On the miseries of browsing for fic.

[antennapedia]

I have no fresh recs for you today, though I did a great deal of speed-reading through a lot of Mycroft + gen tagged fic on the AO3. This experience was miserable. Oh the badfic! Oh the fic that wasn't at all relevant to my interests despite its appearance in my searches

Comments

[elayna88]

I do not understand the posting of unclickable 'mystery' works either. Why not wait until it's ready to be read/viewed?

What does 'free form' mean? I've seen this phrase in many tags and it means nothing to me.

[antennapedia]

"Free-form" tags on AO3 mean tags that haven't been wrangled into official, canonical forms yet. Somebody has used them for the first time ever. This isn't necessarily bad; I used "blue jeans" the other day to tag the blue-jeans-focused kink meme fill I reposted there. This tag is free-form because nobody else had used it yet, but it's a reasonable tag for that story and you could imagine other stories being tagged with it. And readers looking for stories about ass-hugging buttery-soft blue jeans might search for it.

The really wild long tags are the ones that are more, um, controversial.

I have not read this story at all, but I found it while scanning for an example of freeform tags: check the tags on this one. Tags like "Of course Sherlock would get a question about the solar system" are what people are talking about. They can't be aliased to canonical tags like "Humor" or "Pottermore", also on that story, and they are most likely not used on any other story in the archive. And they never *will* be used on any other story on the

[elayna88]

Thank you! I've been wondering what free-form meant.

I've seen some of those really wild long tags and just... sorta blinked. They don't really encourage me to read the fic, as they make me think the author is fairly young. That may be a rude judgment of mine, but they just seem immature. Especially since the first ones I saw were the author denigrating herself or her writing.

[antennapedia]

I think think think there's another use of "freeform" that'll show up in AO3 tags. There's a Beatles fandom tag (things like fandom & characters & pairings are implemented as specially categorized tags behind the scenes). There is also a "Beatles" tag that means "this fic that isn't in the Beatles fandom has the Beatles in it for other reasons". That one will actually be wrangled to an official version that has the word "freeform" in it, to signal something to the tag wranglers. I *think*.

It is confusing.

Tumblr-style tagging drives me crazy on the AO3. It's NOT a blog. It is a FIC ARCHIVE. Tag to help readers find your fics. ARGH.

[jedi_diplomat]

No exclusionary clause is my BIGGEST bitch about the searching feature of AO3, which really is crap. I would love to be able to say "I want everything but explicit because I'm at work" or "look, I don't want series. One shots only pls." And why can't I choose more than one thing in their "filter?" It drives me batty it does.

So yeah, I feel your pain.

[antennapedia]

Why are crossovers included by default? Why? I love me a good crossover when I'm in the mood for one, but not when I'm browsing a fandom's fic in general. Sigh.

[beatrice_otter]

Heh. My reaction to the AO3 search engine is about the opposite, because I search for different things. I search, instead, for things like "bechdel pass" or "superpowers au" or fic kinks, which can't be searched for in any way shape or form on any other archive. Then again, I am polyfannish, and the type of story and the quality thereof is more important for me than the fandom and characters, a lot of the time, and what draws me to a fandom is the type of tropes that tend to get written in it. So, while I would make a few tweaks to the AO3 system, it's exactly what I wanted and never had before. It's one of the reasons I love AO3 and wish that more people had their fic there, so that I could find it on searches like that. But then, the whole AO3 tagging system privileges my type of fic reading over other types.

[antennapedia]

That's an interesting insight! If you're reading for tropes, AO3 gives you a better browsing experience. If you're reading for specific characters (as I very strongly prefer to do), FF.net gives you a better browsing experience.

Tags *can* do both tropes & characters, of course. If there were a way to tag "primary characters" or "primary pairing", AO3 would afford my method of browsing as well as yours. Or if convention were to tag in a more limited way (do not tag for incidental content/characters/etc) it would also work.

[snickfic]

I too use AO3 to trawl for particular tropes. Also, I don't think ff.net handles RPF fandoms at all, although it's possible I'm just not looking in the right place.

I do very much like the "primary pairing" idea for AO3, though. It's discouraging to go looking for, say, a minor SPN het ship (all het ships are minor in SPN) and get back results where in 75% of the cases the het ship is only background to the main slash one. I suspect there are a lot of fandoms that have that same problem.

[antennapedia]

FF.net limits its content: it doesn't want the explicit adult stuff and I don't think it wants RPF either. It also bans fandoms where the owners/authors are known to disapprove. Anne Rice fandoms, for instance. So AO3 is always going to have a broader range of content possible. It's still an order of magnitude or two smaller overall, though.