Ao3 without the author's knowledge?!
None of these seem ideal to me! Probably some people wouldn't care about them being imported as anon, but other people likely would.
And on a completely other note: For works that have already been posted at Ao3, I wonder how they're going to link them to the imported prompts. I'm not sure if it's currently possible to do that. This whole thing brings up a lot of "I wonder how the technical aspect of it will work" for me, and it's stuff that I find interesting, but it's too bad that it's tied up with some other stuff that could potentially be thorny and controversial.
Between this and Fanlore's wild pictures-of-fans arguments, I'm starting to get the impression the OTW in general is very, 'archive everything at all costs' which doesn't a priori trump people's consent to have their stuff archived, buuuut the haste with which these things happen does low-key give me the impression that the consent aspect is like. a secondary consideration.
You don't say. ;V Sure does seem that way.
no subject
Date: 2021-11-06 02:10 am (UTC)In the comment threads, one of the OD volunteers says that the process is going to be manual. So, that answers some of our questions. It's pretty much what I figured, because it's possible with the scope and means not having to deal with the challenge of scraping. (Then again, my default thought is "How can we do this manually?" in most cases, since manual entry is my actual job. Anyway.)
'Course, this means that larger projects, like Hetalia-kink, would be... extremely difficult and time-consuming with this process.
Re: Scraping. A random thought. If somebody wanted to scrape a kink meme for only the prompts, would that be simpler/more doable than doing prompts and fills? I'm assuming yes, that it would be a matter of scraping top-level comments and then doing a manual check to remove things like misfires. But I don't know anything about this kind of thing.
no subject
Date: 2021-11-03 06:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-11-04 02:07 am (UTC)I'm really interested in the practical/technical question of "How can a project like this be imported and integrated into Ao3's currently-existing prompt meme system". But the thought of my own fic being ported over like this gets a "hell no!" reaction from me. The thought that eventually somebody could just... import my anon-posted work, whether I wanted that to happen or not, doesn't sit right with me at all.