Fandom Snowflake: Day 2

[lost_spook]

Day 2: In your own space, promote three communities, challenges, blogs, pages, Twitters, Tumblrs or platforms and explain why you love them.

1. I haven't really explored it properly yet, but

Comments

[clocketpatch]

The Teaspoon is the first archive I ever used and it utterly spoiled me with it's ease of use and wonderful search engine. I didn't bother with Ao3 at all until I start writing B7 stuff this fall because if all you're writing is Who, then what other archive do you really need?

(I do like how Ao3 lets you track statistics though. I'd no idea of the sheer quantity of words I'd written until I looked through there. It's a bit boggling)

[lost_spook]

Yes, I only used AO3 because I wrote other fandoms, and I wanted to do Yuletide. Teaspoon is lovely - though I actually found its search functions very difficult to use (it won't go back to the search results half the time, which is so frustrating) so AO3's searchability and navigation by tags is its big big plus over Teaspoon for me. But, yes, if you're only writing in DW, what else do you need?

I think the moment I was totally sold was when I realised how to get to the tag landing pages. I am sad about tags, I really am. :lol:

[clocketpatch]

It took me FOREVER to figure out how to use tags on Ao3. Once I got it I fell in love with them, but... the tags are part of why I don't like the search function on Ao3.

The Teaspoon makes it very clear what tags are available, but Ao3 doesn't (because there are so many), and so consistent labelling is an issue. Searching for fics that are labelled is easy, but if you search for a fic that has Avon and is 1000 words long... half of the fics are going to be left out because the author didn't bother to/ didn't understand how to tag their fic right.

It's very frustrating.

ETA, that bingo generator looks INCREDIBLY dangerous

[lost_spook]

I think the difference is you can browse easily on AO3 and that simply isn't an option on Teaspoon - and that's what I tend to do. On Teaspoon, you put in all this data, and every time I actually click on a fic and backbutton, the page loses the results and I have to do it all again. Also, you can't search for minor characters, because they rarely have a tag, and you can't search for pairings, just for fics that have x and y in them - and you're still reliant on authors tagging for all their characters, and if it's one of those multi-chapter things, Teaspoon has a limit, and cuts off any extra tags, so you won't find them. So I've only ever used Teaspoon by author and by Doctor category - the search option is reserved for sheer desperation in trying to find something very specific, and I can rarely get it to come up trumps

[clocketpatch]

Really? Apparently I don't understand how to search for length at all because I thought that you had to look for fics that the author had considerately tagged with the wordcount. :/

[lost_spook]

There are several ways to do it - this is the real problem with AO3! Always extra options. The length tags are usually from ages ago when the archive didn't have that ability. If authors still use them, we never canonise them now.

I linked to the full search page below (where you can search by length) but you can also just use the sort option in the sidebar - the little drop down filter menu? You can sort by kudos, comments etc. but also by length. Or if you want a specific length, you can use the full search page.

[lost_spook]

The search page like this: http://archiveofourown.org/works/search

If you put Avon in "any field", and select B7 as the fandom lower down, you get about 940 fics (a couple of hundred more than by clicking on the Kerr Avon tag). You can filter it by word count there among other things (100-1000 gets you about 300 or so).

(Sorry, I'm not meaning to be annoying here. I just went to check, as I don't often use the full search engine and I was curious - as I said, I'm more of an idle browser!)

[clocketpatch]

I didn't even realize that page existed. face!palm

That does make things considerably easier...

[lost_spook]

Heh, that's why we were talking at cross-purposes. (You just click the search button at the top and the works option. :-D)