Tag: ao3

I want to start writing in other fandoms but my AO3 has lots of subscribers all interested in the one fandom I currently write in. I’m scared of alienating them. Advice, please?

ao3commentoftheday:

I’ll open it up to the readers to say whether a fave author starting to write in a new fandom actually is alienating. For me, it’s a way to find something new I might enjoy. That’s actually how I got into Miraculous Ladybug, believe it or not 🙂

If you are worried however, AO3 allows users to have multiple accounts. I don’t know if you want to go down that road, or if you want to use a pseud and post under one name for your current fandom and under your pseud for the other. You do have options, though!

Anyone else have ideas?

-Mod Pi

From what I’ve seen, you often do lose followers, especially if you’re moving from a popular fandom to a smaller one. I don’t know if that counts as ‘alienating’ people, though.

My three favourite authours have all left my fandom. I was able to follow one of them the first time, since I loved them so much I was willing to learn to like something I had no interest in whatsoever. (I love you @jedierenjaeger, forever!)

But I couldn’t follow them to further fandoms. The canons were too dark, not my genre, just not right for me at all. They never alienated me. I still love them. But I don’t read their current work.

When another favourite author left my fandom, they started writing video game fic. VIDEO GAMES! Ugh. I still read some of their fic, because they make the best words, but it’s not a regular thing anymore. They didn’t alienate me. Some jerks whine at them to write their previous fandom, but they’re so much happier now! I’ll follow them forever, and keep lighting up when I see their name. (I’m really glad for you, @heartslogos!)

People might not be able to come with you to your new fandom. 

  • Some might stop following you if that’s all you post. They are invested in their fandoms, liked how you wrote it, and aren’t interested in branching out.
  • Some might keep following you, but not comment on your work – they’re invested in YOU, but not your new fandom. Maybe when you move on again, they’ll be able to join you once more.
  • And a few will stay with you. Fall in love right alongside you. It’s wonderful when that happens.

Major update to our search engine coming soon! | Archive of Our Own

transformativeworks:

tomboyluce:

shiphitsthefan:

damnslippyplanet:

ao3org:

We’re getting ready to deploy an overhaul of our search code—here’s what that means for you (along with a tiny sneak peek of the changes).

oh, sure, give me exclusions now after i’ve already given up and developed like twelve new kinks out of sheer self defense at being unable to exclude them from my searches.

[slams the reblog button] BUT WHERE IS THE LIE

#and by grew i mean discovered and oh god what the archive hath given and what the archive hath taken away @shiphitsthefan

I relate to this to the depths of my very soul

Check it out! Soon, it will be possible to exclude tags from AO3 search results without using the “Search Within Results” field!

Major update to our search engine coming soon! | Archive of Our Own

I know a lot of people get discouraged by looking at their kudos-hits ratios because it appears like only 5-10% of readers actually leave a kudo. I think it’d be interesting to do a study where users look at random works/pages of their History section and see how many hits they left, to get on average how many hits one person makes. This doesn’t including the effects of bots or other factors, but it could be a start to making the ratio less discouraging. (I’ve hit one fic I love 83 times >.<)

ao3commentoftheday:

Great idea! Also, I’ve totally got you beat XD

This is the post I’m referencing.

[Image show a story named ‘A Few Tricks Up My Sleeve’ by notapepper. It has 35 chapters. A red line is drawn around the words ‘visited 140 times.‘

End ID.]

@goldenfalls asked @ao3commentoftheday about people checking how many hits they’d left on various AO3 fics. People are discouraged by the rate of comments they get per fic vs. how many hits the fic has. 

So how do hits compare to actual people who’ve read the story? I spent the last 2 days going through 199 pages, and 5 years, of my AO3 History. Here’s some stuff I noticed while doing this:

  • For the last two years, if I actually read a one chapter fic it usually says I’ve visited from 2-3 times.
  • Fics I’ve only visited once are mostly fics I opened, read a line, realized that tone, spelling, or plot wasn’t what I wanted, and closed.
  • However, from 2013-2105, many of the 1 chapter fic I did read only had 1 hit from me. Maybe increased users mean another person is more likely to show up while you’re reading and make it count as two hits? Or I started reading on both phone and computer enough to affect things?
  • Fics that aren’t in my main fandoms end up with a lot more hits from me, because I have to come back multiple times before I finish.
  • If a fic has more than 10 chapters, I usually leave less hits than there are chapters. Even if I’m reading as it updates.
  • I’m bad with names, so a lot of fics had a bunch of hits because I kept checking it to remind myself who this authour I was following was.
  • I’d see favourite fics with only one note, even though I’ve read it 5 times. I’m assuming it’s because I read it on LJ or Tumblr. I may even have only clicked on the fic to navigate to the authour’s page and see if they have new fic. (Otherwise, I probably reread and commented.) 
  • Sometimes I get an email notification for a new fic, open it, and then go read it on Tumblr instead. (This has nothing to do with the data, I just saw a 86 chapter fic with one hit and was reminded that I never read that authour on AO3 for some reason.)
  • One fic had 10 notes and I never actually read it. I liked the authour and kept opening it and then leaving, before finally accepting I was just NOT interested in that fandom.
  • One 28 chapter fic that I read TWICE has only 4 hits from me. How?

I’d guess that everyone who takes the time to comment counts for about 2 hits, and as time goes on it’s going to be more like 3. Recently, a lot of fic I don’t remember reading twice has had 3 or 4 hits. If you’ve been on the site a while, it probably seems like a lot less engagement just from that.

@destinationtoast, was there a much, much easier way to do this?

I’m posting my tables on my Blogspot, because I can not format on Tumblr at all. The main table is up now, but I hope to do a few more that show changes over time, and that’s going to take some math. (A lot of boring subtraction, to be exact.) I’m also hoping to add colours, since Tableizer ate the ones I added in Word to make it more readable.

ive b een thinking deeply alot lately and honestly? the website ao3 is so beautiful? like people decided to come together to make something solely to share stories of their favorite characters, and so many latched on and its just… overall theres such an aura of love for all of these characters and stories we base our own on. i am not explaining this correctly at all, be ao3 is such a wonderful place and brings out the passion people have for the things they love.

ao3commentoftheday:

naryrising:

ao3commentoftheday:

Thank you for sharing such a lovely thought with us 

❤

❤

I know you were probably mostly talking about the creators who share things there, but it was really nice to read this and see that it includes praise for the Archive itself too.  It can get really discouraging at times to see so much negativity towards the site – and maybe as part of the Support team I see this more than most of our volunteers, except maybe the Abuse team, but I think we all experience it to some degree just because we are all fans existing in fannish spaces online. Some days it feels like I go online and there’s a hundred more tickets and posts telling us how we’ve screwed something up, or how we need to improve, or how it’s our fault that fandom is behaving in a certain way, whatever the current crisis of the day is.  

It can be hard for people to find the motivation to keep going at times, which is a real struggle for a site that is run purely by volunteers – we’re not getting paid to deal with this, we do it because we want to help, or to give something back to fandom, or because we feel like it’s important that AO3 continue to exist and grow.    

It’s not the same, exactly, but imagine if for ten years you wrote a fic.  And it was huge and time-consuming and took up a lot of your skill and effort to create it – you worked on it every day, around all your other commitments.  And it wasn’t perfect, so you keep trying to improve it, because even though nothing is ever perfect, you want it to be as good as it can.  You knew you weren’t going to get paid for it, or get anything in return other than a sense of pride or accomplishment or the well-wishes of your followers.  And then what you get for feedback is a steady stream of “this story sucks” and “you really screwed up in Chapter 27″ and “well it’s not bad I guess but I wish it was actually something else” and “when are you going to update?”

And there are nice comments in there too, sometimes! And even ones that have a critique might also include a compliment, or a thanks for your hard work! So you look for those and try to focus on the positives to keep yourself going.  Sometimes that’s all you can do.  

Did you know we keep a section of our internal wiki to store the nice feedback we get (anonymized, of course) so that any of our volunteers can go look at it when they’re feeling discouraged or need a pick-me-up?  I mean, it makes sense, because a lot of us are also authors, and that’s something I know plenty of authors do – have a file or a doc with the comments that have cheered them up, so that they can look back at them when they’re struggling. 

Anyway, all this is to say, thank you for your kind words, they mean a lot to me, and today they’re helping me to keep on working on this big, ridiculous, fantastic, imperfect, beautiful site.           

From all the authors and readers who have ever (or will ever) used AO3. It really is an amazing site, and I’m so grateful that it exists. 

Zero Comment Challenge: Nov-Dec

copperbadge:

polizwrites:

Resurrecting my Zero Comment Challenge –  to find fics out on Archive of Our Own that have no comments, but deserve a little love.  I’m aiming for a couple of searches a week, but life may have other ideas. 

If you want to join me – go over to  Ao3′s   Search Works page  – plug in your preferred fandom, character(s), rating and/or pairing, then scroll down to the Work Stats section of the page and  type a “0″  in the Comments field – easy peasy!

Once you find a fic that sounds interesting, read it and COMMENT.   I know, I know, that’s the hard part!  But honestly, even a  quick  “this was fun!”  or  “I like your take on <CHARACTER>”  or  “Great interaction between  X and Y”   can be enough to make someone’s day.  

I’m going to reblog this each time I find a fic that fits the bill – like this one: 

Consider it Charity by 

Redemption_Arc.    A young Clint Barton is caught at a crossroads in his life, with assistance coming from an unlikely source.     
I think there’s maybe supposed to be more coming, but it’s currently listed as a single chapter?  (I’ve made that mistake myself) 

This is an astoundingly awesome idea and I’m mad I didn’t come up with it. 😀 I think more people should take up the challenge especially if you’re finding that your regular reading has stagnated lately or if you want to train yourself to comment more. 

AO3′s search function is pretty powerful so you can also do cool stuff like sorting by hits, meaning you could get a story with a ton of hits and no comments, which I know is especially dispiriting to some people, or sort by date-ascending so you get the oldest stories with no comments, which is what I did. 

This led me to locate a JARVIS/Ziggy (MCU/Quantum Leap) crossover and what a fantastic ship. 

angstprompts:

angstprompts:

softnocturne:

angstprompts:

angstprompts:

Just a heads up, AO3 deleted one of my original works because someone reported it for “not being fanwork” despite original work being a “fandom” with over 35k fics.

“Under Section IV. of the Terms of Service, which you agreed to when opening your account, prompt requests, prompt lists, squee posts, notices about meetups, non–fanwork fiction or nonfiction, fic searches, rec lists, letters to other users, reactions to episodes, blog or Tumblr-appropriate posts, and other ephemeral content (i.e. content meant to be temporary), are not allowed to be uploaded on the Archive of Our Own.”

If you have multiple original works on AO3, you very well could be permanently suspended for violating the terms of service.

Be careful.

I have no fucking clue, especially since they hired people to wrangle the tags, meaning that they’re well aware that original work is an option

IS this true? D: AO3 what the heck?

Here’s the email I got, so yeah, it is true

Can everyone reblog this? AO3 has been dealing with a lot of abuse in their invite system, and if they’re cracking down on other areas like original works, this could affect a lot of writers.

[First image is an ask from pitbullmabari: Then why the fuck is original work an option?

Second image is a long email from ao3 to the OP.

End ID.]

percyvex:

naomida:

anneapocalypse:

A good rule of thumb for tagging on AO3:

Relationship tags are for searching.

For any ship that isn’t central to the fic, ask yourself: 

If I were searching specifically for this ship, is there a decent probability that I would be interested this result? If not, it probably doesn’t need to be tagged.

If you feel that you need to warn for a background ship, you can always tag “Untagged Background Relationships” and then if you want you can specify what they are in the author’s notes. Search results are more accurate, you’ve covered your bases, everyone’s happy.

Relationship tags are for searching. If you need to warn for a background or briefly-mentioned ship, there are other ways to do it.

#this applies to character tags too

(x)

what i always do is put the background ships in the additional tags so it’s clearly visible going in but not clogging the tag!

here’s a screenshot of that!

so you can see right away – percy/vex is up front in the relationship tags, signifying it’s the main pairing of the fic, with vex’s platonic relationships with her friend group also being important enough to go in the main tags. then at the end in the additional tags, background vax/gilmore has been specified so people know it’ll be in the fic here and there but it’s not a main focus!

Also remember to use the individual tags for characters who are in relationship tags, as well. 

It might seem redundant, but my sister once spent 8 months searching for a fic by it’s main character. She went through ALL 150 or so pages. But that fic was only tagged ‘character/character’, and wasn’t in his tag. Eventually, we had to search by a bunch of supporting characters. It was ANNOYING.

(tagging background ships like the previous poster suggested is REALLY appreciated, by the way.)

phiralovesloki:

kiralamouse:

coaldustcanary:

transformativeworks:

AO3 has reached 25,000 fandoms! To celebrate, we’ve put together info about fandom tags and how all tags work: https://goo.gl/W4wPxH

Hey folks who use AO3 – please read and reblog widely. In addition to the celebration of our 25,000th canonical fandom, this post contains some great tips for making our tagging system work for you.

As a Support Staffer and Tag Wrangler for AO3, I beg you:

Among the tips:

Separate your / and & ships / is for romantic and/or sexual
relationships. & is for platonic relationships only – ones that are
neither sexual nor romantic. (Pre- and Post-Relationship are still /.)
& was created for those Gen fans who don’t want anything
non-platonic in the ships they’re searching for. You can help both Gen
fans and shippers by carefully choosing the tag that matches your work!

Look, I know you’re writing a slow burn where the friendship aspect of the relationship is important. I applaud that; I love it in my romantic pairings. But it’s a /, not a &. Please save & for those of us who want to find the three truly and purely gen fics for a popular romantic ship.

Folks, I LOVE AO3, please read and share!