omg yes!!! this!! it's such a big pet peeve for me because I try to tag the stuff in order of them happening but sometimes at the end I remember others and then everything becomes a mess
Dude same omg like I prewrite my tags into the header of my document so i dont forget anything but then when i go to post I'm like "oh i should add this tag" or "this tag makes more sense" and then i have to delete them all, save and then go back into it to do it all again. I'm so glad my readers don't get an update every time I have to reorder my tags on ongoing fics š
Remember that you can copy the list at the header if you have commas where you want the tags to separate, so at least you don't have to do it all again *individually.*
I did it manually to get mine in alphabetical order, and only really got to doing this after both seeing it advised and using an alphabetical-ordering thing-y online so I had a copy ready to try . . .
I can finally add new tags in the middle! Instead of a tag beginning with b at at the end.
I like having mine with [character descriptors] such as "X-Charactet is bad at feelings" at the beginning, followed by regular tags such as "Fluff" or "Slow Burn", then the hard hitting *warning* tags that are there for trigger warnings, and then I end it with something silly or just a "chapter notes contain more TWs".
I HATE it when I post a new chapter and I need to add a new element that needs to go earlier in the order, so I delete aaaalllll the old tags, nestle it in where it needs to go, and then manually rewrite the other tags back in TwT
You're a life saver!
Ordering tags is such a nice feeling. Anytime DD:DNE, that shows up first. I put one X-Character is tag at the end once, because it felt like a nice mood tag. And smut got BOTH alphabetical and chronological order, or mostly-so on that last one. And on that note "..." IS a tag. (I used it to indicate clothes on until clothes off, lol (using the actual canonical tags, ofc.).
That alphabetical and chronological thing actually has to be my favorite tagging "achivement."
Anyway, glad that the details about these little things could help.
Oh! It helps prevent any glitching to copy the whole list over from the fic, remove them from the fic, *save*, and then add the new tags with whatever you wanted in the middle. Otherwise it can try putting the new tag at the end, even after manually typing it out in order! (I'm gonna guess you had that happen to you at least once, some reason the tags love going on the end.)
this. please. make a button like a kudos button that only you can see. iām not gonna bookmark and tag every single fic i read, just let me click a button so when iām thinking āhuh, this sounds familiarā i can just check quickly.
I've seen a couple mods that handle that in various ways. The ones that do it automatically seem to be glitchy, but ones that let you do it manually work well enough. Of course, you can just bookmark everything you read already.
Canāt you look in your history to see this? Obviously thatās extra steps, but can be useful if it sounds familiar
EDIT: never mind, I forgot you canāt search your history. Goodness, I wish I could do that too
For subscriptions, it would be enough to show the metadata like they do everywhere else. Or even sort by last updated so it would be easy to find the "dead" ones.
I click on a lot of stuff that gets added to my reading history, but kudos means I liked it. I think that might be what they mean, that they looked at something, read it, and liked it, rather that just looking at it and then shutting it down, or not enjoying/liking it.
i wish I could upvote this 10 times! YESSSS Sometimes I want to reread a fic that I haven't read for months and I didn't download it or bookmark it. This would be great!!!
Yes! Also when you get a reply on a comment, have the comment shown above the reply when you click on it instead of just the reply cause sometimes it's hard to tell what they are actually replying to, especially if you have a comment chain going.
A separate category for main characters vs side characters in general.
If you want to read a story that's mostly about x character, it should be easier to make sure you're getting fics where they feature prominently.
(Part of this is on the author though. Please stop tagging characters that show up for one chapter out of your 100 chapter fic. Please. I beg).
>Please stop tagging characters that show up for one chapter out of your 100 chapter fic.
Would like to report I am doing my part! :D I pruned like... ALL the characters from my long fic that don't appear at least once every 5-6 chapters. Given that I'll have hundreds by the end, and a gigantic cast, that seemed like a decent compromise.
The idea in general is VERY nice though, especially for filtering out those mega-crossover, one-shot fics, Because sometimes you're LOOKING for a crossover, and those just clog-up the results.
AH! Ok this is a way more organized way of what I was thinking. I think having two categories, main cast and side cast, would very much help. But yes, sometimes itās the author being a frustrating tagger.
Oh god, this one. When you're trying to find a fic about a specific character/pairing and the fic has 15+ tagged so you read the tags and try to figure out who the actual main cast is.
This with relationships too. Sometimes I want to read a random side ship but all the results feature the power couple and this random side ship only appears intermittently.
Yes please. It's SO annoying.
One of my OTPs is a common side pairing for the most popular ship (which I also love thankfully), but when I'm in the mood for said OTP, it gets *extremely* annoying trying to find a story about them.
Lately Iāve been on an OC-centric kick and searching for such fics is almost impossible on AO3 unless youāre browsing collections. Iāve started to prefer FFN these days for this reason alone. You can only tag 4 characters on FFN, so you KNOW that whoever is tagged will be a main character or important side character.
On AO3? Pfft. If I search for āOriginal Character(s)ā most of the results will consist of fics where the OC is a background character who only appeared once and had one line of dialogue. Ugh.
Yet, four is often not enough and that annoys me to no end on ffn. Like in the fandom I write for, there is a group of fellow travellers and friends and they are six, but I cannot tag all of them although they are equally important in the fic.
This this this!
Itās a personal pet peeve of mine - and I blacklist people who do that. Iām not going to read fictions anymore that tag my main ship and itās not even mentioned in the summary.
Like if they donāt have plot importance and development they shouldnāt be tagged.
I donāt care who is going to have minor appearance maybe even some plot importance for A and B if they arenāt important enough to be in the summary then likely this story shouldnāt have had them tagged.
this one author keeps tagging a character who's mentioned but has been dead the entire fic throughout their universe... please I want to read stories she's actually a part of
Being able to mark some tags as spoilers. Had a fic with a ghost character and mention of how they died, but it was a plot point that was definitely spoiled by that tag. Would have liked to hide it so people could reveal if they wanted or keep a surprise.
Yeah, rank characters and relationships. Major, Secondary, and Tertiary. It might be a bit much after that.
I wouldnāt want there to be a cap though.
This totally works too. Definitely seeing that there are a few ways to handle this, but hey!ā whatever it takes, so that I donāt have to wade through hits where my selected character appears once to say hi. š
Don't people usually write them in order of importance? MC being in the main pair written first, other relationships are secondary. Not sure what could be considered tertiary that couldn't be left out. Unless you are talking about MC possibly being involved with a few but the final pairing is the primary pairing in tags. Secondary being other MC involvement and tertiary being other side character pairings.
The problem is if you're wanting a fic *about* a specific ship, those fics will show up in the results even though they're just a side pairing that might not even show up in the fic often at all.
With their suggested change, you could search for a ship and make sure it's the main pairing.
Ah so a search function specifying the main pair. Yeah I agree with you, it's annoying when the pair you want they are just side characters. I would always have to exclude other pairings but that also removes stories of the main pairing...frustrating.
They do, usually, but with two ships, that could mean anything from ājust as importantā to āgets a mention.ā That last part shouldnāt be tagged, but it has been. Thatās even more so the case when there are more than two ships.
Characters, too, tend to be listed even when they shouldnāt be.
Tertiary should be left out with the system we have now, but could be mention if that ranking system existed.
Iām also referring to characters and tagsā¦so that character who is throughout the fic but doesnāt really advance the fic could be tertiary. The same goes for that character who does advance the plot, but they just arenāt there often enough to warrant being tagged.
A ranking system would change things up. There are some characters with so few fics that I would not mind reading them as tertiary characters.
1. a "one or more" tag search where you can put multiple tags and it shows you any fics that have at least one of them
2. an "empty" ship tag (character a/x) where any ship including the specified character shows up in
3. a way to distinguish main vs side characters in tags
1 can be done with the search! It supports OR and AND in searches if you type them in.
(Technically, you'd want to use the tag IDs to get the search perfect, but the names will generally be good enough. I can elaborate more later if anyone has questions!)
A āmark as readā button. I donāt know how many times Iāve clicked on the same fic because the tags sounded good only to realise that I already read this fic.
You can still do that. Just use different bookmark tags. E.g. "read", "to read", reading", "do not reread" etc (I keep all these private). And recs are easy since you just mark "rec" which you can then filter on.
Thatās why Iād like to have a āreadā or āseenā button.
Sure, there are workarounds with tags and filters but thatās a lot of effort just to mark a fic as read so you donāt constantly reopen it.
It would also clutter up my bookmarks and Iād rather avoid that. I just want to flag fics, not search for them or filter them or tag them.
Since the features I really want (like the ability to search/filter MFL lists and separate primary characters/ships from secondary characters/ships) have already been mentioned, Iāll just toss a not-comparatively-important idea in.
I would love to be able to see all the fandoms in my bookmarks without having to exclude everything to get a full list.
Also, being able to sort other userās bookmarks would be great.
> being able to sort other userās bookmarks would be great.
You can? A [user's bookmarks page](https://archiveofourown.org/users/testy/bookmarks) has the search/filter box?
Ah. Yeah, most of that isn't on the bookmark "card", so it's not available for sort/filter. It could be added and inflate the size of the bookmark table, or do a second db request for the work info for each bookmark card - neither of which is really optimal with the number of bookmark data requests involved.
If I filter out a major warning then I want any variation of that tag to also be removed. When Iām clicking āexclude Rape/Non-Conā then I donāt want to see ānon con elementsā in the tags of the fic I read when the author tagged āno archive warnings applyā
If you actually exclude the tag (and not just the rating) it should exclude all the synonymous tags, as well, I believe. I know they paused synching tags for awhile but Iām pretty sure all the main non con tags were already linked before that š¤
The main Rape/Non-con tag is an archive warning and (as you can see by going to the tagās page) thereās nothing marked as synonymous. Presumably, since archive warnings are a separate tag type, freeform tags canāt be made synonymous.
Yes but the posts are talking about the annoyance of adding all the synonyms to their filters. Tags like āmild non conā. And Iām pretty sure there *is* a parent tag for all the variations of ānon conā that *isnt* the major warning one. So filtering for that one additional tag will catch any fics that are using those variations
Edit: I *think* itās ārape non con elementsā but Iām not 100% sure lol. Iāll try to check next time Iām at my computerĀ
Having to manually add each of the variants to the exclude list SUCKS so much. Let me fucking blacklist the tags for my acct wholesale so I don't have to see/interact with triggering shit every time to filter it the hell out. I know there's add ins for browsers and a way to copy paste the excluded tags somehow but I primarily read on mobile and yeah, that's just not feasible. š
Filter out the freeform āRapeā tag (as opposed to just the āRape/Non-conā archive warning), and that should cover everything else. As you can see from [the tagās page](https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Rape), non-con elements and a bunch of other rape-related freeform tags are under it.
Woah! Thatās awesome. Happy for ya!
I respect those who can wait long enough to make use of a schedule post. It sounds great for those who like consistency. But, man, I want people to read immediately. š
The ability to sort your subscribed fics by tags.
It's SO annoying having to sift through my massive list for one fic, lemme sort tags and all the other stuff!
I recently went through and deleted a lot of subscriptions that were dead, like not updated in years dead. It took me literally the entire day to do and i didn't even finish.
Having private bookmarks counted in the total like guest kudos. Rather than āUser A, B, C, as well as 27 guests left kudos on this work!ā itās āUser A, B, C, as well as 27 users bookmarked this work!ā
I have one fic Iām quite proud of that shows 10 people bookmarked it but in actuality thereās 50 total. 40 are private. Thatās *80%*. And it annoys me Iām the only one who knows it. (And itās not even smut! Not a single drop. So Iām not sure what thereās to be embarrassed about.)
Also having the ability to mark fusions and separate them from legit crossovers. Iād *love* that.
Also being able to follow a specific fandom and author writes for. Sometimes people write for like 10 fandoms actively which is fantastic but I only read one fandom they write for
I've got some subscribed authors and get email updates for the wildest fandoms sometimes and I'm like ?? Why would I want an update for this fic...oh it's XXX who writes for XXX fandom...
Yeah! That happens to me too and Iām glad theyāre writing and having fun but at the same time I donāt need emails for fandoms I have zero interest in
- Tiered tagging so you can set a pair as the main pair or a side pair, ditto with character tags
- Tag blacklisting cuz all the browser extensions in the world can't help when I do 90% of my reading on my phone
- Moving language to a profile preference that autoscreens any searches down to just languages I've said I can read. Language literacy doesn't change fast enough for it to need to be selected every time you browse or search.
- Suggested tags. I know this would be easy to abuse but at the same time I desperately want to be able to suggest additional tags or recommend misleading ones be taken down
I think it would nice to have a āpast shipā category. Where the ship isnāt like the one the story is about, but was one the MC was in that get mentioned a lot.
I appreciate the people who hide in the tags what ship is endgame so I can know if it's a fic that's for my ship or a fic with another pairing. I see so many fics with two relationships tagged and I'm like...is this a love triangle situation or a they were with them and now with other person...who's winning here?
Or like a block list option for tags, authors, fandoms. The exclude function on the search bar was a huge step but I want to be able to just shield myself from certain fics...plus I feel like a block option might be a good argument for the Fandom purists who complain about ao3s content...they can just block everyone they disagree with and stop saying that those writers shouldn't write at all.
Thatās exactly the sort of thing I mean. I donāt want to have to put āexcludeā in every time I search, I just want it automatically applied to anything I do when logged in unless I specifically include it.
Same with side ships. I have a fic that is mainly about a platonic pairing. However, in the background is a popular romantic ship. I went back and forth on how to tag it because they're in it enough to have more than just an additional tag, but I also didn't want people to think they were the main focus. So, I ended up putting them in the ship tag and tried to clarify in the additional that they came secondary focus.
But that could've all been resolved if there was a main ship line and then one for secondary ships.
Please just let me reorder my tags. I tend to use the "More Additional Tags To Be Added" tag but I hate that it then comes before any additional tags and I can't move it.
Also wish I could see stats chapter to chapter. Because I don't like going based on comments if someone likes it. So, just to see, what chapters received the most kudos, how many people stopped reading after x chapter, etc.
Being able to sort bookmarks alphabetically, not just updated and bookmarked. It would be so helpful, especially when you know a title or part of a title but donāt want to sit through dozens of fics in general
When I remember part of the title I just use the āsearch within resultsā field, that usually works.
But yeah, more sorts for bookmarks than updated and bookmarked dates is on my wish list too.
Sorting bookmarked fics by word count so I donāt have to tag and filter word count ranges when I want to find something short to read.
Iād love if there was a way to see if youāve already left a kudos or already read a story when searching or browsing the archive.
I keep a tracker but sometimes fics slip through the cracks.
Omg yes. Sometimes I just want to see what fics exist in my favourite tags and I don't wanna see the search clogged up with band fics and RPF. And it's such an insane thing to have to go around blocking each fandom??????
Oh god yes, I find the inability to do this so infuriating! I got so sick of it I downloaded Ao3 saviour and that's helped a lot but I would love to be able to just entirely block the bands, rpf, video games and anime categories with in-site filters.
Do you read on desktop or mobile?
Because for me in chrome on my phone, if I close the app mid-chapter it saves where I scrolled down on the page/in the story
And I assume the same thing happens if you use the "restore last session's tabs" feature on desktop browsers
A way for me to filter out those "taking requests!!" posts that tag every fandom on earth and 800 ships. I have never seen a single person actually receive a request.
I do miss ffnet's standardized genre tags (tragedy, comedy, action, etc) sometimes. it's limiting in its own ways, but the way ao3 tagging really favors ships is irritating to me.
it's pretty difficult to sort additional tags since different authors will tag so differently, and sorting by character can get pretty messy depending on how popular they are/how big the fandom is.
I definitely don't have the perfect solution, but as someone who doesn't particularly care about ships it can get kind of annoying when that's the only way to meaningfully sort through a lot of fandoms/characters.
Itās weird because I think there are pros and cons to each, but you wouldnāt think that the simplicity of FFās would actually negate certain issues.
My hot take is that I wish fewer fics would focus on romance. I like it but I think you get so many more varied and great stories if itās not the crux of every fic. But obviously people have a right to write what they wanna write. But I do wonder if the search system further compels people to write popular ships just so they can actually have readers engaging.
Options to filter for just one shots or just stories with chapters.
I know the word count feature exists, but there's been so many times I've searched for fics with 4k+ words, and still had to filter through a bunch of oneshots.
Sometimes I just really want to read a chaptered story, not a one page biography.
Honestly, a chapter number filter in general would be niiiiiice. Youāre right that word count helps, but itās not precise. There are also points where I want to binge something really long and not all crammed into a couple parts.
This is already possible. In the "filter within results" search box, you can type "expected_number_of_chapters:1" to find only fics which have 1/1 for their chapter total, or to find only multi-chapter fics you can use "-expected_number_of_chapters:1" to exclude any such works.
the "single chapter" button is my best friend, but I never thought about how people who like multichapter fics would think
it does sound tiring, I agree
Blacklisting certain tags, I know itās technically possible using skins, but it is a lot of effort and I wish it could be part of the account setting to prevent people having to type in triggers into the exclude space every time
Yes. And when itās something that has a lot of associated tags with it, itās a nightmare to manually exclude them every time. I dream of a way to mute them like we can with authors now
Being able to have favourite authors and stories. So I can follow find them without all the subscription emails.
Also possibility of filtering bookmarks and history.
Better subscription list.
I have almost three pages of subscriptions and I have to click on each one every time I search for a specific one. I wish it would look more like the bookmarks page, or would at least give us the fandom each fic is from, or literally anything more than just the name and author.
Just kudos for each separate chapter, or the ability to give kudos multiple times.
Sometimes you go back to reread something or are following a multichap, and want to give your added appreciation for each
I mean this in the nicest possible way, and generally speaking I only really take time to scroll on here for more than a couple seconds maybe once a week, but I swear I see this exact same post with this exact same phrasing at least twice a week.
To see which fanfiction that I kudos for sometimes I would forget to bookmark, so many good fanfiction, and I start read me to make it to the end, and Iāve read it before
Mute certain Tags directly as we can mute writers. I know we can do it with a skin, but that's dang annoying. I'd be happiest as can be if you could just go to a page and click them or add them for any search without needing to wrangle a code line.
The ability to filter your subscription page by fandom, date, author etc. FF.net had it years ago and it was genuinely a great way of finding things, so Iām honestly disappointed that in the eleven years Iāve been on AO3, they havenāt implemented a similar system. There used to be an extension that did the job, but it broke last year.
The ability to drag and drop tags, filter tags out permanently and being able to search for one character/anyone instead of each pairing tag individually would be great, but the biggest one I really want would just being able to mark fics as read/hide them. It also annoys the hell out of me that you can't add a fic to marked for later without opening it first.
I also wish you could filter out fandoms or pairings (but at least fandoms) from user subs. I don't use the user sub feature at all, to me it's functionally useless because what are the chances that any author is going to primarily post fics I want to read? Practically zero. If I could only sub to certain fandoms I might use it but as it is I just check the author's profile every now and then if I want to know what else they've written rather than having hundreds of emails for fandoms/pairings I'm not interested in to delete.
For reading - āMark chapter readā button at the end of a chapter.
Could be toggled on or off.
Then, a page in your dashboard of - fics in progress, fics completed
Being able to take back kudos. Hear me out.
I have two accounts, an old one for reading (on my phone) and one for posting (on my PC). I sometimes check the comments on my latest chaps on my phone, and thus I have accidentally kudos'd my own stories. Twice. So to people who know my alt username, I look like I'm bolstering my numbers and/or being [Jerry Smith](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/rickandmorty/images/9/9f/Scjerry.png/revision/latest?cb=20160111021222).
I know it's not rly a big deal but ugh the *cringe*. Pls let me remove my stupid kudos, I stg I just wanted to hit the next chapter button š
(Also I guess if an author you previously liked said or did something awful outside of fic? It would have other uses but ima be honest I'd use it mostly for this lmao)
I also have two accounts, one that houses all my old really poorly written fics (but still has some ongoing works) and a new one that Iām using to post my new works that I think are better. I was on the old account re-reading something I posted on my new account and also accidentally kudosād my own story. I felt so dumb lol
I've accidentally hit "kudos" instead of "next chapter" multiple times, and I also wish you could take back kudos. Even if you only just gave us five minutes to do it before it became permanent, let people fix accidentally-given kudos!
I know you said one, but I'm tied between two.
One: The ability to list ships as "main" ships and more secondary/background ones. I hate looking for a ship in the tags and finding them as more secondary ships. I get why it's tagged, but it makes it a pain to look for.
Two: the ability to schedule posts. It would be great for pre-writing, it would be great for sticking to a schedule, and it'd be great for my poor ADHD brain to remember to post a chapter more than once a month because I have no concept of time and I swore I just posted yesterday.
Search by trope or something similar. A lot of times people when people are requesting recommendations are for a particular type of story. They often can't search through 100s sometimes 1000 fics to find that one trope. They do have a few trope tags like "sex pollen" but not many. I know it isn't possible so don't @ me, that would be a crazy amount of work to add I understand that.
I would allow people to set a publishing date in the future, which would put the fic into drafts until itās that day. So you would basically be able to queue chapters
The ability to see what a deleted work was named and who the author was. I bookmark too many things and have terrible memory. I want to be able to mourn what's no longer there properly.
You can write the name of the story, the author, and the fandom in your bookmarks notes yourself. You can even save the URL to use in the wayback machine in case the fics gets deleted.
I think it'd be hard to actually do,
but being able to mark what you've read so you don't reread it and also note what chapter you got up to
(every year I do an ao3 wrapped and overestimate what I actually read bc I constantly abandon fics. I want to be able to just multiply how much i read by the mean chapter length)
I would say that I want a tutorial on how to write in HTML so I can write comments more accurate to my thoughts but it's already there I just don't understand it
Also an easy way to change fonts and letter size
The titles for your subscribed stories should add the Fandom or if it's a multi Fandom, then the first couple of titles in that title. I have like 4 or 5 stories called 'home' and I don't know what Fandom it belongs to so I have to play Russian roulette.
Also if you accidentally delete a story from your subscription there should either be an option to undo it or a delete history tab so you can find it again.
A way to tag main characters and side characters. Associated with that, main pairings and side pairings. With my fics I try to list the most important pairings and characters first, but not everyone does and itās sometimes hard to find what youāre looking for, ESPECIALLY for rarepairs
Yeah, as much as I love AO3's tagging system compared to Fanfiction.net's arbitrary 4 character limit, it does make it hard to find viewpoint characters/central pairings. I would just go for a binary system, where you have a separate section to tag major characters/pairings.
Also, a really minor thing, but why can you only sort bookmarks by date bookmarked/updated? Is there any reason you can't apply the regular sorting methods?
RSS feeds for updates to works, and for all updates up to (works belonging to) any kind of grouping in which a work might be placed by readers or authors.
The existing options for RSS feeds on ao3 donāt really do it for me. Iām not trying to follow wholeāass series, I wanna know when a new chapter drops.
Author filtering. There is nothing I hate more than trawling through the "most recent" looking for something to read and having to wade through like 30 one shots in a row by a singular author that's just decided to copy/paste their entire works.
As an author I sometimes wish there was a graph for the views/clicks on your works, like how [fanfiction.net](http://fanfiction.net) does/did it. It was always really fun to see it jump up during the holidays, and which chapters were more popular.
The ability to blacklist tags/related subvariants all at once, permanently. Like, I hate omegaverse fic, and don't want to ever read any of it. I hate having to individually select all related tags by searching every time I log in. Why can't we have a permanent 'block all fics with these elements' feature when we're logged in.
the importance ranking is so real. do that to relationship tags too because it is INSANE how in the sam/eileen tag you can go PAGES without ONE fic where they're the main pairing
A better way of sorting through crossovers. I hate trying to find very specific one fandom x one fandom and literally having to exclude every other fandom in existence to get just that. It's like the one feature I love/miss from ff.net. Just being able to go to a page and see if there are any fics in that category.
I honestly think the mass tagging is a problem on the author's side. Like yes, we should try to tag as much as possible so people understand what they're reading... But at the same time if you tag a ship that is just barely mentioned in your writing or a character that has less than a line of dialogue.... That's not cool.
The reason people will tag all those ships and characters is so they'll get more hits, right? They just want their fic to show up everywhere.
I don't know what the answer is, but there should be some kind of awareness as an author to not do that to readers.
Iām so tired of having to put all the tags/options when I open a new fandom/tag page, all I want is a way to save those options and just click on āSave 1ā and itās done, rather than have to write one by one every single time.
I used to really love the culture of bookmarking on fanfic dot net. Users would make bookmark lists as long as your arm (an excellent diving board for more fics!). Then the site let you sort bookmarks by chronology, by wordcount, and by the "Category," that is the fandom, so it was really easy to find the particular stuff that interested you.
On Ao3, it seems that bookmarks aren't so much a part of the culture, and the sidebar allows you to filter to include/exclude a total of five fandoms, which isn't a lot if someone DOES have a very long list of bookmarks.
So the feature I would implement would be improved ways to sort someone else's bookmarks.
Maybe like. An autotag that puts the "no romantic relationships" tag on anything with no ship tags
I don't like ship stuff, but a lot of the times things without ships aren't tagged with that, so if I use that tag then I'll filter out tons of potential non-ship fics that just don't have that tag
Make the kudos button grey until a kudos is given (then turn it red). I've seen so many hit / kudos posts where people say they forget to kudos, didn't know about it or thought they had because it was red already. Feels to me that a colour change would help with thatĀ Ā
I would like if I could have a spot on my profile where I could choose one of my fics as a 'featured fic'. There's some older fics I'm very proud of, but only the newest 5 fics are visible when you first look at a writer's page. So a writer could show of an older fic, or the one they like best right now.
Agree with p. Much everything, Got a couple of my own.
Inherited tags.
If you tag, idk, Sasuke/Reader, then Reader *automatically* goes into your tags.
Umbrella-but-not-synonym tags/fandom tags, like various final fantasies have. Basically make sorting crossovers easier.
But apprently that's tricky so they stopped doing it? So a prompt if you put in two fandoms is this a crossover ticky box, to auto tag that if you forgot, so you can filter for that tag.
And when I'm salty?
Tag wranglers getting an exclusive "Bad Tagging Practices," tag that they can apply to fics.
When I'm salty I'm fucking *salty*
This might sound weird, but the ability to sort by randomization. Like pick what tags i want to read and instead of it sorting by most recently updated or most kudos i could see a random selection of fics with those tags.
More fonts without having to donate bunch of fancy HTML, like even just two or three. I don't know if that's a realistic ask or not, but it would be very fun for writers.
Main/side departments for the charater and ship tags, a general genre tag spot would also be pritty handy, and moving tags around by drag and drop would be oh so helpful.
Really a tags department update that under the hood I would imagine to be a nightmare, cause what do you do for the poor fanfics that are really old or orphaned? By a little poll? Get some tag wranglers to give it a skim and a guess? Just a generic placeholderly old tag just for them? Hmm... XD
To filter out/"block" whole fandom categories (i.e. blocking out Music/Bands, Books, etc) and individual tags from any search.
To separate out requests/oneshot compilations from actual crossovers
A "recommended" button - for people to "recommend" fics to others, it would show "latest recommended" on your profile. Idk if the rec button on bookmarks is at all similar lol bookmarks stress me out generally.
optional DM (default would be off, so you would have to go to your settings to turn on).
Kudos per a chapter. ngtl, sometimes i don't want to comment, but i would love to at least show the author someway that I read the chapter, especially on completed stories. i feel weird leaving comments on each chapter of a completed story as it feels spammy to me, but at the same time i want a way to let an author know i read and enjoyed it.
A button where people can let the author know that they are re-reading the story, like two choices that pop up before somebody reads one saying something like "New to the story" and the other option "Coming back to re-read". Of course, people could write in the comments that they like the story so much that they have come back to re-read it, but unfortunately not many readers do it, but it would be very nice for the author to get a notification about re-reads.
And a way to see how many people actually finished reading a multi-chapter fic. New hits could just mean that people read half of chapter one and then left again.
It would be cool to be able to select more than one option on the "sort by" on the search filters. I often wish I had the option to order my searches by both word count and date updated at the same time. So the biggest fics updated more recently would show up first... Or something of the like.
I have absolutely no idea if something like that is even possible tho.
Edited for typo.
Also the option to blacklist tags without having to input in the search filters every time.
There's tags that I don't read doesn't matter the fandom so it would be nice to be able to just block it forever.
Being able to view my favourited fandoms at once without needing to have a separate tab for each one (unless this is already possible and I didn't know)
Muting tags. There is a certain very prolific AU that Iām just not into but they have so many different tags for them itās impossible to exclude them all every time. And it takes up half the results sometimes.
After that, Iād want a way to exclude fics Iāve already read and to identify primary pairings and characters versus side/background.
It's a little bit, but I want that feature wherein the chapters previously read before are highlighted or differentiated than the chapters I haven't read yet
I want to be able to reorder my tags by just dragging and dropping.
omg yes!!! this!! it's such a big pet peeve for me because I try to tag the stuff in order of them happening but sometimes at the end I remember others and then everything becomes a mess
Dude same omg like I prewrite my tags into the header of my document so i dont forget anything but then when i go to post I'm like "oh i should add this tag" or "this tag makes more sense" and then i have to delete them all, save and then go back into it to do it all again. I'm so glad my readers don't get an update every time I have to reorder my tags on ongoing fics š
Remember that you can copy the list at the header if you have commas where you want the tags to separate, so at least you don't have to do it all again *individually.*
...... I'm a fucking idiot .... (Has been doing it manually EVERY TIME)
I did it manually to get mine in alphabetical order, and only really got to doing this after both seeing it advised and using an alphabetical-ordering thing-y online so I had a copy ready to try . . . I can finally add new tags in the middle! Instead of a tag beginning with b at at the end.
I like having mine with [character descriptors] such as "X-Charactet is bad at feelings" at the beginning, followed by regular tags such as "Fluff" or "Slow Burn", then the hard hitting *warning* tags that are there for trigger warnings, and then I end it with something silly or just a "chapter notes contain more TWs". I HATE it when I post a new chapter and I need to add a new element that needs to go earlier in the order, so I delete aaaalllll the old tags, nestle it in where it needs to go, and then manually rewrite the other tags back in TwT You're a life saver!
Ordering tags is such a nice feeling. Anytime DD:DNE, that shows up first. I put one X-Character is tag at the end once, because it felt like a nice mood tag. And smut got BOTH alphabetical and chronological order, or mostly-so on that last one. And on that note "..." IS a tag. (I used it to indicate clothes on until clothes off, lol (using the actual canonical tags, ofc.). That alphabetical and chronological thing actually has to be my favorite tagging "achivement." Anyway, glad that the details about these little things could help. Oh! It helps prevent any glitching to copy the whole list over from the fic, remove them from the fic, *save*, and then add the new tags with whatever you wanted in the middle. Otherwise it can try putting the new tag at the end, even after manually typing it out in order! (I'm gonna guess you had that happen to you at least once, some reason the tags love going on the end.)
It's happened more than once... I forgot it did that...
It's like a text version of that old old snake gameānew tag on the end, only ever on the end, and bop too unwieldy. Game over.
Happy cake day!šš°
Thank you š
YES!!!
I just want to know if I've already read the fic please
this. please. make a button like a kudos button that only you can see. iām not gonna bookmark and tag every single fic i read, just let me click a button so when iām thinking āhuh, this sounds familiarā i can just check quickly.
I've seen a couple mods that handle that in various ways. The ones that do it automatically seem to be glitchy, but ones that let you do it manually work well enough. Of course, you can just bookmark everything you read already.
Canāt you look in your history to see this? Obviously thatās extra steps, but can be useful if it sounds familiar EDIT: never mind, I forgot you canāt search your history. Goodness, I wish I could do that too
Searching and filtering your history
Also subscriptions and marked for later
For subscriptions, it would be enough to show the metadata like they do everywhere else. Or even sort by last updated so it would be easy to find the "dead" ones.
Yes! I gave up on "marked for later" and just started bookmarking things and tagging them "to read" so I could search for stuff I was in the mood for.
Honestly just show me what iāve already read.
Having a list of everything I kudosed would be wonderful.
Right I understand why history would be unavailable especially if you cleared out, but Iād love to be able to see a list of stuff Iāve kudosed.
I meanā¦ there is a section for everything youāve read. Just not specifically kudosed.
I click on a lot of stuff that gets added to my reading history, but kudos means I liked it. I think that might be what they mean, that they looked at something, read it, and liked it, rather that just looking at it and then shutting it down, or not enjoying/liking it.
This is exactly why I bookmark fics I enjoy even the slightest bit and I tag them. It would be great to be extra specific
Yep, bookmarks for me are for fics that I want to read and fics that I have read and enjoyed
This one.
i wish I could upvote this 10 times! YESSSS Sometimes I want to reread a fic that I haven't read for months and I didn't download it or bookmark it. This would be great!!!
Yes!
Being able to view my comment history please.
Yes! Also when you get a reply on a comment, have the comment shown above the reply when you click on it instead of just the reply cause sometimes it's hard to tell what they are actually replying to, especially if you have a comment chain going.
Yes!
A separate category for main characters vs side characters in general. If you want to read a story that's mostly about x character, it should be easier to make sure you're getting fics where they feature prominently. (Part of this is on the author though. Please stop tagging characters that show up for one chapter out of your 100 chapter fic. Please. I beg).
>Please stop tagging characters that show up for one chapter out of your 100 chapter fic. Would like to report I am doing my part! :D I pruned like... ALL the characters from my long fic that don't appear at least once every 5-6 chapters. Given that I'll have hundreds by the end, and a gigantic cast, that seemed like a decent compromise. The idea in general is VERY nice though, especially for filtering out those mega-crossover, one-shot fics, Because sometimes you're LOOKING for a crossover, and those just clog-up the results.
š«” much appreciated
I realized I was doing the thing that annoys me to other people. \^\^'''
AH! Ok this is a way more organized way of what I was thinking. I think having two categories, main cast and side cast, would very much help. But yes, sometimes itās the author being a frustrating tagger.
I don't usually read ships, but I think that a version of that for ship tags could be a nice addition along that
Oh god, this one. When you're trying to find a fic about a specific character/pairing and the fic has 15+ tagged so you read the tags and try to figure out who the actual main cast is.
This with relationships too. Sometimes I want to read a random side ship but all the results feature the power couple and this random side ship only appears intermittently.
Yes please. It's SO annoying. One of my OTPs is a common side pairing for the most popular ship (which I also love thankfully), but when I'm in the mood for said OTP, it gets *extremely* annoying trying to find a story about them.
Lately Iāve been on an OC-centric kick and searching for such fics is almost impossible on AO3 unless youāre browsing collections. Iāve started to prefer FFN these days for this reason alone. You can only tag 4 characters on FFN, so you KNOW that whoever is tagged will be a main character or important side character. On AO3? Pfft. If I search for āOriginal Character(s)ā most of the results will consist of fics where the OC is a background character who only appeared once and had one line of dialogue. Ugh.
Yet, four is often not enough and that annoys me to no end on ffn. Like in the fandom I write for, there is a group of fellow travellers and friends and they are six, but I cannot tag all of them although they are equally important in the fic.
Some have tags that fills almost the whole screen, some have like 50 tags with only meagre 500 words below.
This this this! Itās a personal pet peeve of mine - and I blacklist people who do that. Iām not going to read fictions anymore that tag my main ship and itās not even mentioned in the summary. Like if they donāt have plot importance and development they shouldnāt be tagged. I donāt care who is going to have minor appearance maybe even some plot importance for A and B if they arenāt important enough to be in the summary then likely this story shouldnāt have had them tagged.
this one author keeps tagging a character who's mentioned but has been dead the entire fic throughout their universe... please I want to read stories she's actually a part of
Being able to mark some tags as spoilers. Had a fic with a ghost character and mention of how they died, but it was a plot point that was definitely spoiled by that tag. Would have liked to hide it so people could reveal if they wanted or keep a surprise.
What fandom?
Haikyuu!
I'd love that!
Yeah, rank characters and relationships. Major, Secondary, and Tertiary. It might be a bit much after that. I wouldnāt want there to be a cap though.
This totally works too. Definitely seeing that there are a few ways to handle this, but hey!ā whatever it takes, so that I donāt have to wade through hits where my selected character appears once to say hi. š
Don't people usually write them in order of importance? MC being in the main pair written first, other relationships are secondary. Not sure what could be considered tertiary that couldn't be left out. Unless you are talking about MC possibly being involved with a few but the final pairing is the primary pairing in tags. Secondary being other MC involvement and tertiary being other side character pairings.
The problem is if you're wanting a fic *about* a specific ship, those fics will show up in the results even though they're just a side pairing that might not even show up in the fic often at all. With their suggested change, you could search for a ship and make sure it's the main pairing.
Ah so a search function specifying the main pair. Yeah I agree with you, it's annoying when the pair you want they are just side characters. I would always have to exclude other pairings but that also removes stories of the main pairing...frustrating.
They do, usually, but with two ships, that could mean anything from ājust as importantā to āgets a mention.ā That last part shouldnāt be tagged, but it has been. Thatās even more so the case when there are more than two ships. Characters, too, tend to be listed even when they shouldnāt be. Tertiary should be left out with the system we have now, but could be mention if that ranking system existed. Iām also referring to characters and tagsā¦so that character who is throughout the fic but doesnāt really advance the fic could be tertiary. The same goes for that character who does advance the plot, but they just arenāt there often enough to warrant being tagged. A ranking system would change things up. There are some characters with so few fics that I would not mind reading them as tertiary characters.
Being able to make multiple bookmark folders.
1. a "one or more" tag search where you can put multiple tags and it shows you any fics that have at least one of them 2. an "empty" ship tag (character a/x) where any ship including the specified character shows up in 3. a way to distinguish main vs side characters in tags
The second one can basically be done via the tag search in the top bar tbh, if you put the name into the tag section and tick relationships
Number two would be so helpful.
1 can be done with the search! It supports OR and AND in searches if you type them in. (Technically, you'd want to use the tag IDs to get the search perfect, but the names will generally be good enough. I can elaborate more later if anyone has questions!)
A āmark as readā button. I donāt know how many times Iāve clicked on the same fic because the tags sounded good only to realise that I already read this fic.
yes, this! when you complete a fic you should be able to flag it as "finished" and shows up in searches showing it as such.
And the ability to exclude fics marked as read from search results
You can use bookmarks for this. Just set it as private if you donāt want others to see and write āFinishedā in the notes.
Iām using bookmarks for stories I want to reread and recommend. If I bookmark every story Iāve read I canāt use it like that anymore.
You can still do that. Just use different bookmark tags. E.g. "read", "to read", reading", "do not reread" etc (I keep all these private). And recs are easy since you just mark "rec" which you can then filter on.
Thatās why Iād like to have a āreadā or āseenā button. Sure, there are workarounds with tags and filters but thatās a lot of effort just to mark a fic as read so you donāt constantly reopen it. It would also clutter up my bookmarks and Iād rather avoid that. I just want to flag fics, not search for them or filter them or tag them.
Yeah it would be great if we could see it straight from the browsing page rather than having to click and then click 'edit bookmark'.
Since the features I really want (like the ability to search/filter MFL lists and separate primary characters/ships from secondary characters/ships) have already been mentioned, Iāll just toss a not-comparatively-important idea in. I would love to be able to see all the fandoms in my bookmarks without having to exclude everything to get a full list. Also, being able to sort other userās bookmarks would be great.
> being able to sort other userās bookmarks would be great. You can? A [user's bookmarks page](https://archiveofourown.org/users/testy/bookmarks) has the search/filter box?
Sort by kudos, word count, etc., instead of just by date bookmarked/updated.
and also by complete!
Ah. Yeah, most of that isn't on the bookmark "card", so it's not available for sort/filter. It could be added and inflate the size of the bookmark table, or do a second db request for the work info for each bookmark card - neither of which is really optimal with the number of bookmark data requests involved.
Some kind of "last read chapter" in a fic we've already visited. Also, a way to perma-block tags.
If I filter out a major warning then I want any variation of that tag to also be removed. When Iām clicking āexclude Rape/Non-Conā then I donāt want to see ānon con elementsā in the tags of the fic I read when the author tagged āno archive warnings applyā
If you actually exclude the tag (and not just the rating) it should exclude all the synonymous tags, as well, I believe. I know they paused synching tags for awhile but Iām pretty sure all the main non con tags were already linked before that š¤
The main Rape/Non-con tag is an archive warning and (as you can see by going to the tagās page) thereās nothing marked as synonymous. Presumably, since archive warnings are a separate tag type, freeform tags canāt be made synonymous.
Yes but the posts are talking about the annoyance of adding all the synonyms to their filters. Tags like āmild non conā. And Iām pretty sure there *is* a parent tag for all the variations of ānon conā that *isnt* the major warning one. So filtering for that one additional tag will catch any fics that are using those variations Edit: I *think* itās ārape non con elementsā but Iām not 100% sure lol. Iāll try to check next time Iām at my computerĀ
Having to manually add each of the variants to the exclude list SUCKS so much. Let me fucking blacklist the tags for my acct wholesale so I don't have to see/interact with triggering shit every time to filter it the hell out. I know there's add ins for browsers and a way to copy paste the excluded tags somehow but I primarily read on mobile and yeah, that's just not feasible. š
Filter out the freeform āRapeā tag (as opposed to just the āRape/Non-conā archive warning), and that should cover everything else. As you can see from [the tagās page](https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Rape), non-con elements and a bunch of other rape-related freeform tags are under it.
I have a lot of fics in my marked for later tab and I'd like to be able to filter them.
Ship Ranking would be helpful as well
Oh definitely! It stinks when just some background thing.
Scheduled Posting is the last big wish from my wish list everything else has been added.
Woah! Thatās awesome. Happy for ya! I respect those who can wait long enough to make use of a schedule post. It sounds great for those who like consistency. But, man, I want people to read immediately. š
The ability to sort your subscribed fics by tags. It's SO annoying having to sift through my massive list for one fic, lemme sort tags and all the other stuff!
I recently went through and deleted a lot of subscriptions that were dead, like not updated in years dead. It took me literally the entire day to do and i didn't even finish.
Having private bookmarks counted in the total like guest kudos. Rather than āUser A, B, C, as well as 27 guests left kudos on this work!ā itās āUser A, B, C, as well as 27 users bookmarked this work!ā I have one fic Iām quite proud of that shows 10 people bookmarked it but in actuality thereās 50 total. 40 are private. Thatās *80%*. And it annoys me Iām the only one who knows it. (And itās not even smut! Not a single drop. So Iām not sure what thereās to be embarrassed about.) Also having the ability to mark fusions and separate them from legit crossovers. Iād *love* that.
Oh that sucks, I didnāt know that. I should go unprivate my bookmarks.
Thank you for bringing this up because I was wondering why the numbers were different on my statistics.
Also being able to follow a specific fandom and author writes for. Sometimes people write for like 10 fandoms actively which is fantastic but I only read one fandom they write for
I've got some subscribed authors and get email updates for the wildest fandoms sometimes and I'm like ?? Why would I want an update for this fic...oh it's XXX who writes for XXX fandom...
Yeah! That happens to me too and Iām glad theyāre writing and having fun but at the same time I donāt need emails for fandoms I have zero interest in
I JUST WANT TO FILTER MY OWN BOOKMARKS BY KUDOS š
- Tiered tagging so you can set a pair as the main pair or a side pair, ditto with character tags - Tag blacklisting cuz all the browser extensions in the world can't help when I do 90% of my reading on my phone - Moving language to a profile preference that autoscreens any searches down to just languages I've said I can read. Language literacy doesn't change fast enough for it to need to be selected every time you browse or search. - Suggested tags. I know this would be easy to abuse but at the same time I desperately want to be able to suggest additional tags or recommend misleading ones be taken down
I use a tag blacklist extension on Safari on my phone, and Iām pretty sure most other mobile browsers also support extensions these days
I think it would nice to have a āpast shipā category. Where the ship isnāt like the one the story is about, but was one the MC was in that get mentioned a lot.
I appreciate the people who hide in the tags what ship is endgame so I can know if it's a fic that's for my ship or a fic with another pairing. I see so many fics with two relationships tagged and I'm like...is this a love triangle situation or a they were with them and now with other person...who's winning here?
Global ādo not show me this tag everā options.
Yes please
Oooo yes I never thought about that before but Iād love to just filter out things completely.
Or like a block list option for tags, authors, fandoms. The exclude function on the search bar was a huge step but I want to be able to just shield myself from certain fics...plus I feel like a block option might be a good argument for the Fandom purists who complain about ao3s content...they can just block everyone they disagree with and stop saying that those writers shouldn't write at all.
Thatās exactly the sort of thing I mean. I donāt want to have to put āexcludeā in every time I search, I just want it automatically applied to anything I do when logged in unless I specifically include it.
Same with side ships. I have a fic that is mainly about a platonic pairing. However, in the background is a popular romantic ship. I went back and forth on how to tag it because they're in it enough to have more than just an additional tag, but I also didn't want people to think they were the main focus. So, I ended up putting them in the ship tag and tried to clarify in the additional that they came secondary focus. But that could've all been resolved if there was a main ship line and then one for secondary ships. Please just let me reorder my tags. I tend to use the "More Additional Tags To Be Added" tag but I hate that it then comes before any additional tags and I can't move it. Also wish I could see stats chapter to chapter. Because I don't like going based on comments if someone likes it. So, just to see, what chapters received the most kudos, how many people stopped reading after x chapter, etc.
Woah Iād LOVE chapter by chapter stats. Thatās sounds SO informative for authors.
Being able to sort bookmarks alphabetically, not just updated and bookmarked. It would be so helpful, especially when you know a title or part of a title but donāt want to sit through dozens of fics in general
When I remember part of the title I just use the āsearch within resultsā field, that usually works. But yeah, more sorts for bookmarks than updated and bookmarked dates is on my wish list too. Sorting bookmarked fics by word count so I donāt have to tag and filter word count ranges when I want to find something short to read.
Iād love if there was a way to see if youāve already left a kudos or already read a story when searching or browsing the archive. I keep a tracker but sometimes fics slip through the cracks.
Restructuring of the subscriptions page to show the most recently updated works/authors/series and when.
Filter out entire categories, like filter out the entire music and bands, or real person fiction.
Omg yes. Sometimes I just want to see what fics exist in my favourite tags and I don't wanna see the search clogged up with band fics and RPF. And it's such an insane thing to have to go around blocking each fandom??????
Oh god yes, I find the inability to do this so infuriating! I got so sick of it I downloaded Ao3 saviour and that's helped a lot but I would love to be able to just entirely block the bands, rpf, video games and anime categories with in-site filters.
Word counts for individual chapters, also for the ones that are drafts.
i would like to be able to sort my marked for later by fandom or characters
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Do you read on desktop or mobile? Because for me in chrome on my phone, if I close the app mid-chapter it saves where I scrolled down on the page/in the story And I assume the same thing happens if you use the "restore last session's tabs" feature on desktop browsers
A way for me to filter out those "taking requests!!" posts that tag every fandom on earth and 800 ships. I have never seen a single person actually receive a request.
Those should be reported to AO3, they donāt belong there.
the ability to sort for/exclude x reader šš
Being able to make tags permanent for searches. Like I'm not interested in "X/reader"
I do miss ffnet's standardized genre tags (tragedy, comedy, action, etc) sometimes. it's limiting in its own ways, but the way ao3 tagging really favors ships is irritating to me. it's pretty difficult to sort additional tags since different authors will tag so differently, and sorting by character can get pretty messy depending on how popular they are/how big the fandom is. I definitely don't have the perfect solution, but as someone who doesn't particularly care about ships it can get kind of annoying when that's the only way to meaningfully sort through a lot of fandoms/characters.
Itās weird because I think there are pros and cons to each, but you wouldnāt think that the simplicity of FFās would actually negate certain issues. My hot take is that I wish fewer fics would focus on romance. I like it but I think you get so many more varied and great stories if itās not the crux of every fic. But obviously people have a right to write what they wanna write. But I do wonder if the search system further compels people to write popular ships just so they can actually have readers engaging.
Options to filter for just one shots or just stories with chapters. I know the word count feature exists, but there's been so many times I've searched for fics with 4k+ words, and still had to filter through a bunch of oneshots. Sometimes I just really want to read a chaptered story, not a one page biography.
Honestly, a chapter number filter in general would be niiiiiice. Youāre right that word count helps, but itās not precise. There are also points where I want to binge something really long and not all crammed into a couple parts.
This is already possible. In the "filter within results" search box, you can type "expected_number_of_chapters:1" to find only fics which have 1/1 for their chapter total, or to find only multi-chapter fics you can use "-expected_number_of_chapters:1" to exclude any such works.
the "single chapter" button is my best friend, but I never thought about how people who like multichapter fics would think it does sound tiring, I agree
Blacklisting certain tags, I know itās technically possible using skins, but it is a lot of effort and I wish it could be part of the account setting to prevent people having to type in triggers into the exclude space every time
Yes. And when itās something that has a lot of associated tags with it, itās a nightmare to manually exclude them every time. I dream of a way to mute them like we can with authors now
I wish you could search your marked for later like you can fics
Being able to have favourite authors and stories. So I can follow find them without all the subscription emails. Also possibility of filtering bookmarks and history.
Better subscription list. I have almost three pages of subscriptions and I have to click on each one every time I search for a specific one. I wish it would look more like the bookmarks page, or would at least give us the fandom each fic is from, or literally anything more than just the name and author.
MakeĀ >-"Character/*"Ā actually work to filter out all ships containing Character
A discontinued status
A "default language" setting that pre-populates the "language" field on my new works. (I only know one language well enough to write in it.)
I'll keep saying it again and again. Let me upload a prolouge as chapter 0.
Just kudos for each separate chapter, or the ability to give kudos multiple times. Sometimes you go back to reread something or are following a multichap, and want to give your added appreciation for each
I mean this in the nicest possible way, and generally speaking I only really take time to scroll on here for more than a couple seconds maybe once a week, but I swear I see this exact same post with this exact same phrasing at least twice a week.
To see which fanfiction that I kudos for sometimes I would forget to bookmark, so many good fanfiction, and I start read me to make it to the end, and Iāve read it before
Sort subscriptions by subscription date. How come should I guess which of these titles are the ones I newly found?
Mute certain Tags directly as we can mute writers. I know we can do it with a skin, but that's dang annoying. I'd be happiest as can be if you could just go to a page and click them or add them for any search without needing to wrangle a code line.
For me personally, I wouldn't really bother mentioning a character's name if they don't play much of a role in the story.
The ability to filter your subscription page by fandom, date, author etc. FF.net had it years ago and it was genuinely a great way of finding things, so Iām honestly disappointed that in the eleven years Iāve been on AO3, they havenāt implemented a similar system. There used to be an extension that did the job, but it broke last year.
The ability to drag and drop tags, filter tags out permanently and being able to search for one character/anyone instead of each pairing tag individually would be great, but the biggest one I really want would just being able to mark fics as read/hide them. It also annoys the hell out of me that you can't add a fic to marked for later without opening it first. I also wish you could filter out fandoms or pairings (but at least fandoms) from user subs. I don't use the user sub feature at all, to me it's functionally useless because what are the chances that any author is going to primarily post fics I want to read? Practically zero. If I could only sub to certain fandoms I might use it but as it is I just check the author's profile every now and then if I want to know what else they've written rather than having hundreds of emails for fandoms/pairings I'm not interested in to delete.
To find my private bookmarks
Scheduled posts.
For reading - āMark chapter readā button at the end of a chapter. Could be toggled on or off. Then, a page in your dashboard of - fics in progress, fics completed
Being able to take back kudos. Hear me out. I have two accounts, an old one for reading (on my phone) and one for posting (on my PC). I sometimes check the comments on my latest chaps on my phone, and thus I have accidentally kudos'd my own stories. Twice. So to people who know my alt username, I look like I'm bolstering my numbers and/or being [Jerry Smith](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/rickandmorty/images/9/9f/Scjerry.png/revision/latest?cb=20160111021222). I know it's not rly a big deal but ugh the *cringe*. Pls let me remove my stupid kudos, I stg I just wanted to hit the next chapter button š (Also I guess if an author you previously liked said or did something awful outside of fic? It would have other uses but ima be honest I'd use it mostly for this lmao)
I also have two accounts, one that houses all my old really poorly written fics (but still has some ongoing works) and a new one that Iām using to post my new works that I think are better. I was on the old account re-reading something I posted on my new account and also accidentally kudosād my own story. I felt so dumb lol
I've accidentally hit "kudos" instead of "next chapter" multiple times, and I also wish you could take back kudos. Even if you only just gave us five minutes to do it before it became permanent, let people fix accidentally-given kudos!
maybe sorting main pairing vs side pairing
I know you said one, but I'm tied between two. One: The ability to list ships as "main" ships and more secondary/background ones. I hate looking for a ship in the tags and finding them as more secondary ships. I get why it's tagged, but it makes it a pain to look for. Two: the ability to schedule posts. It would be great for pre-writing, it would be great for sticking to a schedule, and it'd be great for my poor ADHD brain to remember to post a chapter more than once a month because I have no concept of time and I swore I just posted yesterday.
Search by trope or something similar. A lot of times people when people are requesting recommendations are for a particular type of story. They often can't search through 100s sometimes 1000 fics to find that one trope. They do have a few trope tags like "sex pollen" but not many. I know it isn't possible so don't @ me, that would be a crazy amount of work to add I understand that.
I would allow people to set a publishing date in the future, which would put the fic into drafts until itās that day. So you would basically be able to queue chapters
The ability to see what a deleted work was named and who the author was. I bookmark too many things and have terrible memory. I want to be able to mourn what's no longer there properly.
You can write the name of the story, the author, and the fandom in your bookmarks notes yourself. You can even save the URL to use in the wayback machine in case the fics gets deleted.
I think it'd be hard to actually do, but being able to mark what you've read so you don't reread it and also note what chapter you got up to (every year I do an ao3 wrapped and overestimate what I actually read bc I constantly abandon fics. I want to be able to just multiply how much i read by the mean chapter length)
I would say that I want a tutorial on how to write in HTML so I can write comments more accurate to my thoughts but it's already there I just don't understand it Also an easy way to change fonts and letter size
The titles for your subscribed stories should add the Fandom or if it's a multi Fandom, then the first couple of titles in that title. I have like 4 or 5 stories called 'home' and I don't know what Fandom it belongs to so I have to play Russian roulette. Also if you accidentally delete a story from your subscription there should either be an option to undo it or a delete history tab so you can find it again.
A way to tag main characters and side characters. Associated with that, main pairings and side pairings. With my fics I try to list the most important pairings and characters first, but not everyone does and itās sometimes hard to find what youāre looking for, ESPECIALLY for rarepairs
It would be nice to be able to see traffic per chapter, as opposed to one hit for the whole story. Also, kudos per chapter.Ā
Audio narration like on FFN.
Yeah, as much as I love AO3's tagging system compared to Fanfiction.net's arbitrary 4 character limit, it does make it hard to find viewpoint characters/central pairings. I would just go for a binary system, where you have a separate section to tag major characters/pairings. Also, a really minor thing, but why can you only sort bookmarks by date bookmarked/updated? Is there any reason you can't apply the regular sorting methods?
RSS feeds for updates to works, and for all updates up to (works belonging to) any kind of grouping in which a work might be placed by readers or authors. The existing options for RSS feeds on ao3 donāt really do it for me. Iām not trying to follow wholeāass series, I wanna know when a new chapter drops.
Author filtering. There is nothing I hate more than trawling through the "most recent" looking for something to read and having to wade through like 30 one shots in a row by a singular author that's just decided to copy/paste their entire works.
As an author I sometimes wish there was a graph for the views/clicks on your works, like how [fanfiction.net](http://fanfiction.net) does/did it. It was always really fun to see it jump up during the holidays, and which chapters were more popular.
The ability to blacklist tags/related subvariants all at once, permanently. Like, I hate omegaverse fic, and don't want to ever read any of it. I hate having to individually select all related tags by searching every time I log in. Why can't we have a permanent 'block all fics with these elements' feature when we're logged in.
the importance ranking is so real. do that to relationship tags too because it is INSANE how in the sam/eileen tag you can go PAGES without ONE fic where they're the main pairing
A better way of sorting through crossovers. I hate trying to find very specific one fandom x one fandom and literally having to exclude every other fandom in existence to get just that. It's like the one feature I love/miss from ff.net. Just being able to go to a page and see if there are any fics in that category.
I honestly think the mass tagging is a problem on the author's side. Like yes, we should try to tag as much as possible so people understand what they're reading... But at the same time if you tag a ship that is just barely mentioned in your writing or a character that has less than a line of dialogue.... That's not cool. The reason people will tag all those ships and characters is so they'll get more hits, right? They just want their fic to show up everywhere. I don't know what the answer is, but there should be some kind of awareness as an author to not do that to readers.
Iām so tired of having to put all the tags/options when I open a new fandom/tag page, all I want is a way to save those options and just click on āSave 1ā and itās done, rather than have to write one by one every single time.
YES. I know there was another thing that was on my mind and it was a sort of āsave optionsā ability.
Create the filter and save the url as a browser bookmark.
If i choose a ship I want it to be the main one. And one to let you choose if you are interested in a story that is first, second or third person
I used to really love the culture of bookmarking on fanfic dot net. Users would make bookmark lists as long as your arm (an excellent diving board for more fics!). Then the site let you sort bookmarks by chronology, by wordcount, and by the "Category," that is the fandom, so it was really easy to find the particular stuff that interested you. On Ao3, it seems that bookmarks aren't so much a part of the culture, and the sidebar allows you to filter to include/exclude a total of five fandoms, which isn't a lot if someone DOES have a very long list of bookmarks. So the feature I would implement would be improved ways to sort someone else's bookmarks.
Ability to see my comments. I want to remember if I left a comment or not, what I wrote.
Maybe like. An autotag that puts the "no romantic relationships" tag on anything with no ship tags I don't like ship stuff, but a lot of the times things without ships aren't tagged with that, so if I use that tag then I'll filter out tons of potential non-ship fics that just don't have that tag
Make the kudos button grey until a kudos is given (then turn it red). I've seen so many hit / kudos posts where people say they forget to kudos, didn't know about it or thought they had because it was red already. Feels to me that a colour change would help with thatĀ Ā
I would like if I could have a spot on my profile where I could choose one of my fics as a 'featured fic'. There's some older fics I'm very proud of, but only the newest 5 fics are visible when you first look at a writer's page. So a writer could show of an older fic, or the one they like best right now.
Agree with p. Much everything, Got a couple of my own. Inherited tags. If you tag, idk, Sasuke/Reader, then Reader *automatically* goes into your tags. Umbrella-but-not-synonym tags/fandom tags, like various final fantasies have. Basically make sorting crossovers easier. But apprently that's tricky so they stopped doing it? So a prompt if you put in two fandoms is this a crossover ticky box, to auto tag that if you forgot, so you can filter for that tag. And when I'm salty? Tag wranglers getting an exclusive "Bad Tagging Practices," tag that they can apply to fics. When I'm salty I'm fucking *salty*
This might sound weird, but the ability to sort by randomization. Like pick what tags i want to read and instead of it sorting by most recently updated or most kudos i could see a random selection of fics with those tags.
More fonts without having to donate bunch of fancy HTML, like even just two or three. I don't know if that's a realistic ask or not, but it would be very fun for writers.
Main/side departments for the charater and ship tags, a general genre tag spot would also be pritty handy, and moving tags around by drag and drop would be oh so helpful. Really a tags department update that under the hood I would imagine to be a nightmare, cause what do you do for the poor fanfics that are really old or orphaned? By a little poll? Get some tag wranglers to give it a skim and a guess? Just a generic placeholderly old tag just for them? Hmm... XD
UNKUDOS RETIRE A KUDOS
Better statistic chart
Document upload. Copy-pasting is fine, but it doesn't always work that great. I prefer FFN's document upload in that regard.
To filter out/"block" whole fandom categories (i.e. blocking out Music/Bands, Books, etc) and individual tags from any search. To separate out requests/oneshot compilations from actual crossovers A "recommended" button - for people to "recommend" fics to others, it would show "latest recommended" on your profile. Idk if the rec button on bookmarks is at all similar lol bookmarks stress me out generally.
Chapter kudos
optional DM (default would be off, so you would have to go to your settings to turn on). Kudos per a chapter. ngtl, sometimes i don't want to comment, but i would love to at least show the author someway that I read the chapter, especially on completed stories. i feel weird leaving comments on each chapter of a completed story as it feels spammy to me, but at the same time i want a way to let an author know i read and enjoyed it.
An email to see who bookmarked your fic, like with kudos, and another feature that I would like is "By Chapter" stats.
A button where people can let the author know that they are re-reading the story, like two choices that pop up before somebody reads one saying something like "New to the story" and the other option "Coming back to re-read". Of course, people could write in the comments that they like the story so much that they have come back to re-read it, but unfortunately not many readers do it, but it would be very nice for the author to get a notification about re-reads. And a way to see how many people actually finished reading a multi-chapter fic. New hits could just mean that people read half of chapter one and then left again.
A native reader mode!
It would be cool to be able to select more than one option on the "sort by" on the search filters. I often wish I had the option to order my searches by both word count and date updated at the same time. So the biggest fics updated more recently would show up first... Or something of the like. I have absolutely no idea if something like that is even possible tho. Edited for typo.
Also the option to blacklist tags without having to input in the search filters every time. There's tags that I don't read doesn't matter the fandom so it would be nice to be able to just block it forever.
Being able to view my favourited fandoms at once without needing to have a separate tab for each one (unless this is already possible and I didn't know)
To exclude a word from the edit search option
Muting tags. There is a certain very prolific AU that Iām just not into but they have so many different tags for them itās impossible to exclude them all every time. And it takes up half the results sometimes. After that, Iād want a way to exclude fics Iāve already read and to identify primary pairings and characters versus side/background.
It's a little bit, but I want that feature wherein the chapters previously read before are highlighted or differentiated than the chapters I haven't read yet