How to use your AO3 inbox effectively
Iāve noticed that many authors only use those handy but limited-in-functionality email announcements of new fic comments. Many have also said that they find browsing individual story chaptersā comments sections so that they can see which discussions individual comments are a part of. In the AO3 inbox, you can actually do this very effectively, but many authors donāt seem to know about it!
Sure, you can reply to comments quickly by clicking on the email link, but really keeping track of which comments youāve not replied to kind of requires taking up using the AO3 inbox, which is a powerful and easy tool for reader interaction management. You can easily still also use the email announcements for replying because itās all synced, but I strongly recommend glancing at your inbox every once in a while to make sure you havenāt missed or forgot about any comments.
Thatās a link to your inbox on the left. Unless youāve deleted stuff off there, it will contain all the comments youāve received, ever. The number in brackets next to the circled link is the number of unreadĀ comments (aka comments which have not been marked as read OR been replied to). The simplest way to understand this number is that itāsĀ how many comments have been given about which you havenāt decided what to do (reply/ignore/delete).
(Tip: Browsing the older parts of your inbox is fun for a bit of encounraging bedtime reading.)
You can choose to only see these comments to which you havenāt reacted to. There are useful filters on the right.
And now comes the only unintuitive thing you need to know to make full use of your inbox: click on the name of the story in a comment, and you will be taken to a separate page.
Now, youāll be faced with four choices. You can reply directly, delete the comment, or see the whole conversation the comment is a part of.Ā āThreadā shows you the discussion from this comment onwards;Ā āParent threadā shows you the entire conversation itās a part of. Letās chooseĀ āParent threadā:
VoilĆ”! People whoĀ complain that they donāt like the inbox because canāt keep up which story and which chapter and what conversation comments are a part of probably just havenāt found this option yet. On this page, you can neatly respond to every part of the conversation you want to. A lot easier than trying to sort through all those emails to work out who said what and when and which messages youāve replied to or otherwise reacted to.
If you reply to a comment via email, the system will automatically mark it as read and replied to in the inbox as well.
āBut what if Iāve never used it and itās got lots of comments and I sure donāt want to go clicking through all those old ones to clear the inboxā, you may say. The possible solutions are: 1. go through the comments by clicking on the optionsĀ āselect allāĀ andĀ āmark as readā ORĀ 2. just ignore the old stuff and start using the inbox from now on. It will always show you, by default, the newest comments so you can just jump in at any time and start using it from that moment onwards without having to see all the old stuff. The number on the link may not ever go to zero, but letās not be so OCD about it cleaning up all the old stuff doesnāt feel like worth the hassle. Not doing so wonāt prevent you from making full use of the inbox. I donāt tend to read the email announcements these days; mostly I just check the AO3 inbox number and if itās not zero, I know Iāve got new comments to which I then reply to neatly right there.Ā
Happy reader interactions!