What Does Restricted (Logged-In Only) Mean?
AO3 PlatformAn 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.
Restricted (Logged-In Only) in Practice
Restricting a work is the archive's middle ground between fully public and gone: anyone with an AO3 account can still read it, but logged-out visitors, search engine crawlers, and casual link-followers hit a login wall. Authors restrict for many reasons — keeping RPF inside the fourth wall and away from the people it depicts, reducing scraping for reposts and AI training datasets, or general privacy comfort. Waves of mass-restricting tend to follow scraping scandals and fandom privacy scares. The lock icon next to a title is the visible marker, and 'locking' fics is the common verb for the practice.
Example usage
"After the scraping incident she locked her whole catalog — everything's restricted to logged-in users now."
Related Terms
Repost (Unauthorized)
Republishing 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.
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RPF (Real Person Fiction)
Fanfiction about real people — musicians, actors, athletes, streamers — rather than fictional characters. RPF is a major, long-established wing of fandom with its own norms and debates.
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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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Fourth Wall (Fandom)
The norm of keeping fanworks — especially RPF and shipping content — out of the view of the celebrities and creators they depict. 'Breaking the fourth wall' means fan content reaching its subjects, usually to fandom's horror.
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