#overtagging wank

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.

It probably is at the end of the day, but ime the team at AO3 are trying to be very careful in how they approach this and what they frame as the actual policy violation. They’re probably afraid that if they discipline this author for tagging practices they’ll be inundated with requests to do so for countless other works that haven’t caught the attention of fandom at large but annoys someone somewhere. They have to be very precise in defining rules about this. 

I’m fairly sure all the fandoms the work is tagged with are genuinely crossovers that occur in the work, so you can’t really say that they shouldn’t be allowed to tag it that way, since now you’ve created a situation where how crossovers should be tagged isn’t clear. I don’t know if all the other tags are things that appear in the work, but you also can’t create a situation where the abuse team have to go through checking whether those tags are legitimate. If you cite the violation as “tagging for things that aren’t relevant” then you’ve created a situation where that’s a legitimate complaint to bring to them.

There’s no official limit on the number of tags. That’s the actual violation, right? There are simply too many. But there’s no rule that says you can’t do that. It’s a social convention in fandom to not overtag your work, it’s a fandom faux pas, but it’s more a violation of the spirit of the law than the word of the law, and now the team at AO3 have to figure out a way to convert that into something already mentioned in their TOS or a new rule.