My AO3 Crossposting Experience
LJ, as much as I love it, is kind of dead these days, and was never a particularly great fanfiction archive to begin with, and as for fanfic.net - well, they killed any hope of being taken seriously as a major fic archive the day they banned anything beyond a PG rating. AO3's pretty much where it's at for a lot of fandoms these days, and most of a year and many hours of furious dithering later, I finally finished the mammoth task of getting all my fic uploaded over there.
...yeah. Just in case anyone was actually wondering how you take that long copying what my stats tell me came to over 390,000 words worth of 88 different fic, that's about the size of it.
A few more thoughts on how I've been finding the whole AO3 experience:
Kudos
It has come to my attention that there is a small but vocal minority out there who resent the very existence of AO3 kudos, apparently because they see it as a way of encouraging people to hit the 'like' button instead of leaving a real comment. In light of this, let me take this opportunity to state for the record that IMHO, kudos are awesome. As an insecure fanfic author who has never been one to get pages of feedback, and who still gets that tiny moment of pleasure whenever an email shows up in her inbox letting her know that someone out there on the internet liked one of her fic enough to hit a button to let her know, getting kudos is awesome. As a mild introvert who frequently winds up too nervous to figure out how to word a short comment on a fic she enjoyed, being able to give kudos is awesome. And as a reader who very much appreciates the kudos tally as an admittedly-flawed-but-better-than-nothing indicator of how many other readers out there want it to be known they enjoyed this fic, being able to see who else has given kudos is awesome too. To my mind, kudos are quite simply a wonderful thing.
Posting interface
Oh my god but the 'edit draft' form is a legendary piece of shit. AO3 clearly does not want us editing our drafts. Any draft older than a week gets deleted without so much as an email warning. (And why is that, exactly? Is the AO3 worried by the idea of people writing fic directly into the draft entry box? Are they horrified by the thought their servers might become clogged up by people saving half-finished works that other people can't read yet? Even ff.net lets you save drafts for a good 90 days!) Edits to a draft cannot be saved without going through the 'preview' form, but frequently do not even appear in the preview until you have hit 'preview' once, then 'save without posting', then 'preview' again. As of the latest code push, edits to the last chapter of Good Intentions refused to save at all, no matter what combination of previews I tried. In order to get that chapter up, I had to delete the draft chapter altogether and create a new one with the correct changes. If any of these problems are minor caching bugs I could sort out by changing my browser settings, then hell if there's any obvious FAQ pages to help me figure it out.
Tagging
As nice as it is to finally have a massive multi-fandom archive that lets you search for fic by pairing, the tagging system on AO3 makes me a sad, sad computer science graduate, and has been making me sad ever since I first read the announcement that their system was going to run on the principle of "tag however the hell you want, and our team of trained tag wranglers will psychically divine what the hell you meant and sort out the equivalencies behind the scenes!" and damn-near dislocated my jaw on the spot. No presets, no guidelines, just a mad free-for-all with some poor sucker left running the back end, stuck trying to figure out whether someone who's tagged a CLAMP fic with 'donuts' meant the actual confectionary, the obscure pairing name for 'Doumeki/Watanuki', or some other new meme altogether. Having now used the final product, I can only report that the end result is every bit as difficult as I ever feared.
In all fairness to the AO3 team, they're not completely off base about everything - allowing synonyms for most tags was a good call. Enforcing hard-and-fast rules for even something so basic as character names would be doomed to end in tears, especially once the debates start over whether we should be using full names or common nicknames, real names or superhero names, original Japanese names or dub names, over which romanisation is 'correct', over characters whose names might not even have been revealed outside some little known expansion volume - it's a perfect recipe for the silliest kind of drama. So giving the fans the freedom to name that character Fai/Fye/Fay as they please and synching up the tags from the back end actually makes quite a lot of sense. So far, so good.
The problem with the whole scheme is that it depends on someone doing an awful lot of work behind the scenes that the end user never knows about, forcing both user and wrangler to make a lot of loose assumptions about what the other end is up to without any easy way of finding out if they're right. Am I generalising a little much here? Let's go with an example from my personal experience to demonstrate what I'm talking about.
Let Slip the Dogs of War, one of my first Cable & Deadpool fics, stars Deadpool (Wade Wilson), Cable (Nathan Summers), and War (Nathan Summers again, but an alternate universe version of the same who appears in a handful of Cable & Deadpool chapters). Since that makes two different Nathan Summerses in the same story and for all important purposes they're two very different characters, I'm going to need a tag for each of them. Calling one 'Cable' and one 'War' doesn't work, because 'War' is a code name that's been used by several different Marvel universe characters over the years, some of whom have shown up in other Cable or Deadpool titles. The obvious solution was to use the "[code name] | [real name]" format I'd seen around the archive, popular with series like Tiger and Bunny (anime about superheros) or Phoenix Wright (where characters were renamed for the English adaptation, but some fans prefer the Japanese). So I tagged my fic as containing "Deadpool | Wade Wilson, Cable | Nathan Summers, War | Nathan Summers", and considered the job done.
Or not, because when I checked back, my new "Cable | Nathan Summers" tag brought me to a page declaring "this tag has not yet been marked as common, and cannot be filtered on". Ah. Looks like I'm the first person to use that naming format in this fandom. Oh well, fair enough, it's a small fandom. According to the AO3 guidelines, it'll get wrangled soon enough.
Having checked that same tag today, several months down the track, I am disappointed to report that nope, no wrangling has taken place.
The AO3 FAQs are unable to tell me why. Surely it can't have been this many months since any tags got wrangled. Have my tags been missed somehow? Is there a massive queue of unwrangled tags, with mine sitting in the middle somewhere? Is there simply no-one wrangling tags for the Cable & Deadpool fandom right now? This is an obvious problem that any halfway decent web-developer ought to have anticipated. At the very least, there ought to be a FAQ question covering it. I should not have to email the administrators to find an answer.
Nor is this is the only issue. Hoping to figure out for myself what tags the rest of the fandom were using, I went to the search form and entered 'War' under character. The search form returned me results for every fic using the 'war' as any tag, character related or otherwise - so a fic tagged as containing 'Nuclear warfare' would show up among the results. Talk about sloppy coding. I did eventually track down one tag referring to War-the-character by checking what had been synched up under 'Nathan Summers', where I found the synonyms included War (Cable and Deadpool). Clicking on this tag, however, returns me every fic tagged with any variant on "Nathan Summers", and is hence useless in helping me figure out if this very specific variant on the character has ever appeared in fic there. Unsurprisingly at this point, even entering "War (Cable and Deadpool)" into the search form under 'character' continued returning me that irrelevant "Nuclear Warfare" hit. This is the sort of behaviour that, in technical terms, we like to call a fail.
I eventually figured out what was going on not by taking my chances with the official support form, but by dropping a question on an anon-meme where I'd seen tag wranglers pop up to discuss the job in the past. There, I discovered that fandoms are usually assigned to specific wranglers, so the odds were there just wasn't anyone assigned to Cable & Deadpool right now. When one of them went to check, however, we found out there is supposed to be a wrangler assigned - and if there is someone assigned, other wranglers aren't supposed to drop in and mess with tags themselves, even if whoever it is has been AWOL for some time now, so so much for getting help there. I'm back to going through the official support form, which looks to be set up to send all tag-related questions to the same place, nevermind minor matters like efficiency.
The whole mess becomes only more insidious when you realise that for a great many users, writing for popular characters in large fandoms likely to have the most active wranglers, such issues are unlikely to come up. It's the minority spread across the smaller fandoms who get stuck dealing with the vast majority of the archive's issues, and who are going to have the most trouble getting their voices heard. The AO3's system actively discourages any sort of communication between tag wranglers and users whatsoever, which is exactly the kind of scheme which only works under the assumption that nothing is ever going to go wrong - tags will always be wrangled promptly, and all fandoms will have an active wrangler. And if you believe that will ever be the case, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you at a very competitive price.
How about another example? If you check out AO3's freeform tag cloud, showing the most commonly used top-level tags in the archive, you'll notice that the third-most-common tag in the archive (below "Alternate universe", slightly below "Angst" and just barely above "Sexual content") are those in the "Relationship" category - ie, anything other than gen.
This is instantly confusing, because the AO3 was quite sensibly set up to treat relationships (be they m/m, f/f, m/f, multiples of the above, unclassifiable by gender, or genfic with no relationships at all) as a top-level category in it's own class, and anyone with any experience with the fanfic community ought to understand why. Why, then, are relationship tags showing up under the freeform tags? Has the cloud been deliberately organised to include them? As it turns out, no - a little investigation will soon prove that the total number of fics under the 'relationship' tag is only just over 50,000, whereas the total number of fic on the archive under the top-level M/F category alone is over 140,000. The hell?
It seems the 'relationship' the freeform tag is actually made up of all the fics which someone has tagged with 'slash' or 'het' or whatever, even when those fics are also (as they usually seem to be) correctly categorised under M/M, or M/F etc. Whether these are fics imported from other archives that did use tags like 'slash', whether people are tagging them that way by habit, or whether there's some sort of real misunderstanding over whether those tags are needed I can only speculate, but if a major subset of all freeform tags stored in the archive are by definition functionally redundant, that's a worry. A new user who starts out on the AO3 front page, clicks 'browse by tags' and goes looking through the very obvious relationship tag might never realise they're seeing only a fraction of the fic they're looking for, and will likely end up very confused about what all this relationship-genre-category stuff is about. It creates confusion, and it slows down searches, and neither of those things are going to be healthy for the long term success of a project like this. More to the point, it's a classic illustration of the fundamental confusion over how AO3 tags work that I've seen a lot of other voices express in some of those anon-meme threads.
Above all, this is frustrating because it's so, so easy for me to imagine ways it could all be done better. As others have pointed out before me, the core problem with the AO3 tag wrangling system is that it's a non-scaling solution. As long as wranglers have to review every accidental typo entered in a character tag, then the work needed to keep the archive running will increase exponentially as the archive keeps getting bigger. The system could save a massive amount of time and frustration on everyone's part by letting the users themselves do a bit more. The key is transparency. Give the users more information about how the tagging system works, and let them play a role in indicating how tags should be synched up, and you'll reduce confusion and frustration at the user end and save the wranglers work.
Here's how it would work.
Firstly, right now, there's nothing to let a user know they've entered a tag the system doesn't recognise unless they make the effort of go through all their own tags manually. To fix this, you'd add an extra form so that when you post a fic, you'd get a screen something like this.
Very simple - it outlines which tags you've entered have been recognised, and shows you how. It's an easy way to alert them to any minor typos and give them a chance to fix them themselves, or replace an unrecognised tag with an existing synonym and save having to wait for a wrangler to sort it out. In small fandoms which may not have an active wrangler, this is exactly the sort of information the users badly need. A similar page could let users review all tags on their existing fic, double-check whether any older tags had been wrangled yet, and send reminders to the right people if they hadn't been.
More importantly, you'd let the user themselves suggest how new tags might be sorted or merged, (hopefully) leaving the tag wrangler to do no more than hit 'confirm'. For most obvious cases you shouldn't even need a wrangler familiar with that fandom to be involved, or even a human being at all - an automated routine based on a little simple boolean logic could do the job for them. You'd also let users put their random freeform blather under 'ignore', and save the wranglers having to deal with them at all. These kinds of changes can make a massive difference to performance and maintenance tasks, and any halfway-decent CompSci course dedicates hours to going through how you calculate efficiency when designing systems like this (seriously, I could support this point with equations and diagrams if anyone wanted to see them).
Secondly, users should be able to see whether their fandom has an assigned wrangler just by looking at the works in that fandom. (Cynically, you might also want to include the date when any tags were wrangled last, so it's easier to tell if the assigned wrangler has gone AWOL.) If it's obvious there's no wrangler assigned, people are much more likely to volunteer for the job, or at least think twice about assuming their new tags will be wrangled quickly.
If you want to get really user-friendly and actually give users a place to discuss whether tags are synched up where they should be, and hopefully even talk to their wranglers, it's been pointed out a dozen times over around the web that the archive could really use some official forums. Right now, there's nothing but the FAQ pages and a few links to twitter accounts and the like to give a new user any guidance, or let users discuss things among themselves - nothing fandom-specific whatsoever.
I could go on at this point, but if I got into the logistic problems faced by that poor fan out there who really wants to find fic actually about a canonical ship which appears in the background of a gazillion different slash/gen/het about other characters fic (but which has all been tagged with that pairing because why not) I'd be here all day.
All this stuff would be so much less frustrating if these all these bugs in the system weren't exactly the issues I'd known were going to crop up just as soon as I heard about the tag wrangling scheme. But they are, and at times like this there's no satisfaction in being able to say 'saw that coming' worth a damn.
...yeah. Just in case anyone was actually wondering how you take that long copying what my stats tell me came to over 390,000 words worth of 88 different fic, that's about the size of it.
A few more thoughts on how I've been finding the whole AO3 experience:
Kudos
It has come to my attention that there is a small but vocal minority out there who resent the very existence of AO3 kudos, apparently because they see it as a way of encouraging people to hit the 'like' button instead of leaving a real comment. In light of this, let me take this opportunity to state for the record that IMHO, kudos are awesome. As an insecure fanfic author who has never been one to get pages of feedback, and who still gets that tiny moment of pleasure whenever an email shows up in her inbox letting her know that someone out there on the internet liked one of her fic enough to hit a button to let her know, getting kudos is awesome. As a mild introvert who frequently winds up too nervous to figure out how to word a short comment on a fic she enjoyed, being able to give kudos is awesome. And as a reader who very much appreciates the kudos tally as an admittedly-flawed-but-better-than-nothing indicator of how many other readers out there want it to be known they enjoyed this fic, being able to see who else has given kudos is awesome too. To my mind, kudos are quite simply a wonderful thing.
Posting interface
Oh my god but the 'edit draft' form is a legendary piece of shit. AO3 clearly does not want us editing our drafts. Any draft older than a week gets deleted without so much as an email warning. (And why is that, exactly? Is the AO3 worried by the idea of people writing fic directly into the draft entry box? Are they horrified by the thought their servers might become clogged up by people saving half-finished works that other people can't read yet? Even ff.net lets you save drafts for a good 90 days!) Edits to a draft cannot be saved without going through the 'preview' form, but frequently do not even appear in the preview until you have hit 'preview' once, then 'save without posting', then 'preview' again. As of the latest code push, edits to the last chapter of Good Intentions refused to save at all, no matter what combination of previews I tried. In order to get that chapter up, I had to delete the draft chapter altogether and create a new one with the correct changes. If any of these problems are minor caching bugs I could sort out by changing my browser settings, then hell if there's any obvious FAQ pages to help me figure it out.
Tagging
As nice as it is to finally have a massive multi-fandom archive that lets you search for fic by pairing, the tagging system on AO3 makes me a sad, sad computer science graduate, and has been making me sad ever since I first read the announcement that their system was going to run on the principle of "tag however the hell you want, and our team of trained tag wranglers will psychically divine what the hell you meant and sort out the equivalencies behind the scenes!" and damn-near dislocated my jaw on the spot. No presets, no guidelines, just a mad free-for-all with some poor sucker left running the back end, stuck trying to figure out whether someone who's tagged a CLAMP fic with 'donuts' meant the actual confectionary, the obscure pairing name for 'Doumeki/Watanuki', or some other new meme altogether. Having now used the final product, I can only report that the end result is every bit as difficult as I ever feared.
In all fairness to the AO3 team, they're not completely off base about everything - allowing synonyms for most tags was a good call. Enforcing hard-and-fast rules for even something so basic as character names would be doomed to end in tears, especially once the debates start over whether we should be using full names or common nicknames, real names or superhero names, original Japanese names or dub names, over which romanisation is 'correct', over characters whose names might not even have been revealed outside some little known expansion volume - it's a perfect recipe for the silliest kind of drama. So giving the fans the freedom to name that character Fai/Fye/Fay as they please and synching up the tags from the back end actually makes quite a lot of sense. So far, so good.
The problem with the whole scheme is that it depends on someone doing an awful lot of work behind the scenes that the end user never knows about, forcing both user and wrangler to make a lot of loose assumptions about what the other end is up to without any easy way of finding out if they're right. Am I generalising a little much here? Let's go with an example from my personal experience to demonstrate what I'm talking about.
Let Slip the Dogs of War, one of my first Cable & Deadpool fics, stars Deadpool (Wade Wilson), Cable (Nathan Summers), and War (Nathan Summers again, but an alternate universe version of the same who appears in a handful of Cable & Deadpool chapters). Since that makes two different Nathan Summerses in the same story and for all important purposes they're two very different characters, I'm going to need a tag for each of them. Calling one 'Cable' and one 'War' doesn't work, because 'War' is a code name that's been used by several different Marvel universe characters over the years, some of whom have shown up in other Cable or Deadpool titles. The obvious solution was to use the "[code name] | [real name]" format I'd seen around the archive, popular with series like Tiger and Bunny (anime about superheros) or Phoenix Wright (where characters were renamed for the English adaptation, but some fans prefer the Japanese). So I tagged my fic as containing "Deadpool | Wade Wilson, Cable | Nathan Summers, War | Nathan Summers", and considered the job done.
Or not, because when I checked back, my new "Cable | Nathan Summers" tag brought me to a page declaring "this tag has not yet been marked as common, and cannot be filtered on". Ah. Looks like I'm the first person to use that naming format in this fandom. Oh well, fair enough, it's a small fandom. According to the AO3 guidelines, it'll get wrangled soon enough.
Having checked that same tag today, several months down the track, I am disappointed to report that nope, no wrangling has taken place.
The AO3 FAQs are unable to tell me why. Surely it can't have been this many months since any tags got wrangled. Have my tags been missed somehow? Is there a massive queue of unwrangled tags, with mine sitting in the middle somewhere? Is there simply no-one wrangling tags for the Cable & Deadpool fandom right now? This is an obvious problem that any halfway decent web-developer ought to have anticipated. At the very least, there ought to be a FAQ question covering it. I should not have to email the administrators to find an answer.
Nor is this is the only issue. Hoping to figure out for myself what tags the rest of the fandom were using, I went to the search form and entered 'War' under character. The search form returned me results for every fic using the 'war' as any tag, character related or otherwise - so a fic tagged as containing 'Nuclear warfare' would show up among the results. Talk about sloppy coding. I did eventually track down one tag referring to War-the-character by checking what had been synched up under 'Nathan Summers', where I found the synonyms included War (Cable and Deadpool). Clicking on this tag, however, returns me every fic tagged with any variant on "Nathan Summers", and is hence useless in helping me figure out if this very specific variant on the character has ever appeared in fic there. Unsurprisingly at this point, even entering "War (Cable and Deadpool)" into the search form under 'character' continued returning me that irrelevant "Nuclear Warfare" hit. This is the sort of behaviour that, in technical terms, we like to call a fail.
I eventually figured out what was going on not by taking my chances with the official support form, but by dropping a question on an anon-meme where I'd seen tag wranglers pop up to discuss the job in the past. There, I discovered that fandoms are usually assigned to specific wranglers, so the odds were there just wasn't anyone assigned to Cable & Deadpool right now. When one of them went to check, however, we found out there is supposed to be a wrangler assigned - and if there is someone assigned, other wranglers aren't supposed to drop in and mess with tags themselves, even if whoever it is has been AWOL for some time now, so so much for getting help there. I'm back to going through the official support form, which looks to be set up to send all tag-related questions to the same place, nevermind minor matters like efficiency.
The whole mess becomes only more insidious when you realise that for a great many users, writing for popular characters in large fandoms likely to have the most active wranglers, such issues are unlikely to come up. It's the minority spread across the smaller fandoms who get stuck dealing with the vast majority of the archive's issues, and who are going to have the most trouble getting their voices heard. The AO3's system actively discourages any sort of communication between tag wranglers and users whatsoever, which is exactly the kind of scheme which only works under the assumption that nothing is ever going to go wrong - tags will always be wrangled promptly, and all fandoms will have an active wrangler. And if you believe that will ever be the case, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you at a very competitive price.
How about another example? If you check out AO3's freeform tag cloud, showing the most commonly used top-level tags in the archive, you'll notice that the third-most-common tag in the archive (below "Alternate universe", slightly below "Angst" and just barely above "Sexual content") are those in the "Relationship" category - ie, anything other than gen.
This is instantly confusing, because the AO3 was quite sensibly set up to treat relationships (be they m/m, f/f, m/f, multiples of the above, unclassifiable by gender, or genfic with no relationships at all) as a top-level category in it's own class, and anyone with any experience with the fanfic community ought to understand why. Why, then, are relationship tags showing up under the freeform tags? Has the cloud been deliberately organised to include them? As it turns out, no - a little investigation will soon prove that the total number of fics under the 'relationship' tag is only just over 50,000, whereas the total number of fic on the archive under the top-level M/F category alone is over 140,000. The hell?
It seems the 'relationship' the freeform tag is actually made up of all the fics which someone has tagged with 'slash' or 'het' or whatever, even when those fics are also (as they usually seem to be) correctly categorised under M/M, or M/F etc. Whether these are fics imported from other archives that did use tags like 'slash', whether people are tagging them that way by habit, or whether there's some sort of real misunderstanding over whether those tags are needed I can only speculate, but if a major subset of all freeform tags stored in the archive are by definition functionally redundant, that's a worry. A new user who starts out on the AO3 front page, clicks 'browse by tags' and goes looking through the very obvious relationship tag might never realise they're seeing only a fraction of the fic they're looking for, and will likely end up very confused about what all this relationship-genre-category stuff is about. It creates confusion, and it slows down searches, and neither of those things are going to be healthy for the long term success of a project like this. More to the point, it's a classic illustration of the fundamental confusion over how AO3 tags work that I've seen a lot of other voices express in some of those anon-meme threads.
Above all, this is frustrating because it's so, so easy for me to imagine ways it could all be done better. As others have pointed out before me, the core problem with the AO3 tag wrangling system is that it's a non-scaling solution. As long as wranglers have to review every accidental typo entered in a character tag, then the work needed to keep the archive running will increase exponentially as the archive keeps getting bigger. The system could save a massive amount of time and frustration on everyone's part by letting the users themselves do a bit more. The key is transparency. Give the users more information about how the tagging system works, and let them play a role in indicating how tags should be synched up, and you'll reduce confusion and frustration at the user end and save the wranglers work.
Here's how it would work.
Firstly, right now, there's nothing to let a user know they've entered a tag the system doesn't recognise unless they make the effort of go through all their own tags manually. To fix this, you'd add an extra form so that when you post a fic, you'd get a screen something like this.
Very simple - it outlines which tags you've entered have been recognised, and shows you how. It's an easy way to alert them to any minor typos and give them a chance to fix them themselves, or replace an unrecognised tag with an existing synonym and save having to wait for a wrangler to sort it out. In small fandoms which may not have an active wrangler, this is exactly the sort of information the users badly need. A similar page could let users review all tags on their existing fic, double-check whether any older tags had been wrangled yet, and send reminders to the right people if they hadn't been.
More importantly, you'd let the user themselves suggest how new tags might be sorted or merged, (hopefully) leaving the tag wrangler to do no more than hit 'confirm'. For most obvious cases you shouldn't even need a wrangler familiar with that fandom to be involved, or even a human being at all - an automated routine based on a little simple boolean logic could do the job for them. You'd also let users put their random freeform blather under 'ignore', and save the wranglers having to deal with them at all. These kinds of changes can make a massive difference to performance and maintenance tasks, and any halfway-decent CompSci course dedicates hours to going through how you calculate efficiency when designing systems like this (seriously, I could support this point with equations and diagrams if anyone wanted to see them).
Secondly, users should be able to see whether their fandom has an assigned wrangler just by looking at the works in that fandom. (Cynically, you might also want to include the date when any tags were wrangled last, so it's easier to tell if the assigned wrangler has gone AWOL.) If it's obvious there's no wrangler assigned, people are much more likely to volunteer for the job, or at least think twice about assuming their new tags will be wrangled quickly.
If you want to get really user-friendly and actually give users a place to discuss whether tags are synched up where they should be, and hopefully even talk to their wranglers, it's been pointed out a dozen times over around the web that the archive could really use some official forums. Right now, there's nothing but the FAQ pages and a few links to twitter accounts and the like to give a new user any guidance, or let users discuss things among themselves - nothing fandom-specific whatsoever.
I could go on at this point, but if I got into the logistic problems faced by that poor fan out there who really wants to find fic actually about a canonical ship which appears in the background of a gazillion different slash/gen/het about other characters fic (but which has all been tagged with that pairing because why not) I'd be here all day.
All this stuff would be so much less frustrating if these all these bugs in the system weren't exactly the issues I'd known were going to crop up just as soon as I heard about the tag wrangling scheme. But they are, and at times like this there's no satisfaction in being able to say 'saw that coming' worth a damn.