ao3 wisdoms
a fun fact about me is that i've been on ao3 since june 2016. did you fucking know that we didn't always have the exclude section in the filter sidebar? do you fucking know how much i fucking suffered?
oh, yeah, sure, there was still a method of filtering stuff out, but it was clunky to set up and always use, and blahblahblah
anyway, i like knowing how to utilize my tools (like ao3) to their fullest potentials, so here's a collection of some of mine Learned Wisdomes™
advanced ao3 filtering lesson i: filter_ids
sure, it's the old-fashioned method of filtering stuff out, but there's still a lot of useful stuff to be known here!
kind of an introduction to advanced ao3 searching i guess?
ao3 tagging etiquette
i know a lot of people don't go through raw ao3 tags for large fandoms like genshin or bnha, BUT I DO (because i want to evaluate everything myself, with my own eyes, to decide if i wanna read it).
because a lot of people overtag shit as a precaution (or just bc they're not entirely familiar with how ao3 tags in the database work (see: old-fashioned filtering)), there's a lot of slush in those tags, esp when looking for fics that have endgame m/f pairings or even feature f/f pairings as their main ship.
hence, i have done a brief write-up of my own personal standards of tagging, including a brief on why there are meaningful distinctions between using particular tag categories.
advanced ao3 filtering lesson ii: hidden search operators
we all know about otp:true, but there are many more secret search operators we can use inside the "search within results" box on ao3!
i would know. i looked through the source code for them.
userscript recommendations
some scripts i have installed on my browser to improve my quality of life on ao3
some thoughts on an ideal fanfiction archive
ao3 is really cool and absolutely incredible for what it does— but it's not perfect, although fewer and fewer people these days have experienced otherwise.
i have, however, and so i have Thoughts™
thoughts on chatfics (cross-indexed from " essays")
as both a long-time fic writer and a person who did competitive comedic performance for several years, it's only natural that i would have some Thoughts™ on what may very well be the most infamous genre of "comedy" fic out there.
on bookmarks
sometimes i see posts where fic authors complain about readers leaving negative notes in their bookmarks. i have some thoughts on that.
standard ao3 workskin
i wrote a workskin with some styling tweaks that i've basically just made standard for my works.
in defense of deletion
some of you need to accept that works are deleted for reasons beyond "didn't know that orphaning or anonymizing was an option."