Archive of Our Own Update

[jane_elliot]

Apparently AO3 now has an advanced search function (yay!), albeit one they aren't promoting very well.  What that search function doesn't have?  A way to search by fandom.  (WTF?!)

Then again, I can't figure out how the function works at all, since using "<1 month" and ">1 month" produces almost exactly the same set of results (featuring the same

Comments

[ext_227574]

Yeah, "<1 month" doesn't work. Try "0 - 31 days ago" instead.

[jane_elliot]

Hm. The help bubble says that "month" should work. Maybe they're still fiddling with that particular function?

[ext_227574]

Month works, but for some reason the greater than and lesser than symbols don't work in the date field. Quite confusing, when it says in the help bubble that they should. As far as I remember, they've never worked the various times I've experimented with the advanced search.

[llamabitchyo]

I just did a search for fics in English, ">30000" words, "< 7 days" which resulted in 3600 fics and the search results ignoring the date field.

Searching for the same with "0 - 7 days ago" in the date field yielded 100 results (I'm suspicious of the round number), most of which have the WIP icon. But it's easier than any other way of hunting through AO3 so far.

ETA:
I'd be perfectly happy to do a once a week posting about long completed fics new on AO3, but the fandoms I read in are fairly small. I don't know enough about most big fandoms to be any sort of judge on quality (beyond the quick judgments based on the grammar in the summaries and checking to see that fics marked complete actually look like they're complete).

[jane_elliot]

Honestly, I find the only effective ways of searching through the archives are to search for a specific story (for which AO3 is far superior to FF.net, though that could be because FF.net has way more stories) or to browse via length (for new fandoms) or by date (for fandoms you've looked at before). Unfortunately, the latter is only really effective for small fandoms.

As for creating a comm with weekly updates for long complete stories -- that would be awesome! I'd steer clear of questions of quality, though; you run the risk of opening a significant can of worms if you leave out a story because of, say, bad grammar in the summary (I speak from experience:) Complete or not complete is an objective measurement, however, and should be totally safe.

All that said, creating a list of *all* of the long, completed stories on the archive each week sounds like an overwhelming task. Would that be your intention, or just for the major fandoms? (If you opt to do the comm at all, of course:)

[llamabitchyo]

I'm looking into the feasibility of doing it now. I think I'd want to do it for all fandoms, but I want to see how long it takes to just do this past week. It does seem slightly overwhelming, but it also helps me, because I often feel that even 20,000 word fics are too short.

[jane_elliot]

You are a woman(?) after my own heart:)