sirius ★

stupid comment i saw on youtube about white day 😭

hope this hasn’t been done before… kiibo and miu are talking about each other btw

AO3 is not goodreads. It is not the NYT bestseller list.

You paid no money to read these stories. They are, in fact, a labor of love, done on the off time in the off hours of people who are writing for the joy of writing and the joy of the story.

Your ratings are not appreciated. Not by other readers, who don't know you from adam. Not by fandom-savvy passerby.

And not, in fact, by the author. Who again: Wrote this for fun. In their spare time - around work, around family and friend commitments. Around the rest of their lives. Fandom clout almost never "pays off" in any monetary gains, in any form of physical or financial security.

So please stop "rating" us on something we do for joy.

Today, a fellow fanauthor shared this with me. It was not on any story of my own, but they understandably needed a moment to go "wtf" and process it all. With their permission, I now share this with you.

You won't find this comment on AO3 anymore, by the by.

I have... a lot of issues with this. First of all being something that would be a C-grade in any US school system is not a "Good Rating" for most folks, but many of my issues would be the same even in this commenter had rated this a 10/10.

It boils down to this:

Why are you grading us on something we all are here to do solely for fun and personal enjoyment? Why does it have to be good?

Why can't it just be a labor of love and of joy to be good enough for you, dear commenter?

Do I, as a fanauthor, want to write well? Sure! I do want to write good stories. But I didn't ask random readers to grade me on them. Not in bookmarks that I can easily check, and certainly not in my comments section. And I never will want them to. Every author I've talked to agrees. Is there someone out there who might want this? Sure. Most likely, even! The human experience and desires are broad and varied. But in my experience, if they do exist in Fandom, they're the vast minority. So please:

Tap on a tag you're interested in reading (just at the top of a fic, for example). That will bring you to a results page that shows every fic that uses that tag. To get rid of the ones you don't want, look right above the works list to the buttons and tap on Filters. (if you're on a computer, the filters will already be there, on the right hand side of your screen).

Once you've found the filter menu, it's like the OP said. There are a *lot* of options for you to choose from. You can tap on any of them to open up a sub menu with specifics.

For relationship/character/trope tags, AO3 will automatically show you the top ten most-tagged ones within the tag you're already looking at. If the one you want to exclude isn't in that list, you can type it into the "Other tags to exclude" box and AO3 will give you a dropdown to pick from. You can add a theoretically unlimited number of tags to your exclude list, but I think it's possible to have a list that breaks things eventually. I've never personally hit it? But I bet someone out there has.

that's why, for example, the tags

not beta read

no beta

no beta we die like men

no beta we die like mne

no beta we die like [insert character who dies in canon]

unbetad

unbeta'd

unbeta-d

un-beta'd

and a million more versions are all searchable and filterable if you just tag one of them. A Tag Wrangler (the job title of a human volunteer who manages AO3 tags) has made sure that AO3 understands that those are all synonyms, so AO3 treats them that way.

When you're tagging your fic, or searching for a fic, or filtering a tag to find or remove works from the list you do not have to use every possible version of a tag. You just need to pick one - unless using more is a stylistic choice you're making, in which case have at it.

Let’s Talk Tumblr-Style Tags

I’ve received multiple questions about “tumblr-style” or “rambling” tags. Let’s talk about those for a minute!

How do you deal with “chatty” tags?

The same way we deal with any other tag! Honestly, the main problem with “chatty” tags is the way they tend to roll several topics into one tag. Any given tag can only be synned (attached) to one “canonical” tag. So if you mention that Harry Potter is both red-haired AND a Ravenclaw in your tag, I can’t attach it to both Red-Haired Harry Potter and Ravenclaw Harry Potter, so it gets attached to neither. I don’t care how long or weird your tags are, as long as they only talk about one topic! I deal with them just fine.

When people talk in the tags as they might in Tumblr tagging, does that make your job more difficult? 

Nope! Long tags are no harder to wrangle than short ones. And if you’re not saying anything of substance, that’s easy for me to handle; it’s not really my problem, frankly. You’re much more likely to be bothering readers, who probably don’t want to read a long ramble of tags to figure out what’s in your works. But it doesn’t make wrangling harder!

I’ve seen people complain about Tumblr-style “rambling” in additional tags, but the ranters have never identified themselves as wranglers. Is there a majority opinion about unwrangleable tags among wranglers (omg “wrangle” doesn’t even look like a word anymore)? How do you handle these tags in your work?

Years and years ago I saw a callout culture post telling everyone to stop using the AO3 tags like their tumblr ones, i.e. using them to have rambles and ‘feels’, and that it was causing the site and staff problems. It was written very rudely but has always stuck with me. Stopping short of the obnoxious, does this mess your guys good work up? Is there anything you wish we knew when we’re tagging a new work?

Personally, I still use some slightly chatty tags on my own works! Continuing the Harry Potter examples, I might tag something like “Harry Potter remains a total disaster” because I know that it can easily be synned to “Human Disaster Harry Potter” while making it clear to my readers that this is an ongoing theme. Again, the frustration with chatty tags among wranglers is mainly about the multiple-topic tags. We want to make your works filterable! Tags about how Harry Potter is a human disaster AND bisexual AND an auror can’t be attached to any of those tags, and so are not filterable. 

The same thing applies to tags that are broken into two. You probably don’t realize it, but wranglers see tags totally divorced from their context! They show up in columns of text, on our end. So if you tag “#Harry Potter is so very gay #and so is Ron” they’ll show up separate from each other…. then “and so is Ron” will not be attached to “Gay Ron Weasley,” which is a pity for anyone looking for him! Each tag needs to have one concept, which means one full concept. All the facts in one place!

We leave these no-concept or multi-concept tags “unfilterable,” which means it’s in the fandom, but not attached to anything. They’re not hard to handle, but they make us sad, because we’d like to make them filterable and can’t. Of course, if you don’t care if your works are filterable, then carry right on, you poetic and noble land-mermaids. 

Chatty tags don’t mess us up. They can be exhausting from the sheer volume sometimes, but that’s okay! I don’t think anyone enjoys wrangling them, but they’re not the end of days for us. I think they’re actually worse from your end as a reader, because it can be hard to sort through a wall of tags to figure out what’s actually useful information, rather than complaining about [being up until 3 am/having writer’s block/hating that one character so so much/etc etc]. 

What wranglers wish taggers knew about Tumblr-style tags:

Here’s the takeaway: it’s fine to be chatty! All I ask is that you please try to keep each tag to one concept, and be aware of how many tags you’re using. Not just for the wrangler’s sake, but for your reader’s. Consider if the information you’re putting in the tags belongs there, for filtering or informational purposes, or if what you’re saying might not be better suited to an Author’s Note at the beginning of the chapter. And if you wouldn’t put it in your AN… why are you putting it in the tags?

- Guest Mod Pepper

that's why, for example, the tags

not beta read

no beta

no beta we die like men

no beta we die like mne

no beta we die like [insert character who dies in canon]

unbetad

unbeta'd

unbeta-d

un-beta'd

and a million more versions are all searchable and filterable if you just tag one of them. A Tag Wrangler (the job title of a human volunteer who manages AO3 tags) has made sure that AO3 understands that those are all synonyms, so AO3 treats them that way.

When you're tagging your fic, or searching for a fic, or filtering a tag to find or remove works from the list you do not have to use every possible version of a tag. You just need to pick one - unless using more is a stylistic choice you're making, in which case have at it.