What Does Repost (Unauthorized) Mean?
Fandom CultureRepublishing someone else's fanwork without permission — fic copied to other sites, art uploaded to aggregators, often stripped of credit. One of fandom's most persistent etiquette violations.
Repost (Unauthorized) in Practice
Reposting is distinct from reblogging or linking: the work itself is copied to a new location, severing it from its creator's control, stats, and comment section. Fic gets scraped wholesale onto ad-laden mirror sites and read aloud in monetized videos; art gets uploaded to Pinterest and Instagram accounts without credit. Fandom norms are unambiguous — link, don't repost — and creators fight back with watermarks, AO3's logged-in-only visibility option, and takedown requests. The issue has intensified in the AI era, with archives scraped for training data prompting many authors to lock works to registered users. The community's standing advice: if you love a work, send people to it, not a copy of it.
Example usage
"She found her entire series reposted on a mirror site with ads, and spent the week filing takedowns."
Related Terms
Restricted (Logged-In Only)
An AO3 posting option that makes a work visible only to logged-in archive users. Restricted works show a lock icon and don't appear to guests or search engines.
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Reblog
Tumblr's share function: reposting someone's post to your own blog, optionally with commentary or tags added. Reblogging is how fanwork circulates and how Tumblr fandom culture happens.
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AO3 (Archive of Our Own)
The largest fanfiction archive on the internet, run by the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works. It is fan-built, donation-funded, ad-free, and famous for its powerful tagging and filtering system.
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More Fandom Culture Terms
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