Stepping into the event horizon

[fignewton]

Okay, so. Admittedly with a bit of reluctance, I have finally made the leap to AO3.

(Yes, it's a fabulous resource. Yes, I have a problem or two with it. LJ's situation, and the disappearance of two regular archives where I had my fic backed up, played a role in the decision.)

Any suggestions from those more experienced with the archive? The one about "don't upload umpteen fics per day, without even bothering to include summaries" doesn't need to be given. :)

Comments

[sg_wonderland]

I would say tag correctly but don't overtag or do the cutesy tag (daniel won't stop talking!) but I don't think you need that one. So, kick off your shoes and explore some new fandom, there are certainly plenty to be had!

[fignewton]

Heh. The cutesy tag is tremendously annoying in 99% of cases, although there have been a few that amused me.

What is overtagging, in your opinion? Including everything that is also in the summary?

[sg_wonderland]

I don't think you need to tag for everything (one I saw had 200+ tags). For me, the tag is a method for categorisation and helpful to search. But tag the important things: violence, non-con, etc. If it's going to eventually go Jack/Sam or Jack/daniel, say that upfront. If it's a work in progress, I want to know.

[fignewton]

...how can there be no tag for character study?

If I use a tag that's not included in the drop-down list, does it show up anyway?

[sg_wonderland]

I think you can certainly create a category (points at all those cutesy tags).

[fignewton]

Yeah, I see that I did. Also, I can use a different character tag rather than the dropdown one. Nice.

Slowly, I shall learn. I hope. :)

[sg_wonderland]

You shall!

[princessofgeeks]

The tags that show up in the drop down list are the ones that have become so widespread and common that they are now searchable.

You can tag it with anything you want, but only the drop down tags become searchable, as I understand it. The tags are chosen by the users and have evolved over time. The maintainers of the archive "wrangle" them into something consistent, but there's always a cutting edge of newly developing trends and tags.

[beatrice_otter]

Specifically, the tags that show up on the dropdown list are the ones that are canonical. That is, a tag wrangler has looked at them and gone, yup, this is an official tag that people use. This is not some random cruft, this is not an OC, this is not a chatty tag that will be used on maybe two fics ever, this is not some weird variant spelling of some pre-existing tag. (Variant tags are made synonymous to the canonical form of the tag, so that if you tag your fic "Tim Drake aka Robin" and "Robin (Tim Drake)" and somebody clicks on it, all fics tagged with Tim Drake in them will come up whether or not they were tagged with the exact Tim Drake tag you used.

You can search for anything. Using the search function searches through title and plot first, and only then tags. You can click on any tag. If it is not canonical (i.e. a tag that comes up in the search box) or synned to a canonical tag, you get a page like this one: http://archiveofourown.org/tags/Wishbabies

It's not the same page you get by clicking on a canonical tag, but it does bring up every work and bookmark tagged with that tag. It's just that if a tag is not canonical or synned to a canonical tag, there probably aren't very many fics tagged with it. (Generally five or fewer)

[princessofgeeks]

Thank you! I didn't realize that you could search for what the archive calls noncanonical tags.

[beatrice_otter]

You're welcome!

[synecdochic]

My personal line for overtagging is "if I were browsing by this tag and found this story, would I be annoyed that the author had tagged for it?" (IE: is X a minor enough part of the story that I would feel annoyed if I was looking in the X tag, read the story, and found there wasn't enough X in it.)

[fignewton]

That is an excellent definition, thanks!

[synecdochic]

Yeah. I try to hit the high points of "things this story contains" in such a way that would work for me as a reader browsing by those tags, you know? Tags really are for readers.

[cesy]

Though it's also useful to bear in mind that people use them for negative filtering - what are the chances that someone hates this character or is triggered by this thing and will be upset/hurt/annoyed at finding it in the story without warning? You can't protect everyone from everything, but that's the key opposite constraint to bear in mind, along with "people who want this thing and want to find it".

[beatrice_otter]

I started out thinking the chatty tags were annoying, but then I realized that in a lot of cases they tell you more about the fic than a more generic/shorter tag would. Like, the aforementioned "daniel won't stop talking!" is genuinely a thing you do find in some Stargate fic. That is one characterization of Daniel. It also shows that Daniel is important in the fic, which is more than the "Daniel Jackson" tag can tell you (all that one means is that he appears in it). How else would you express that? I mean, there are some chatty tags that are over the top, and too many tags just means people don't read any of them, but a lot of the chatty tags actually tell you a lot of useful information. (Particularly the ones that actually become common enough to become canonical tags, such as "Tony Stark Has Daddy Issues" in the MCU. I really like the existence of that tag, because I only have so much tolerance for Tony Stark's daddy issues, so on days when that would be the kiss of death for me in a fic, I can avoid it.

So I don't judge based on tag style, but how much useful information is contained in whatever tag style you use.

[princessofgeeks]

Tag your fic with every possible thing you can put on it. You would think people would read the archive by fandom and by author, but people tend instead to search for tags with story themes that they are interested in.

The gen-flavored usage of the archive may be different, though.

But in my experience people search for tags of story elements they like, and only secondarily search by author and fandom (which is how I read).

Good luck!

[fignewton]

Ooh, the complete opposite of my own way of thinking! I can understand that, I suppose. People who like time travel will search by that tag, while I would want to leave it out to avoid spoiling a story...

And thanks, too, for the advice re the dropdown menus. Hopefully this won't be too steep a learning curve.

[sg_wonderland]

I just bookmarked stargate SG1 there and sort through what shows up.

[fignewton]

Yep, that's my method, too. So it's interesting to learn other people's perspectives!

[beatrice_otter]

I am polyfannish; I have always tended to read the fic for a fandom first and then the source material. That's always been the case; I was reading Buffy fanfic for a year, at least, before I caught an episode on TV. Sometimes I will look for fic in a particular fandom, but a lot of time not. I do a lot of searching on tags. But I don't like every fandom, and so I use AO3 Savior to blacklist a lot of fandoms so it's easy to skip through them.

Here is one way I find new fic: figure out what I want to read, go to that tag, and sort it for most kudos or most hits or most comments. Read what looks interesting.

If I really like a fic I find that way, I check out the author and see if they have other stuff I like. If they have a high enough ratio of stuff I like to stuff I don't like, I subscribe to them so I'll get notified whenever they post a new fic. But even if I don't like them enough for that, I'll go through their bookmarks because if I like what they write, I'll probably like what they read, too.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

[fignewton]

I'm not polyfannish at all; I tend to stick to a few fandoms, and I write exclusively in one fandom (although that's a kind of serial fannish monogamy.)

My problem with sorting by comments/kudos is that I have observed that including a pairing automatically increases the popularity of a fic exponentially. And I am a gen girl unless the shipping is built directly into the canon, so...

[beatrice_otter]

Yeah. I totally get you. I wish that people tagged all their gen fic with "gen" or "noromo" like the old X-Files fandom, or something.

You can exclude or block pairings in a couple of ways, which would help. One is to get AO3 Savior and put the major pairing tags in the tags to blacklist. Another, which doesn't require a special browser extension but does require a bit of arcane AO3 knowledge is to filter based on tag IDs. It's complicated, so I will direct you to one of Actual Tag Wrangler WrangleTangle's post on the subject: https://wrangletangle.tumblr.com/post/152367628094/psychosisbyosmosis-pardon-me-but-how-do-you-make

Once the pairings are gone, you should be left with mostly gen fic!

Or, you could click on the friendship/gen relationship tags (i.e. Jack & Daniel instead of Jack/Daniel) and sort by hits that way.

[fignewton]

I set up a filter to exclude all shipping: -Explicit AND -M/M AND -F/F AND -F/M. That works well enough. :)

[grav_ity]

You can date your uploads, so if you wrote a fic in 2005, you can date it 2005. I think that keeps it from cluttering up the front page (unless you are after visibility, of course, in which case: go to town).

Honestly, I both love and hate the tags. I find them hilarious, but I also don't use them. I tend to navigate entirely by character tag (and if a story lists a TONNE of characters, I am less likely to click it, unless they're in the "also" category). I have no idea what the SG-1 tags are like.

[fignewton]

I chose not to backdate my fics, but I am including end notes that specify when the stories were first posted.

The tags are interesting. They get on my nerves in some cases, when there it seems there are almost more tags than fic. :) But I can see where they could definitely come in handy!

[beatrice_otter]

See, I'm just the opposite. One of my primary ways of finding new fic is to follow tags for whatever type of fic I'm feeling like right then. But then, I'm polyfannish. When I focus on a fandom, if I have a specific character that I want to read about it's often a secondary character who is in the background of a lot of fics, so using the character tags is ... unhelpful. (On the Sam Wilson tag, you can wade through five pages of Steve/Bucky fics where Sam Wilson is a sidekick/support/background character before you find ONE that focuses on him. I know. I've done it.)

[grav_ity]

Yeah, when I said "character tag" I definitely meant "relationship tag". And then I basically only read the fic if it's the only relationship tagged. Sam Wilson readers put up with so much! :)

(I also tried one time to go through the "marriage of convenience" tag, which was, like, solid Dean/Castiel with the odd Transformer fic thrown in for...variety? My fic reading habits have changed a lot, and I mostly read based on recommendation, often for fandoms I'm not even in!)

ANYWAY. I do like the tags. Sometimes they confuse me, but I do like them.

[beatrice_otter]

I have a whole comprehensive look at tagging on AO3 which some people have found useful here: http://yuletide.livejournal.com/1213917.html (It also contains feedback from other people, especially tag wranglers.

Other points: it is nice to set the publication date for the fic as the date you actually published it originally. Also, if you have any fic series, please connect them all using the "series" function. If you have fics that were written as a gift for someone, and they are on AO3, you can mark a fic as a gift for them. They may find it a nice reminder (they'll get a notification of it).

I would create collections and subcollections for your alphabet soups. Like, one overarching Alphabet Soup collection, with each particular Soup having its own subcollection. Or you could make them multi-author series. But it would be cool to have them together (or as close to together as possible, seeing that not everybody is on AO3).

Also: there is an option in your Preferences to allow other people to "Automatically agree to your work being collected by others in the Archive." DON'T DO IT. One of the main things collections are used for is ficathons, right? Where you upload the fic, but it's hidden until the ficathon goes live, a lot of the time, so all the fics are revealed at once. So collections have this thing where the owner of the collection can hide it, which makes all the fic in it hidden from everyone but the collection mod/owner and the author. When it's a ficathon, this is a good thing. But some people use the collections feature as a way of bookmarking their favorite fic (instead of the bookmarks feature, I don't get it) and they don't want their bookmarks public, and so they mark the collection as hidden! AND THEN NOBODY CAN SEE ANY OF THOSE STORIES. What has happened recently is, a number of people had checked "sure, anybody can put my work in a collection!" and somebody using collections as private bookmarks made their fic invisible, and nobody noticed for a while. (The problem is, even if one finds a fic that this has probably happened to, because it's anonymous/hidden you can tell there is a work there but not a) who the author is or b) who the mod is, so you can't DO anything about it. In short, if you don't let people add your work to communities without your permission, you can make sure that you get notified if someone wants to make a collection with your work, and then you can make sure it doesn't get set to anonymous.

[fignewton]

Thank you so much! The Yuletide post was a great read and I am very appreciative of the warning re collections. I double-checked to ensure I have not enabled that option.

An Alphabet Soup collection already exists - I think it was Suzannemarie who created it - and I have to make sure to join it. :) No subcollections, though. At least, I don't think there are. And it would be a good idea, too.

[beatrice_otter]

You're welcome!

[princessofgeeks]

Wow; what a mess! Is there anything an author or the archive people can do about this after the fact?

[cesy]

Yes, the author can remove their fic from the collection, and the archive team are working on longer-term solutions to avoid the problem without creating others.

[beatrice_otter]

You can always see your own fics, and if they are hidden because they are in a collection, it will show. So if you had it set to "anyone can add to collections" and want to check, all you have to do is go through your works list and look for any that are hidden. I'm not sure if you can remove it from the wrong collection yourself, or if you have to contact support, but I know it can be fixed. AFAIK, having the author notice is the only way to fix it.

[smg01]

Speaking of collections (as mentioned above), there is already a collection of some of the sg1friendathon stories that I created after one of the ficathons. I don't know that it's fully comprehensive, but it does have a goodly number of the fics.

Also, hi! It's been so long since I've posted here, I have to remember how.

[fignewton]

And howdy to you, too! I just replied to BO's comment that I'm pretty sure you created a collection - was it sg1friendathon? I thought it was Alphabet Soup.

I'm uploading slowly, so it'll take me a while to reach the point where I have something up there to add to those collections. I'll keep my eyes open. :)

Hope things are going well with you!

[smg01]

I had to go back and check because I was thinking Alphabet Soup at first too, but I think just the friendathon.

There's an almost dizzying amount of stuff and options at AO3 and I've barely skimmed the surface of it. Overall, though, I do think it's pretty tidily put together.

[fignewton]

I'm pretty sure someone make an Alphabet Soup collection. In fact, I know I referenced it in those "final sekrit message" posts.

...Here it is! SG-1 Alphabet Soup. Courtesy of wyomingnot, actually! And there are 129 fics listed there, which is pretty awesome. And kinda smug-inducing, that I am the enabler of so much fic. :D

And I found the sg1friendathon collection, too! Much yay. We should do it again this year!

[smg01]

I haven't written anything in ages, but I was just looking over my past fics and thinking, "I don't hate these." I still have a very, very long fic that sits half done, because while I know pretty much where I want to go, I keep getting stuck trying to get there. I may pull it out again if my schedule lets up again in a few weeks.

All of which is to say, maybe a new friendathon would be fun.

[fignewton]

I think it would be! But with the sheer hecticness of RL right now, I can't even think about it until mid to late June. So we'll see. :)

[beatrice_otter]

Just a note, I really don't like my name shortened to BO--it's also an abbreviation for "body odor." I hope you see the problem ...

[fignewton]

Eh, yeah. Heh. Sorry.

How would you shorten your nick? People refer to me as Fig, frex, which is fine by me.

[beatrice_otter]

People don't shorten my name much, actually? And if they do, mostly to Beatrice, which isn't a great shortening. But the only really short version that works is BO, which, no. No, no, no, no, no.

Sorry!

SG Fic Rec Comm

[wordgeek_slash]

Hi!

Sorry to bother you here on your personal acct, but I'm unable to post on stargateficrec since I deleted my LJ account a couple of months back, and the poll there doesn't allow anon comments.

My feeling is there may be a lot of us who still crawl the LJ rec sites looking for hidden gems, even though we have fled LJ itself, and would like to participate in your poll. The comm performs a public service, one that I'm very grateful for, and I'd love for it to continue in whatever form is most comfortable for everyone involved. If you feel that it's safe to continue on LJ, so be it, but backing it up to DW just in case would only be prudent, IMO.

Thanks for your time!

WG

Re: SG Fic Rec Comm

[fignewton]

Thanks for tracking me down enough to give me your comment. :)

We had to disable anon comments on stargateficrec because of ridiculous amounts of spamming, but you can still log on with Open ID. In fact, two of our regular reccers have closed their LJ accounts and are continuing to rec via DW that way.

Thanks very much for your input!

Re: SG Fic Rec Comm

[wordgeek_slash]

Yeah, I tried Open ID a couple of ways, and it keeps telling me to "please enter a URL', so I must have the syntax wrong. Totally understand about the spamming, tho.

Thanks for all you do...

WG

From: fignewton - DW Comment [mailto:dw_null@dreamwidth.org] Sent: Monday, May 8, 2017 8:19 AM To: wordgeek@comcast.net Subject: Re: SG Fic Rec Comm [ fignewton - 271398 ]

http://v.dreamwidth.org/22256/42015

Fig Newton (fignewton http://fignewton.dreamwidth.org/profile ) replied to a comment you left in a Dreamwidth entry http://fignewton.dreamwidth.org/271398.html "Stepping into the event horizon". The comment they replied to was:

Hi!

Sorry to bother you here on your personal acct, but I'm unable to post on stargateficrec since I deleted my LJ account a couple of months back, and the poll there doesn't allow anon comments.

My feeling is there may be a lot of us who still crawl the LJ rec sites looking for hidden gems, even though we have fled LJ itself, and would like to participate in your poll. The comm performs a public service, one that I'm very grateful for, and I'd love for it to continue in whatever form is most comfortable for everyone involved. If you feel that it's safe to continue on LJ, so be it, but backing it up to DW just in case would only be prudent, IMO.

Thanks for your time!

WG

The reply was:

Subject: Re: SG Fic Rec Comm Thanks for tracking me down enough to give me your comment. :)

We had to disable anon comments on stargateficrec because of ridiculous amounts of spamming, but you can still log on with Open ID. In fact, two of our regular reccers have closed their LJ accounts and are continuing to rec via DW that way.

Thanks very much for your input!

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