For AO3 Folks...
I tried to submit this through the appropriate feedback/suggestions section of the site and got a 500 error. Twice. Thus, I post it here, in the hopes that someone with influence will see it (or someone without influence will pass it on to someone who has it).
-First, I love a lot of your most recent changes. The MOBI and HTML download options are especially fabulous. Thank you.
-Second, when I'm trying to find a specific story on AO3, the general search function works fabulously -- I nearly always get less than five results on my search and if the story is in the archive, it's always one of the five.
-Unfortunately, every other search I try is a complete disaster. I suspect part of that is because I don't search for specific tags (honestly, outside of pairings I find the whole tag system more of a hindrance than a help, but presumably I'm in the minority there); instead, I've been attempting to use the advanced search for dates and word counts. The good news is that it seems that I can search for word counts. The bad news is that the date field doesn't work at all and one just isn't useful to me without the other. Frankly, if I was only allowed one working field in the advanced search, that field would be the date field. Unfortunately, that is the one field that is apparently fubar.
-Before someone tells me for the millionth time to just use the "sort by word count" function, please understand that that only works for the first time I browse a fandom. After that, I have no way of knowing which stories I've already downloaded and which ones are new. For small fandoms, I can just go through all of the new stories for those that meet my minimum word requirements, but for large fandoms (Harry Potter, Supernatural, X-Men First Class, just to name a few), that simply isn't feasible (Harry Potter alone can easily have twenty pages of fics posted in under a week).
-That said, if you could sort your search results by date or word count, even if only while you're getting the advanced search working, that would help tremendously.
Thank you!
-First, I love a lot of your most recent changes. The MOBI and HTML download options are especially fabulous. Thank you.
-Second, when I'm trying to find a specific story on AO3, the general search function works fabulously -- I nearly always get less than five results on my search and if the story is in the archive, it's always one of the five.
-Unfortunately, every other search I try is a complete disaster. I suspect part of that is because I don't search for specific tags (honestly, outside of pairings I find the whole tag system more of a hindrance than a help, but presumably I'm in the minority there); instead, I've been attempting to use the advanced search for dates and word counts. The good news is that it seems that I can search for word counts. The bad news is that the date field doesn't work at all and one just isn't useful to me without the other. Frankly, if I was only allowed one working field in the advanced search, that field would be the date field. Unfortunately, that is the one field that is apparently fubar.
-Before someone tells me for the millionth time to just use the "sort by word count" function, please understand that that only works for the first time I browse a fandom. After that, I have no way of knowing which stories I've already downloaded and which ones are new. For small fandoms, I can just go through all of the new stories for those that meet my minimum word requirements, but for large fandoms (Harry Potter, Supernatural, X-Men First Class, just to name a few), that simply isn't feasible (Harry Potter alone can easily have twenty pages of fics posted in under a week).
-That said, if you could sort your search results by date or word count, even if only while you're getting the advanced search working, that would help tremendously.
Thank you!