#i need to backtag all off my asks so i can look at them on rainy days

[jessaerys]

read a fic where the author made the characters siblings the other day for their own personal reasons. cried a little. it was one of those pieces you just know means a lot to whoever wrote it and it felt special to be able to get moved by it.. thats what life is about for real. anyways i thought of you! following you has helped me make my own mind and be more compassionate about the subject which is something im always trying to do

sharing this because i think i remember someone else doing it and it seemed fine lol! wishing u a nice rest of the week :]

ooohhh this means a lot, thank you for sending this little message i am clutching it close to my heart. sometimes i feel like this blog is super cringe so it feels completely unexpected that it has helped others question their values / expand their horizons / be more compassionate !!!

you're right, you're right that IS what life is all about 🥺 i'm so happy for you !!!!!

[mdzs-kinkmeme]

Question! I am not about deleting prompts, but why does it force you to edit so many spreadsheet pages? The links to the individual prompts still work, right? Figuring out which one was deleted is a pain, but it sounds like you’re giving yourself extra work.

Figuring out which prompt was deleted is the easy part! Even fixing the spreadsheet pages isn’t especially hard, it’s just annoying. It doesn’t generally take longer than an hour to fix, assuming I’m halfway awake. (In fact I went and did it myself after I drafted this post, and without any help from the tag team it took just a few minutes under an hour, moving slowly because I have a smoke inhalation headache.) It’s just much nicer to have everything on pause while stuff’s getting moved around.

And also I live in hope that turning off prompts for a day will alert people to the whole “please don’t delete prompts” thing. That’s why it’s a consistent 24-hour shutdown instead of “we’ll shut down until I fix it.”

But since you’re wondering why this is even a problem for us in the first place, I’ll try to explain!

We could theoretically put all the prompts on one massive spreadsheet so that pages didn’t matter, but that would mean asking the tag team to scroll up and down through 2000+ prompts. Consequently, prompts are divided up by which AO3 page they’re on, 20 prompts a page. Green means the whole 20-prompt page has been double-checked for errors, yellow means it’s all up on Pinboard, orange means it’s prepped for upload, and pink means the tag team is still working on adding tags:

We have to review all 100+ pages every so often to update Claimed/Unclaimed Filled/Unfilled status and to do any backtagging that occurs to us. This often takes the form of assigning volunteers a range of 10 pages (200 prompts) each. While you’re quite right that all links to individual prompts are static, clicking to individually open each one when you’re trying to quickly review 200 of them would be a pain, so taggers usually work by opening a 20-prompt page on AO3 in one window and then scrolling down as they look over the corresponding 20-prompt spreadsheet in another.

A spreadsheet of tagged, uploaded-to-Pinboard prompts looks like this:

Every time somebody deletes an old prompt, these 20-prompts-at-a-time pages no longer reflect the reality of the AO3 pages, and if we were to let those discontinuities pile up, it would get progressively harder and harder to move smoothly back and forth between AO3, Pinboard, and the master spreadsheet.

So as you can likely imagine, when we lose a prompt off page 37 on AO3, I remove the deleted prompt from its place in the spreadsheet, and then move the top prompt on page 38 to the bottom of page 37, and then the top prompt on 39 to the bottom of page 38, and then the top prompt on 40 to the bottom of page 39, and so on and so on until I’ve caught up to page 108 and everything lines up again. And then I go and reload all 71 moved prompts on Pinboard so their numbers are correct there as well -- since the Pinboard doesn’t link back to the spreadsheet, it’s helpful to have a number-tag there telling me what page the prompt comes from if I find an error (such as a misspelled tag) via Pinboard.

I’m sure we could probably be sloppier -- I made this system up as it occurred to me, and I change things as I go and people make suggestions -- but having the numbers line up on all three platforms has been suuuuuper helpful in making me not want to tear my hair out when I need to do edits scattered through 2000+ prompts. If somebody has a clever Google Sheets idea that would maintain the 1-to-1 spreadsheet-AO3 setup while also not needing such a silly correction effort every time AO3 changes, I’m open to hearing about it!