Dealing with the "Reveals Bug" on AO3

[ride_4ever]

When you post a work to an anonymous, unrevealed AO3 collection, such as the dSSS, your work is supposed to stay hidden until the collection is set to be revealed... and that is what happens unless that collection has been hit by the AO3 "reveals bug" that causes submitted fanworks to appear immediately as if you'd posted them outside the collection. We mods cannot predict or prevent the “reveals bug”. To prevent your work from being revealed ahead of time, you need to preview your work and save it as a draft, check its settings, and then either continue to post it (if the settings are correct) or delete it, wait a few minutes, and try again. Please make sure you don't leave it as a draft - that will not fulfill your assignment.

Here’s a “Reveals Bug” Tutorial, courtesy of the Once Upon a Fic comm.

(TYK to feroxargentea for providing this information.)

Comments

[jackymedan]

Will you be crossposting this to tumblr as well and/or posting a reminder of this when you actually open the collection for posting works, so people won't forget to do this? thanks for the heads up either way :)))

[ride_4ever]

We mods split up the work of who handles which social media platforms -- I'm the one for LJ and DW and Pillowfort, and as soon as I had posted this "reveals bug" info I informed the mod who does Tumblr to make the same post there. Might be something of a time-lag between this post and the Tumblr post because that mod is currently travelling and may have gaps in online time.

As for the part of your question where you wrote "when you actually open the collection for posting works" -- well, the collection becomes open for posting works as soon as assignments are sent out, so it's been open already and that's how we saw that works posted to the collection were affected by the "reveals bug".

[jackymedan]

Ok :) just making sure. I wanted to reblog it there to spread the word, idk if everyone follows this comm (I saw it because I got an email notification about the post otherwise I don't really come here on DW)

I didn't know the collection was already open, sorry, I thought you manually opened it on december 1st.. again, thank you for the heads up! hopefully everything that gets uploaded from now on will be ok with these precautions.

[ride_4ever]

We mods encourage all the dSSS participants to be set up for email notifications from this comm (as you have done) but we know that not everyone has actually done that, so TYK for the reblogging!

[ride_4ever]

Two uploads that went tonight were fine, so either fen are now taking precautions or the bug has passed us by for the time being or both.

[verushka70]

btw, TKY very much for keeping us informed so we can fix things ASAP. Much appreciated!

[squidgiepdx]

As Ride said, yep! I will post to Tumblr soon. Boo and I are in india on vacation, so I’m a bit slow to react at the moment. But i will post in the next couple hours.

[jackymedan]

I saw and reblogged the post :)) thank you! (I didn't mean to hurry you guys, hope you enjoy your vacation!)

[squidgiepdx]

No worries at all! With boo and me on the other side of the world, plus being in vacation mode, makes for some delayed responses! :)

[jackymedan]

hey, I just stumbled upon an old open tab I had of the collection and I noticed this:

"Works Revealed: (no time specified)
Authors Revealed: Mon 24 Dec 2018 11:59PM CST (06:59AM CET)"

did that happen by accident/as a glitch (since the date currently listed for authors revealed should be the works revealed date) maybe related to this bug or...?

[ride_4ever]

TYK! That does bear checking out and mods will do so.

[verushka70]

Fixed it last night...Again, thanks so much for letting us know so we can fix the glitches!

[jackymedan]

no problem :))) thank YOU guys for running the exchange every year! it really has been one of the highlights of my year fandomwise ever since I first joined in 2014, so the least I can do (besides signing up and making art) is try to help you guys out wherever I can <3

[ride_4ever]

<3 <3 <3