AO3 News

Invitation queue turned off for a week to combat spam

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Published:
2017-10-22 22:05:00 UTC
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We're currently experiencing an influx of spammers who have been creating bogus works and collections to link to their fare. They've become highly adept at using Archive features, and they've been flooding our invite queue with throwaway email addresses to create new accounts. This keeps our Abuse team busy around the clock, deleting spam works as they pop up and trying to weed out obvious spam email addresses before invites are sent out every day. It also prolongs the wait time for everyone else who wants to join the Archive. Our wait list is inching ever closer to 20,000, meaning legitimate users have to wait almost three weeks to receive an invitation email.

As a short-term measure, we've decided to turn off the invite queue for a week, so we can relieve some of the burden on our Abuse team, discuss technical solutions to the problem, and implement a quick fix or two to help with the worst attacks.

If you are a current user, you can check your Invitations page to see if you have any old invites waiting to be sent to a friend or fellow fan.

We are sorry for the long wait times, and we're doing our best to come back soon and get invites out quicker to those currently waiting!

Update on October 23, 11:23 UTC: People who are currently waiting for an invitation should still receive an email while the queue is under review. If you think you should have received an invitation, please wait another day or two, check your spam folder or "Social" tab in Gmail, and use our look-up tool to see if you're still in the queue. If you're sure you should have received an invitation and didn't, you can contact our Support team.

Update on October 30, 23:08 UTC: Please refer to our post "Update: Invitation requests remain disabled for the time being" for the latest information regarding invitations.