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You, posting your work to AO3: These tags are excellent, they are super-clear about exactly what I mean, and no one will ever be confused about my intent.

Me, a Tag Wrangler receiving your tags through the wrangulator: ACTUally-

#listen sometimes i stare at people's works for like 5 whole minutes #and still can't figure it out #if you use characters' full names in tags please know i love you

[tumblr.com profile] lurking-lucifer said: The Tumblr tags specify using characters’ full names.

This is honestly never something I considered before, but I’m guessing that - a lot of the time - tag wranglers probably see tags to organise/sort independent of the work itself, so it could prove confusing to see say “Human Peter” or “Mutant Keith” … the names are so common that it could belong to dozens of fandoms, with no guarantee the wrangler is a part of those fandoms either.

When writing character tags, it’s worth bearing in mind.

Not only will it make things easier for volunteers, but it’ll likely have the added benefit of increasing your audience, too, as people will have a more specific tag to search and use in place of one that could apply to several characters. After all, nothing more irritating than searching for x and finding y!


This is correct, except it’s not “a lot of the time” - it’s every time! We have to make an extra effort to go to an individual work to see the tag in context. Otherwise, all tags arrive to us without context. And if we’re wrangling hundreds of tags a day, we’re just never going to have time to check the works on all tags.

Even worse, “Human Peter” can (and has) been used by multiple people to mean different Peters. We can’t edit tags, so we can’t fix that. The tag will simply become unuseable. Human Peter Hale or Human Peter Quill, those are wrangleable tags! Human Peter, not so much.

This post explains the Peter problem in detail. (This one is funnier and shows the problem visually.) This post shows how the wrangulator works on the back end. And this post suggests how to make life easier for tag wranglers in general.

If anyone has questions about how tags work or needs help with deciding how to tag, my asks are open!
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[tumblr.com profile] ao3tagoftheday[Image Description: Tag reading “don’t be mean to the tag wranglers”]

The AO3 Tag of the Day is: Seriously though


#we love you tag wranglers!

Aw, this is so sweet! Thank you! <3

Being kind to tag wranglers in one’s tagging is a little different than most people might expect on first glance. Here’s a list of things that are hard or easy to wrangle, and here’s an explanation of why sarcasm or irony in tags doesn’t work out well (please save it for your summary or notes). You can also be a pro at tagging OCs, remember to be unambiguous (in fandoms and in character names, regardless of category), and separate your RPF from your FPF and your platonic ships from your romantic/sexual/pining ships. All of these things are kindnesses we really appreciate, often even pointing them out to each other with hearteyes.

We’re wrangling around 200K tags a month right now - we need all the kindness we can get! (And so do the coders!)
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Did you know that… you can use the tag search on AO3 to find all the relationship or freeform tags relating to your favorite character, just by typing in their name and choosing “Relationships” or “Freeforms” from the menu? You can even decide if you want ALL THE TAGS or just canonicals.

#search is speedy
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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
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Did you know that… you can set yourself to always see entire works on AO3 whenever you’re logged in? Just go to your user page, select “Preferences”, scroll down to “Display”, check “Show whole work by default”, and press “Update”.

#no more panic when you can’t get that last chapter to load
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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
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Did you know that… the maximum number of characters per tag (including spaces) is 100?

#try entering your favorite ot8 relationship and see
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Subtracting a tag from search results on AO3

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.
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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

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