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Over the past several months, the Archive of Our Own has been experiencing an increase in spam comments left by registered users. To help prevent these comments, which typically ask for contact information and offer art commissions or collaboration, we'll be introducing limits on commenting and other activities for logged-in users. We expect to have these limits in place within the next few days.
As a result of these limits, you may get error messages telling you to "Retry later," especially when leaving or editing multiple comments over a short period of time. Our aim is to slow down the spammers with minimal impact on legitimate commenters, so we'll be monitoring the situation and adjusting the rate limits as needed once the code is in place. (This also means we can't tell you exactly what the limits are. However, we recommend waiting at least 15 minutes before trying again.)
Once these limits are in place, we'll also be looking into other methods that we hope will reduce spam with even less disruption to legitimate users. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your understanding as we work to find a balance that meets everyone's needs.
Update 21:45 UTC 24 March 2025: Rate limiting for logged-in comments is now in place.