teland:
minim-calibre:
guardianofscrewingup:
garshil:
lokincest:
peacelovethorki:
hekahte:
knightcommandernerd:
this is your psa to NOT USE AO3 TAGS the same way you would use tags on tumblr! AO3 goes through a lot of effort to create and track tags, whereas tumblr is freeflow and blog-respective. please only use AO3 tags that have story relevancy, NOT AS PERSONAL TAGS.
list of good example tags:
Alternate Universe
Alternate Universe - Canon divergent
slow burn
list of bad example tags:
apparently [X] was already a tag
I don’t know what else to tag this as lol
you know what I mean
#this is something that is very work-heavy for ao3 mods please don’t do this
I’ve read multiple posts from ao3 mods saying this is not true.
FROM AO3′S OWN TUMBLR:
“The kind of one-off commentary tags that are frequently referred to as Tumblr-style tags do not put any kind of extra strain on the database, or require more work from the wranglers than any other Additional Tag, such as Romance or Angst or Pretzels. Even the fact that there are a lot of them isn’t really an issue.”
“It doesn’t create more work for the wranglers than the simple act of wrangling already does. And trust us: the wranglers really, really like organizing your tags in the background.”
[x]
AO3 mods have confirmed themselves that there is nothing wrong with people rambling in tags. It doesn’t strain the database, it isn’t any harder on the wranglers than any other tag. In fact, rambling tags are probably easier for them to chuck into the freeform or additonal category than someone who accidentally tries to create a new tag for a ship or kink or something.
Don’t tell people they can’t express themselves in the tags. It’s not just “ummmm lol so yeah” kind of stuff, some of it expresses things that are hard to tag for but the readers might want to know about the fic ahead of time. For example one of mine: “this is really just fluff + flirting and implied stuff at the end” or “X embarrassing Y and annoying the hell out of Z”. Should that stuff be in author’s notes? Probably. Am I going to put it there? For various reasons, no, the main reason being that you can’t see author’s notes from the outside of the fic.
In general, just stop spreading misinformation please, it took me two seconds to look up AO3′s actual opinion on rambly tags instead of assuming.
Welp, looks like I’ll have to do a mea culpa here. Did not bother to do recent fact checking since I knew in the past it was not an encouraged thing to do. However, I now stand corrected. It’s not my personal favorite thing to see, but as I abuse tumblr tags, I can’t hold it against people for using it.
Carry on, fic writers/artists/podficcers.
It just looks really obnoxious though so I wonder why people do it anyway, even if it doesn’t really cause any strain on the servers. I understand making new tags for new ships or odd little fandom names for certain concepts, or even the occasional tag that’s some inside fandom joke, or using them to post trigger warnings with other important shorthand info about what the fic is about, like that other tumblr user above pointed out they use them for.
But sometimes it’s just straight up rambling and if someone has a whole paragraph of tags that has cutesy commentary, that’s pretty much a guarantee I’m skipping the fic. The tags are there so people can get the quick and dirty on the important parts of a fic, like ships, kinks, etc. And there are a LOT of not-so-great fics to wade through to find the good ones. I’m not gonna wade through a paragraph of tag essays trying to pick out what’s important.
So people can do it if they want but the messier it gets, the more likely you’re going to lose some readers because you’re just rambling along. It’s messy and gives off the same “My writing isn’t good enough to stand alone with tags only about what the fic is about and a normal summary” vibes that the old “R+R, no flamez plz” stuff in summaries give vibes of on FF.net. Whether or not it actually causes problems for the Ao3 tag wranglers doesn’t change that the format is different, that it’s not your personal blog, and the READERS sometimes like that to just be a quick view of the most important things in the fic. That can sometimes mean non-standard tags like “this is just fluff” like the user above said but the ramblier you get, the more likely someone’s eyes will glaze and glance over. (Also, I mean, there is a “fluff” tag, so that doesn’t need to be a whole sentence fragment, honestly).
When I’m looking through a database to find things, I’m looking for things to be concise, well organized, and clearly labeled. That’s the difference between Ao3 and tumblr. Tumblr is social media where I’m specifically looking for people’s silliness and their thoughts. Ao3 is a database where I’m looking for specific things, and visually scanning for specific labels. It’s one of those self-indulgent things that sometimes benefits the writer’s ego more than the readers trying to find fic, if you use it a certain way. On the internet, it’s good to always consider the experience of the person trying to find something easily and quickly when you’re trying to get people to read, look at, or buy your stuff.
See, I see why you have your preferences, and understand that, but I will fully admit that I love certain types of rambling Tumblr-style tags on AO3 for the sake of finding things to read.
If I’m browsing a fandom or tag, which is often the case, freeform tags serve as a combination epigraph, blurb, and occasionally even flavor text (I could explain that last one, but it would take hand gestures and possibly a whiteboard) for their story. I’ve found some of my more enjoyable blind reads because their freeform tags grabbed my attention. They didn’t tell me a hell of a lot about the stories, but they did tell me enough about the authors’ tastes and senses of humor for me to give them a shot.
But I when I’m browsing AO3, I’m also treating it less like using a database for finding things (unlike when I want to find specific things, where I use the canonicals and search to dramatically narrow my scope) and more like wandering through a bookstore hoping something catches my eye, so we’ve got a different use case. Something tagged with strictly canonicals is going to look like every other book in the shop to me, where something tagged with ridiculous freeform conceits is going be unnecessary noise to you.
So they’ll gain some, lose some, and it probably, if previous discussions* I’ve had about it are anything to go by, evens out.
*(This is a discussion that I’ve had regarding freeform tags a few times, and it’s an interesting (to me) split, where about half of us in any given discussion found them helpful for finding things, and the other half found them irritating and only of use for winnowing. I’d be curious to see a survey on it.)
OMG, thank you, Min, I’ve been trying and failing to come up with a way to express all the things the random, rambly freeform tags do for me, and you just hit it out of the park.
I’ll add one: They can be a fantastic way to give me an idea of whether the author is ‘my kind’ in terms of how they read the characters/what tropes they think fit the characters best/what tropes I can expect that aren’t easily quantifiable.
Like, a story with a tag that says ‘Bruce Wayne is completely incapable of taking care of himself’ or whatever is probably gonna be my jam, but a story with a tag that says ‘somebody save Timmy’ or the like, even if all the other canonical tags look just right, will, I know, send me screaming into the night. Could those concepts be expressed with canonical tags? Eh, depends on the story.
But a) you’ll need more than one, b) you’ll probably be spoiling things you don’t want to spoil, and c) you won’t have caught my eye (and my gratitude) quite so quickly.
So, you know, I grok when people hate the freeform tags, I do, but there are a whole mess of stories which don’t use ‘em.
I wish I could remember the specific one that, yonks ago, solidified my views on freeform tags. All I remember was that it was an incredibly obscure reference that, after I laughed for several minutes straight, made me click on the story.
Thinking more about it this morning, when I would be lying if I said I were any more awake than I was last night (ah, sleep, I miss you, please come home), freeform tags can, and ideally do, tell us a lot about how the author views a specific piece of canon/worldbuilding/fandom trope (this would be what I mean by flavor text, really). I’m a huge fan of stories that take common tropes, esp. problematic ones, and turn them on their head. It’s very hard for me to get from the canonicals if an author’s attempting to do that with their story, but relatively easy to get it from the freeform tags.
I am, as I think I indicated in my tags in my original reblog, actually historically a pretty crap tagger for various reasons. I’m attempting to change that by keeping running tags lists while I’m writing–tagging in post is a pain in the ass for me, especially when importing older content–so this is something that I’m spending a lot of time thinking about from an author’s POV in addition to the reader’s POV above, given how valuable I find the damn things for finding reading material myself. With a freeform, if I use a freeform, what do I want to convey? What sort of thing do I want the reader to go into the story aware of that’s not exactly a spoiler for the story, but cannot be adequately captured in canonicals and doesn’t fit in the summary? (Note: I’m even worst at summaries than I am at tagging.)
Thus my decision to add “Parental Neglect Level: John Winchester” to the running tags list for the damn Push fic. While obviously not everyone in fandom is going to have watched Supernatural, it’s a juggernaut fandom, so a lot of people will understand straight off what that means either through having watched it or through fannish osmosis. There are canonicals I could use, but they don’t have the same nuance, and using the freeform allows me to say both what the canonical would (that there is child neglect involved) and what it wouldn’t (that it’s complicated and external forces are at work, which explains but does not excuse, and is going to fuck a body up), and allows me to do it all in five words and a colon.
I was all ready to agree with one side and then I discovered that I agree with the other side as well until I realized that neither side has fully discussed how much of a ramble is a rambly tag.
Frankly I love the little asides or fandom in-jokes and authors senses of humor, but frankly when there’s over maybe 10 solid lines in ao3 (about two inches on my screen) that are pure author’s notes I just can’t read that much underline I’m sorry.
