thatrandomsarahchick:

huntersoftheapocalypsis:

downtroddendeity:

djinnhatescold:

bloodtroth:

I was today years old when I learned that when you type “otp: true” in AO3 search results it filters out fics with additional ships, leaving only the fics where your otp is the main ship

Gamechanger

Here’s a cheatsheet of all the available hidden search functions. “-creators:[whatever]” is another exclusion that can be particularly useful.

rt, to make my life easier

Holy shit. Rt to save time

mothgirl-is-a-gateway-drug-deac:

vamptits:

vamptits:

filtering down ao3 results from 14000 to 6 based on a single tag is foul. im sorry none of you are as enlightened as me ig.

normal one. next question.

peer review

dear-ao3:

[Image ID: A screenshot of Ao3 author’s notes that read “we are [caps] not [end caps] seeing the gates of heaven with this one!!!!” followed by two doubpe exclamation mark emojis, two speaking head emojis, and a folded hands emoji. /End ID]

madilikesyou:

i made a tiktok and i gave into posting my ff in chapters 😕 first chapter of my stsg twilight au ff is out! primaverarouge on ao3! (my first ff ever pls be nice to me..)

swagbbygurl:

Nah because why is it that majority of the fanfics of gaanaru/narugaara in Ao3 are brief relationships only? Why you treating my man Gaara as a rebound? Why tf is Sasuke endgame when i specifically ask for Gaara? Like, dont get me wrong i love Sasunaru, but sometimes you just wanna see your boi to finally eat that thick juicy ass while the emo kid gets jealous

bebx:

nyxelestia:

olderthannetfic:

tzikeh:

olderthannetfic:

–

I’m dying.

Nonnie, seriously?

No, that’s mean, I know you’re serious. It’s just flabbergasting how much fandom has expanded and how much there isn’t a direct link to the past.

Astolat and Cesperanza floated the idea at Vividcon and various places, I think, though I wasn’t going to cons in that era. We were all on LJ in those days, and Astolat made a big post nailing her theses to the door. Discussion in the comments was instant and prolonged.

A LJ com was set up to discuss. It was later renamed to otw_news, but if you go all the way back to the beginning, you can see brainstorming mess instead of official news posts.

Fanlore page linking to Astolat’s post and giving a little context.

Early brainstorming: https://otw-news.livejournal.com/2007/05/

For example, here I am collecting links to older archives to look at for research when designing AO3.

Fun fact, we never intended to call it AO3. There was a whole call for name suggestions, but nothing was as evocative as astolat’s original post title referencing Virginia Woolf. (For those who haven’t thought about it, AO3’s name is a reference to A Room of One’s Own.)

Here’s the name discussion

Here’s the poll that came out of it

But also notice how many people voted: 562.

That’s how many people cared at the time: a few hundred. Maybe a thousand if you count lurkers, but frankly, that community was not as lurkery as now. It wasn’t just ten friends. It was a community effort. But what “our” community looked like at the time was vastly different. It was six degrees of Kevin Bacon astolat, not a vast sea of strangers like fic fandom on AO3 is now.

Here’s an early post suggesting we ban the under 18s from the site entirely. Pity we didn’t do so, given the rise of antis.

Here’s the invite to a fundraising party at astolat’s in NYC that following Halloween. I dressed as Amanda from Highlander, not very well.

You can tell we knew each other by looking at those comments on astolat’s initial post. You can also tell how discussion-based that part of fandom was back in 2007.

The way my tumblr is now with a ton of text, back and forth, and hopping around between threads of conversation, all featuring a consistent set of faces, is very much like LJ. Most of tumblr is not.

This is important info to put out there, and I constantly forget that “fandom” as it is now is nothing like the community we had then. This is a good resource for understanding what was going on with the creation of AO3 in particular, but it’s also a great example of why older fans say that we miss the Livejournal era of fandom so much.

AO3 is the result of long discussions, hard work, and a dedicated community of fans. Though it isn’t is a social media site (and it was never intended to be), it is the only place now that sometimes feels like how the fannish community used to be on LJ–when a good discussion gets going in the comments on a story. But AO3 is for fanfiction et al, and therefore is limited in discussion subjects.

(The ads you’ll encounter if you follow those links, though? Did not exist when we were there and were one of the reasons we abandoned the site–not the most important reasons by a long shot as you’ll understand if you read more about why AO3 was created, but they were a factor.)

We were a collection of communities, with some-to-significant overlap in members. Fanfiction writers were not “content creators,” and people who didn’t write fanfiction were not “the lucky audience who should be soooooooooooo grateful that writers deigned to gift us with their incredible talent.” We knew each other. Many of us met each other IRL after meeting through fandom (once fandom shifted to the internet there was some hesitancy at first about meeting “online” friends, but that was quickly gotten over). We went to conventions together. We had lunch and dinner and parties and meet-ups IRL outside of conventions.

If you take a wander around from even just that one LJ community (click on a username to check out their personal LJ), you can see how discussions would branch off without excluding anyone the way they do on Tumblr. If you wanted to share something you saw on someone else’s LJ, you just linked to it, and people followed the link to read it and join in the discussion (or just lurk). The force of Tumblr splintering is an active barrier to creating real communities.

I really miss LJ. I miss the connection I felt to my community there.

#fandom is supposed to be a community – not a two-tiered system of sellers and buyers

Yup.

I wrote a very rambly essay about how Tumblr’s decentralization hurt fandom communities, but if I were to condense it to be pithy in a reblog, these shitty five-minute MS Paint sketches of Tumblr vs LiveJournal will hopefully sum it up nicely:

Tumblr

You:

Some other fan:

“One fandom” or “the fandom community”, as defined on Tumblr:

Before Tumblr / The Fandom Us Millenials Miss

The big brown circles are fanfic authors/fanartist/“creators”; the stars are fans. Notice the difference of relative location between the stars and the cores? Let alone the very different communication structures of everything else in these diagrams.

thesaltofcarthage:

littlebrooksmakegreatrivers:

irenkaferalkitty:

possibly-an-obsession:

stucky-ficrecs:

bilqisofsheba:

watsonshoneybee:

sherrinfordeductions:

watsonshoneybee:

johnlockghosts:

I wish that ao3 had an option to filter warnings (and tbh certain authors) out like I will never ever want to read it and just seeing it puts me off so much that often I end up closing my browser because that content upsets me so much lmao

There is a way to do this but I can’t recall how to do it. it’s something you type into the box for “other filters” or something, I don’t remember. who knows??

It’s not a great option, and I don’t know if you can sort out authors that way, but it’s better than nothing if someone can reblog this with how to do it!

Alrighty friends! It takes some specificity, but you can do this. Let me show you how!

So I started with going to the Sherlock (TV) section of Ao3. On the right we find this lovely section! ((I know I’m going over things you already probably know, but I figure this post may go to new Ao3 users, so bear with me.))

Underneath this, I chose sort by Kudos, because that’s a quick way to find most popular fics, for the sake of this demonstration. 

With those filters on, we end up with this being our first two results: 

As you can see, we have Nature and Nurture by earlgreytea68, and The Internet Is Not Just For Porn by cyerus. So what if I am utterly sick of seeing earlgreytea68 on my list? Let’s pretend I’ve read all their fics, or that I just don’t like her, or whatever. I want this author out. I go to this section on the right: 

In “Search within results” I type earlgreytea68 into the bar, with a minus sign in front. This gives me the following page, upon hitting the sort and filter button:

There goes earlgreytea68! But now I’ve decided that Crack is just not my thing, I’m sick of that, too, for heaven’s sake, I want something reasonable in my gay slash fanfiction about detectives that solve crimes about glowing dogs and irish megalomaniacs. Heaven forbid this get ridiculous.

Well, then I add this to my search:

Which gets rid of everything with that tag. My results are now:

Performance in a Leading Role is now my first result!

You can do this as many times as you want; the biggest problem I have is trying to filter out multi-worded tags. For example, “Secret Relationship” is hard to filter. Better to go with authors you dislike or with words like “DubCon”. 

I hope this helps! Also remember that googling site:archiveofourown.org and then adding search terms will mean google searches Ao3 for you, and sometimes that works far better. 

Good luck!

An excellent in-depth guide! Thank you!!

omg changed my whole ao3 rarepair game

An excellent guide to filtering on AO3!

You can filter out phrases by enclosing them in quotes. For example, if ABO and Hydra Trash Party are not your things, try:

-“alpha/beta/omega dynamics” -”hydra trash party”

I have more advice!

Say, you’re in your random fandom- I went with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, since I’ve been reading Iron Man stuff recently. Tony Stark is awesome.

But anyway, you’re on the page, and you see that there are 174,774 works! That is way too many for a casual afternoon’s browsing.

And you see that the first one is Peter Parker/Tony Stark and that is not your jam. It doesn’t work for you, or it squicks you, whatever. Wouldn’t life be easier if you could browse without seeing that pairing (or whatever pairing you don’t like)? You can!

First, click on that pairing tag(You may want to open this in another tab, actually.):

and it’ll take you to the page for that pairing tag. Click this button:

and then look at the address bar! The actual page is unimportant. Copy the numbers located here:

and go back to the original search page! Down on the side, in the same place you can get rid of other tags, type -relationship_ids:”the number you just copied”

Then hit ‘sort and filter’ annnd… magic!

The fics with that pairing are gone! You can also do multiple pairings, get rid of any tags you don’t like, and sort it by date or length or kudos, or whatever.

Enjoy.

I’d just like to add that these sorts of search modifiers ALSO WORK IN GOOGLE AND MOST RESEARCH DATABASES.

The more you know.

X

this. this right here is why AO3 got a Hugo nomination. because the tagging and filtering is fucking groundbreaking. I’ve come to expect everything to filter and tag like AO3.

rootaf:

ao3:

me: