im not a twink i promise

Why are you making this change?

As we’re an RPF subfandom, we adhere to standard policy for RPF tag formatting, which means including a legal name where appropriate. We source legal names from web pages that are publicly accessible at the time of canonization, which creators would have endorsed themselves (such as their social media or interview articles). However, when character tags only contain a legal name, they’re often unrecognizable for both users and wranglers. 

If a content creator primarily promotes themselves under a username, many users likely won’t know who the canonical character tag is referring to. Similarly, tag wranglers have struggled with accidentally duplicating character tags: we have trouble finding the canonical tags too!

To improve things for everyone, we’re changing our canonical tags to include usernames alongside legal names where appropriate. This ensures we’re compatible with other RPF fandoms—which we often have overlap with—while keeping tags usable and recognizable. 

Will this affect anyone whose character tag is only a username? Will you add legal names to tags that don’t have them already? 

We don’t plan to edit any existing canonical character tags that only contain a username. For example, TommyInnit (Video Blogging RPF) will remain canonical, even though the creator has since also made content under the legal name Tom Simons. 

In rare cases, a username may be ambiguous within Video Blogging RPF, and we will add another name or more information to a character tag to differentiate it. However, this is generally quite rare. When we conducted our audit of all character tags in Video Blogging RPF, the vast majority of username-only tags did not require additional disambiguation and will not be changed. 

In other cases, such as a content creator not wanting to be associated with a username anymore, we will remove the relevant information from the tag and replace it with a more appropriate name. This is similar to how we handle content creators who do not go by old legal names anymore. If a content creator changes their name—legal name or username—and does not want to be associated with their old name, we have and always will update the character tag as appropriate. 

What if a legal name on a character tag is incorrect? Will you be fixing those?

During our audit, we also ran into a few cases where a character tag’s legal name is incorrect, outdated, or there are conflicting sources. We will be updating such tags with more up-to-date information as we come across them or will remove names from a tag entirely if there are conflicting sources. For example, as mentioned above, Jeremy Harrington will be renamed to Jeremy | Jerma985 due to conflicting unofficial sources regarding the creator's legal last name. 

We want to thank our volunteers for their hard work, both for evaluating the 6000+ character tags in Video Blogging RPF and for preparing to rename all relevant tags as quickly and smoothly as possible. Given the large number of tags that will be changed, these changes will take some time to complete. We ask for your patience as we work to rename all relevant tags. If you have any follow-up questions, or concerns about specific tags, you can always contact AO3 Support.