I’ve seen several people in the past 2 weeks post in utter confusion about their works disappearing after they were notified that they’d been added to a collection – or not notified at all. This sounds like a deep mystery, but it’s not.
A somewhat new feature on AO3 is the ability to invite works to a collection. Each user can set their preference to either accept all such invitations automatically or decide each one manually. You can also set whether to be emailed about invitations or not. These settings are under your “Preferences” menu, in the “Collections, Challenges and Gifts” section.
Recently, several users have started creating collections instead of using personal bookmarks for a topic. This is fine! These users then started inviting works to those collections. Also fine! That’s what the system was designed for.
Some of those collection owners got excited about the Anonymity function that collections can turn on or off. They decided to make their collections anonymous. To protect anonymity, if a work is listed in a collection that is set to anonymous, the work does not appear on your personal works page. This makes sense if you enter a challenge and it has an anonymous period before reveals – having the work appear on your personal works page would break anonymity pretty badly!
Unfortunately, I think most people setting Anonymity on these new invitation-only collections don’t realize that they’re making people’s existing works disappear from their works pages. If you have “Automatically agree to your work being collected by others in the Archive” and “Turn off emails from collections” both checked, your work might seem to literally vanish. Someone adds it to their collection, you don’t get an email because you turned those off, and you never find out what happened.
However! There’s a very simple solution.
- Go to your works page (http://archiveofourown.org/users/YOUR USERNAME/works).
- Select the button “Works in Collections”.
- All your works in collections will pop up, and all the collections will be listed in the filters.
- Skim down to find your missing work, or use the filter list to look for a collection you don’t remember seeing before and filter by it.
- Edit your work.
- Under “Post to Collections / Challenges”, press the “x” beside the collection’s name.
- Save your work.
This will remove your work from the collection – for now. If this happened to you, I highly recommend turning off “Automatically agree to your work being collected by others in the Archive” in your preferences to avoid the work being re-added to the collection by a confused collection owner who doesn’t understand what happened.
Collection owners, please make sure you understand what Anonymity does before enabling it! For most invitation-only collections, it doesn’t make sense to enable that, because the works already exist and have names attached to them on the archive.
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