I posted this on the announcement on the OTW's site as well, but it seems like thinks are being responded to more over here, so I thought I'd repost this:
I am honestly incredibly uncomfortable with the idea of challenge runners and collection maintainers being given direct access to the registered email addresses of people participating in the challenge. For the sake of prompt checking of my ao3 messages, I have my ao3 account associated with my main email, which is easy to attach to my real, non-fandom identity. I do not use this email for any other fandom purposes, however, and would not want it given out to challenge runners under any circumstances.
And even if participants are alright with the specific individuals who are running a challenge or collection having their emails address, since that list of people can change or be added to after the fact with no notice to people whose works are in that collection, the list of people who have access to their email address can change without notice. Unlike staff members or volunteers who could access this information now, there is no vetting or accountability if they should choose to use this information in ways not associated with the challenge or collection they run, so this seems very ripe for potential abuse.
Would it be possible for challenge runners and collection maintainers to be given a way to message participants without being given direct access to their address instead?
If it were a matter of "get your coding wish", I'd personally love it if, rather than automatically displaying the participant's email next to their sign-up, AO3 sign-ups included a field in Offers for a contact address.
This would mean it was a) entered deliberately by the participant, with an understanding of what it would be used for that was based on THAT exchange's rules b) current c) adjustable for the collection owner's preferences (ie, they could say if tumblr or dreamwidth was an acceptable alternative to email).
It would be a non-matchable field, similar to the "dear author letter" field but only visible to the collection owners/maintainers.
Moderators have always had access to participants' emails. Since the Archive's inception, we have had no reports of abuse. However, since this fact was not clear we are editing the Terms of Service to make this more transparent and to ensure that moderators understand they can and will be held responsible for abusing this feature.
There are no immediate plans to change this functionality. If we introduce something like private messaging we may reevaluate and add that as an option, however that is dependent on several variables and it may not be feasible.
Private messaging would actually be ideal for this, especially since sometimes there are comments I'd like to leave on fics but feel would not be best done publicly, if nothing else because it may be a gaff I feel is unintended and thus would like to give the person the option of silently fixing it without a comment thread others might (have) see(n).
Comment on Proposed Changes to the Archive of Our Own's Terms of Service and Frequently Asked Questions
the_dragongirl Tue 26 Jan 2016 10:20PM UTC
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Morbane Tue 26 Jan 2016 10:43PM UTC
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AO3_Policy_and_Abuse (Official) Wed 27 Jan 2016 01:52AM UTC
Last Edited Wed 27 Jan 2016 01:54AM UTC
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Ryo Hoshi (Hoshi_Ryo) Fri 29 Jan 2016 02:10AM UTC
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