what are people getting mad about on ao3 now?? which fic with millions of tags are people mad about
It’s a Mo Dao Zu Shi fic called “Sexy Time With Wangxian” which has been clogging up search results for months at this point (if not longer) due to frequent updates and over-tagging, but recently got worse. I’ve personally scrolled past it many times and it was always annoying but it didn’t use to be as bad.
From what I can piece together, the author got annoyed with people going into their comments and telling them to use fewer tags so they added even more tags and, which is probably most vital to this blowing up, added crossover tags for BTS and some other stuff, meaning that this fic would then also clog up search results in those fandoms.
The fic is apparently currently down because the author said something about hoping their critics got COVID or whatever and AO3 suspended them for a month for abusive conduct (not for the fic, which doesn’t outright break anything in the TOS, although I think you could argue some elements of the authors behavior falls under spam). The author claims to be planning to come back after the suspension ends and add even more crossover tags.
Anyway apparently some people thought the way to protest AO3 not just removing that fic the minute they got mass complaints about it was to make their own over-tagged spam works. I saw one with the bee movie script in the tags that was gone the minute I refreshed the page so it seems like AO3 are on top of it but good grief, that behavior is the last thing the volunteers need while they figure out how to set up rules surrounding over-tagging that prevent spam behavior but doesn’t limit legitimate usage of the site or set a bad precedent for how and why they intervene in fandom wank over a specific work.