For a break from mindlessly reposting from Tumblr, I'd like to take a moment to celebrate AO3's deeply inclusive content policy.

If you feel so inclined, please drop links to some of your favorite fanworks on AO3. They don't have to be NSFW. Any fandom, any genre, just things you enjoy.

For extra salt, I'm encouraging everyone to feel free to keep posting here through December 18. Fandom doesn't stop even if Tumblr implodes.

[Description: Screenshot of the tags “confident peter quill” and “sensitive peter quill” from the tag wrangling interface on Archive of Our Own.]

I love this user so much. Why do I love this user? Because even without suggestions in the autocomplete for these words, they understood the fundamental problem of Too Many Peters.

Listen y’all, there aren’t just 2 Peters, or 3. There are 56 characters named Peter in Marvel alone. There are over 580 Peters on AO3 right now. Wranglers bust our butts trying to get you the tags you need in the autocomplete, but we can’t do that without some help from you.

Tell us who you mean. Not in the notes, not in some of the tags, but in. Every. Single. Tag. Any Peter without a family name or fandom added in that same tag is a naked Peter. Don’t let your Peters go naked! Please, we’re working here!

That goes for literally every other name on the archive, too. If I had a dollar for every naked Erik we get…. no, honestly, you couldn’t pay me to deal with the naked Eriks. They are the biggest pita. Get some family names on those Eriks! (or a Phantom disambig)

Seriously, please don’t make us dig up clothes for your peeps. No matter what category they’re in, please give them to us already dressed. From the bottom of my heart to everyone who does this: thank you!

#no more naked peters

Hey guys, an AO3 tag wrangler here with a small suggestion for making the lives of wranglers and the Abuse volunteers and all your fellow users a little easier. You know that impulse to post a “PROMPT ME, I WILL TAKE ANY OF THESE 50 SHIPS IN 30 FANDOMS” work?

Please don’t. These make everyone cry.

Look at all those fandoms and ship tags… that this work doesn’t apply to! Look at the fact that this isn’t even a work yet! Look at all those tags you’re asking wranglers to wrangle, usually not the existing canonicals, that appear in the bins of 30 different wrangling teams, flooding the smaller teams and annoying the big ones! Look at the Abuse volunteers getting 3 reports for your work in the first day and having to talk to you and reply to each of those people!

I have a better suggestion: personal prompt meme.

Aw yeah, AO3 has prompt memes and allows personal collections! Imagine your personal prompt collection:

• Control when it’s open and closed!


• Post a link in the notes of all your works!


• Post a link on your blog and your AO3 profile!


• Post the things you’ll accept in the Rules/FAQ section of the collection!


• Use claims or gifts to notify the prompter when you’ve posted a work for their prompt!


• Easily delete prompts that don’t follow your rules!


• Post each work separately and gift each one to the prompter to build relationships and encourage interest from new fans who just noticed your work!

So much control, so much useful organization, so many fewer frustrated users finding a work with two chapters, neither of which applies to most of the relationships or fandoms tags. Why burn your bridges with some users when you’re trying for positive attention for your works?

Just imagine it: “[YourName]′s Personal Prompt Meme*”. Your name on a collection on AO3. All for you.

Let’s make this a thing, yeah?

…a friendly reminder that AO3 has download capability! Take a few moments to figure out what you’d like to read for the couple of hours the site will be down and download them. If you download more than you can read in 2 hours, you’ll have extra in case something’s not what you were looking for.

And while you’re waiting, you can think about all the lovely back-end changes that will help your friendly neighborhood wranglers. \o/

When I wrangle bookmark tags, I like to play “guess which work that’s attached to.” I’m pretty sure I got this whole set. Can you?

Did you know that… “The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom” and “Avengers - Fandom” tags on AO3 are ambiguous because there’s another, unrelated British TV show called “The Avengers”? And because of the Avengers comics and EMH?

#ambiguous fandoms are ambiguous for everyone, #including the people you want to have find your work, #‘Avengers’ doesn’t just mean the Marvel movie

Did you know that… if you tag your work on AO3 with a non-canonical fandom tag when a canonical tag already exists for that fandom, your other tags are invisible to your wranglers? They usually get found anywhere from a couple weeks to a couple months later in the mass bins.

#in your interest to tag with canonical fandoms, #if you want your tags wrangled sooner

Did you know that… you can exclude tags from your searches by entering -“Tag Name” in the “Search Within Results” box in the filters?

#this won’t work on other versions of the tag #but you can exclude several tags if you need to

ETA April 8: Some have suggested that simply ticking the fandoms, characters, relationships, etc. that you want in the filters will remove other, undesired tags. THIS IS NOT CORRECT. It will limit results to works containing the desired tags, but undesired tags can still be mixed into those results. The checkboxes are an AND search, not a NOT search.

Did you know that… there are 140,000+ accounts on AO3 as I post this, and hundreds being added every day?

#if you’re on the waiting list and <1000th in line, #you’ll get your invite within a couple of days

I had 110 freeform tags to wrangle in MCU alone last night, but this one made me pause and grin. Best tag all night.