Tagging Poly (Ask)

[wrangletangle]

mrsmichaellorca asked: Hey just read your FSF post. I do write a 3some ship I worry that its not reaching its intended audience of AO3 where or how do you look for poly there?

(Ah Tumblr, I still don’t know how to get you to work…)

I’m publishing this because a lot of folks are probably curious. First, there are no real category tags for poly, because we share “Multi” with everyone who has a work with multiple categories, like M/F and M/M in the same work. (I personally use “Other”, but that’s a shared category, too.)

To really make sure people can find your work, there are three freeform tags I recommend: Polyamory, Threesome, and Moresomes. The nice thing is, if you pick a subtag of one of these, you’re also covering the general tag, because of the way metatags work. So if I use “OT4”, that tag is a subtag of “Moresomes”, so it will show up when someone filters for “Moresomes”.

When things calm down a bit from the beginning of the year chaos, I’ll be bringing this topic up directly with the wrangling team again, though I don’t know if the archive would consider adding another category for us. It’s worth a try, though.