#I’m adding context for space I just need to post smth so I don’t go insane

[babeeboy]

I’m ngl I’m losing it

[evilvarric666-archive]

This is gonna be long, so sorry in advance, but as someone who enjoys long fics here are my two cents:

I get why some ppl may not want 75 tags in fics, but this is gonna hurt long fic writers. On a long fic there are probably gonna be more relationships that are central to the plot that aren't the main ship. And side pairings that may be a squick to some ppl. Not to mention trigger warnings and tone tags.

For example: a long fic with the pairing Y x Z. Z had an abusive relationship, and that's gonna be explored. So the author tags abusive relationship, bc that's a trigger, but an explanation next tag saying "not current ship" or smth.

Then Y has very important friendships with some of the cast. These are central to the plot so they're tagged too.

Turns out, character W is controversial in the fandom, but they're central to the fic too. The author is gonna tag after the character tag W positive/negative; so ppl who don't wanna see positive/negative things about W can skip this.

And guess what? Ship A x B appears in this fic too. Maybe it's not that central, but this ship is also disliked by some people, so the author will tag it, so ppl can filter through.

Another problem is with media that has different mediums, like, the media Y, Z, etc are from has movies, and books, and games and a tv show. All these things actually have different stories, different enough at least that ppl may only want to see fics written for the movies! But the author wants to take plot from the movies and the books. So instead of just tagging the all media tag for that media, they also tag media (movies) and media (books)

These tags end up accumulating. And especially in long fics. The author could make the first chapter a list of tws and stuff that they keep updating, but that destroys the purpose of ao3 tags: you can't filter content like that, you can only filter tags.

I honestly think they should just find a way to delete the fics with the trolling tags, or make a readmore thing so it doesn't hurt the browsing. At the very least make the tag limit longer.

sorry in advance that this is going to be rambly and weird. I have a lot of thoughts.

I get where you're coming from but I also still disagree. Like it's definitely going to change the way longfic writers tag, but I really don't think it's going to hurt them. I think it's going to encourage more effective tagging and that that's going to be better for everybody in the long run. If anything, I think that overtagging is what's hurting longfic writers, it makes their works look unappealing, and actually important information gets buried in a wall of text.

i will admit though that I do understand better now why less room for trigger tagging is going to be an issue. My preferred tagging style is "General/umbrella warnings in the tags, with whatever elaboration/specifics the author deems necessary in an author's note/author's notes at the beginning of each chapter" (example: "animal death" in the tags, so that the filters catch it + people who can't handle the subject At All know to keep scrolling, and then the author's note specifying that its in the context of game hunting & not a pet death, so that people who were uncertain and needed more info could click in and get the specifics.) and I thought that preference was pretty universal? But apparently a lot of people use the tags as an exhaustive list of warnings, which I didn't know because when I see a work with more than, well with more than 75 tags, I just start scrolling until it's gone.

(this is a tangent and I get that my experiences are not universal. but I genuinely dislike full warning lists in the tags because, for me at least, it makes it harder for me to figure out if the story is something I can/want to read. The things I Really Do Not Want To Read about are rare, and rarely tagged the same way twice, so the exclusion filter isn't really helpful for me. I have to actually read the full list of warnings and if the things I'm looking for are sandwiched inbetween a bunch of trope/character tags in a big wall o text I am going to miss it. This has happened to me multiple times.)

I think that that's an ineffective tagging style, basically. Lots of tags is kind of the opposite of useful tags, imo. Short, to the point and consistently worded warnings are better and I think having less space will encourage people to do that. I understand why people do this other style, though, and also why it would frustrate them that they can no longer do that. I think it really sucks that ao3 let everyone wild west their website for so long that it managed to spawn like three distinct groups of people who all use the website in completely incompatible ways, and now it's at the point where any new rule implemented is going to screw a lot of people over no matter what. But I digress.

Anyways, as long as someone isn't putting Revolutionary Girl Utena levels of warnings in their tags (and if your fic needs that much... maybe you should just put yur top 10 biggest warnings on there and slap a Dead Dove Do Not Eat on the end there, yknow?), I think that 75 tags will fully accommodate them. I get that tags start adding up, but also I think a lot of people are underestimating how many tags 75 tags is.

Like to just add up how many tags are used in your example: three / pairing tags, lets go crazy and say three more & pairing tags, tag every character tag in those pairings that's twelve, #abusive relationship + #not main pairing tags, three fandom tags bc multiple source mediums, a #[controversial character] positive tag... that's 24 tags. Like all the necessary character & pairing tags are handled in less than a third of the space given (and personally I consider this slightly over tagged. I think the only character tags you should put on a fic are the very mainest/pov characters, but yknow) and honestly if you can't then figure out a way to communicate the rest of the necessary information about your fic in 51 tags and a 1250 character summary then I really don't know how to help you. I personally would have to really push myself to figure out how to put more than 75 tags on one fic, regardless of the length of the fic. And I can't help but notice that a lot of the fics I could find with over 75 tags while searching last night had a lot of... unnecessary duplicate tags, often for information that could've been easily otherwise intuited (tagging #mandolorian #mandolore #mandolorian character and #mandolorian culture on a Jango Fett pre-series fic, for example)

I do have some criticisms about the current change though. I think it would've been better to have individual tag number limits for each individual field (x number of fandom tags, x number of character tags, etc.) instead of a 75 tags over all limit (or make a "warning tags" field that's separate from "additional tags" but that's a separate essay and would... probably mean overhauling the whole site. so not very practical.) A readmore option would be good too, and I'm not sure why they didn't go for that? I also think that this change will be most effective if done in combination with other changes. Like posting very loosely or not at all enforced official tagging/style guides for the site. I really think that even a tepid attempt at standardization will increase the site's usability like, A Lot.

I'm not sure how cohesive that was. TL;DR I appreciate hearing your thoughts, mine are that I still think this is a step in the right direction. And that cutting back on overtagging will lead to more concise, effective tagging which will make browsing and filtering easier in the long run.

[confessionsofa-roleplayer]

Alright I’m gonna try and dispel a few myths here: I was doing things the other day and decided to html program my promo. For context, I’ve never used html before aside from for paragraphs (minus spaces) and the ones with “i” and “b” for italicize and bold. These are the ultimate basic basic basic things that are honestly not even as easy as just pressing enter or ctrl/cmd+i/b. It may be useful on mobile? Possibly? So… Curious, I went in to figure out how to get the curly fancy text that tumblr implemented a couple months ago. It’s harder than it looks ok? I wanted the fancy text, links, and bullet points together, so it would be several layers of code for one line (hell, one word) of text. It was hard even when I was literally copy-pasting the lines of code into my tumblr post from google searches. Now I’m no computer programmer, and I’m sure most of us aren’t. Clearly this is why I struggled. I figured it out eventually, but it didn’t look as nearly good as if I had just done what I always do and just use the options that the regular text gives you. Perhaps people have had different experiences, but the “programming is so easy” thing is really only easy if you can afford to dump 2-3 hours into it. I took almost as long programming a 10-15 word text post as I took drawing (from scratch, I do all my graphics myself) and editing the actual promo graphic. So for people who say programming this is “so easy”… I can very easily say that’s pretty bull. Sure, getting your strike through or small text is easy since you literally just do to get small text and if you want double small you just add another one around it, but once you start getting into the nitty gritty of “how to put your links in bullet points” and “how to put these links into fancy text without having to do multiple paragraphs” and “how to center these fancy text links on the page” (center is more than just center> it’s more like something with textstyle or smth… I barely remember)… Things get hard and stuff stops working and you start to tear at your hair. This pretty much only goes for beginners and non-programmers though, I’m sure people who know how to program have it easier bc naturally, they have more knowledge and experience so of /course/ it’s easier. Maybe with practice this gets easier. Maybe if I had found better guides this could be easier. I consider myself among the top 10% of my age group in intellect and problem-solving skills, and this was ridiculously hard for the measly results I got. But this was my experience trying it out, maybe yours is different. So for everyone saying formatting your posts is easy: it depends highly on what you’re trying to do with it. Small text is laughably easy. You can either program it or just shift + ctrl/cmd + - (yeah literally that fuckin easy) and to turn small text back to normal it’s the same command (the more you know). Huge text is even easier bc tumblr desktop gives you options from strike through to huge to adding “underlining” by putting in a defunct link. Cutting a post even without xkit is actually not that hard, since all you need is a link to your partner’s reply. Everything else is provided in that little menu that pops up with the black buttons. As time goes on, html is only needed for people who want to go the “next level” up like I did. There are many /many/ tumblr features that let you do exactly what those formatted text people have been doing. In that sense, I concur. It’s not hard to press shift + ctrl + - to get small text. It’s not hard to press shift + ctrl + 6 to get strike through text. It’s not even hard to add links unless you have to bc something else can only be programmed in. This doesn’t include the copy-pasted stuff like the fancy curly text that always only ever shows up as boxes and/or question marks whether I’m on mobile or desktop (maybe only Windows can see it????? Who knows). TLDR: it’s not as hard to format the basics as some people think as you don’t even need html programming skills bc it’s all covered by keyboard commands, but as you get more and more complicated it’s not as easy as you think it is. So that’s my experience with html. Friendship ended with html, keyboard commands are my best friends now.