What is the general etiquette of a stranger suggesting corrections in the comments?

I noticed an error in a scaramouche fic, so I messaged her on DW to tell her, and she said it was okay if I did so in comments.

I was reading another story I really liked, and I went back to the beginning, and noticed inconsistencies with her last chapter. Not anyone I've ever had dealings with (I've had short comments conversations with Annie D), but they just seemed like logistics (she'd forgotten how far apart she'd established they lived, for instance, and where Sam was in school). But then it turned out to be region-picking, because of a meaning of college that's new to me, and that was a bit of a back and forth.

Her last chapter had "jumper", "cooker", and "rubbish" so I thought I'd say something, but now that it's done (she made the edits and thanked me), I feel I might have crossed a line.

I often have that question, too. No answer for you, but I usually don't say anything.

I do, but I'm often a pain in the butt. I got Kudos on an old story this morning.

What is the general etiquette of a stranger suggesting corrections in the comments?

If there's a vaguely private way, I totally do if I like the story. I prefer not to leave them in general comments because it makes *me* feel weird. But I've emailed and such.

If there's no *subtle* way, I debate how big the edit is and how much the mistake nags at me. I've gone both ways.

AO3 doesn't have a way to contact the authors, right? Sheeit, I'd feel even worse if they do, but last time I looked there wasn't a way.

And, you know, scaramouche is pretty much bulletproof and BNFlike. Her not midning doesn't have to extrapolate.

I, just...good story! Glaring British vocab in SPN story set in the US! I want to help.

I'm sure there are a few idiomatic expressions either way you might not catch, but for the most part, if I'm writing Harry Potter, I'm going to write jumper instead of sweater, and lift instead of elevator. Overall, it's not really that hard.

I caught a few things like that in a Big Bang Theory story that was really good.

The author used spanner instead of wrench and two other things that stuck out.

I commented that it was a really good story and I really enjoyed it, there were just a few "Britishisms" that crept through. The author said she was Australian and asked what I meant so I told her and she fixed them.

I'm more able to let it go at this point if it's in the narrative text (it seems like there's a flood of British authors hitting AO3 and writing for US fandoms), but hearing Californian teens say something like "what are you on about?" in the dialogue makes me grind my teeth. And at this point I'm wondering if there's some way to purge the word ridiculous from the internet.

What's wrong with ridiculous?

Speaking of etiquette, I was just reading these SPN RPG character descriptions [link] and thinking they were really neat, and recognising the artists of the first two card pics, and then....got to the end of the post. Damn, man! That's so not cool, especially when you could have used photos and gotten away clean. Pretending to be polite doesn't make it better.

Which is disappointing, because they'd have been real cool if they weren't bothering the artists.