[ID: a meme reading "you're offered $250 million dollars but to claim it you must enter the last video game you've played and stay there for a full year. If you accept the deal, how's life there?]
The above examples have been provided with the authors' permission to demonstrate what these look like.
Basic rundown:
They are all 3 sentences long
Perfect grammar, capitalization, and punctuation
Like absolutely flawless English teacher-style writing with only a single exclamation mark, ever
No mentions whatsoever of character names, settings, situations, or anything that could be tied to the story
The usernames may be identical to people who exist on ao3, but the name is not clickable, and no profile is associated with it EXCEPT when you directly search for that name. What this means: the comments come from an unregistered (not logged in) reader, bots scrape the site for real usernames, attach that to the comment, and post
Please spread the word about this so authors can filter comments and report them accordingly
There has been some speculation about why this is happening at all, and the best guess is that this is a feature that AI-training story-scraping tools are implementing to try and make their browsing traffic look legitimate
what's the worst month? there's only ten options so i skipped october cause we all know she's too good for us and december cause yes we're all tired of christmas but let's give someone else a shot at worstie <3
xxknoxvixenxx
radioheadarchive
ripperdxcs
racistlatino
a-url-that-exists
stitched-up-teddy-bear
beemovieerotica
whencartoonsruletheworld
were--ralph