ao3some

The purpose of this community is to be a place for fans of the Archive of Our Own to come and discuss, connect, and share.

Discuss - anything that comes to mind! Features, suggestions, news, volunteer work, tagging practices, bookmarking practices. Just anything you'd like to talk about with other AO3 enthusiasts.

Connect - tell people who you are on AO3! Find new people (and old) to subscribe to.

Share - invite codes, skins, tips and tricks, user scripts.

This community was inspired in part by

deliciouslymad (

deliciouslymad), a community for fans of the social bookmarking site delicious.com. This is not a place to complain about things that are-not-yet at AO3, but to have fun conversations about what we already love, and would love to see for the site.

Above all, be awesome to each other.

AO3 links: Support and Feedback | Archive FAQs | Known Issues

Dreamwidth links:

otw_news |

ao3_skins

stepps

Hello all you ao3some people! Mod here :) I've been lurking, and I appreciate everyone's contributions so much! Glad you all love playing with AO3 as much as me. If only I had money to give them right now :(

Just dropping by to link you to

arduinna's really detailed post about how to use AO3's search function to find just what you want.

tuff_ghost

If your userscript @requires jQuery, and your users are on Firefox, it's going to break JS running on Ao3 since the latest deploy, particularly the JS which shows modal boxes and hides the Share code on works.

If you're like me you were @requiring jQuery because you wanted your script to run in Chrome on Tampermonkey (where your script is sandboxed away from the host jQuery instance), and you didn't want to maintain two different copies of your script for Greasemonkey and Tampermonkey.

So, @require jQuery breaks stuff in Firefox, but you still need jQuery in Chrome. The solution is to get your jQuery instance from unsafeWindow.jQuery - this will point to the host instance of jQuery.


(function($) {
    // your code which uses jQuery normally as $
})(unsafeWindow.jQuery);

samjohnsson

One of the Support requests we've had a couple times recently is true r-t-l support for languages such as Hebrew and Arabic. While we're looking for easier ways to do it, we've currently got a workaround that you can use on any text-based work you post.

To make yourself a workskin:
1) Log in.
2) Go here: archiveofourown.org/skins/new (you can reach that link by going to your Home, then clicking Skins, then the ‘New Skin’ button).
3) Change the Type to ‘Work Skin’ (this step is very important).
4) Write in a title you will recognize and a description.
5) Copy and paste the following into the CSS box:

#workskin #chapters .userstuff .rtl {
font-family: "Guttman David", Arial;
unicode-bidi: embed;
direction: rtl;
}

Then make sure you select the skin when posting a work in a rtl language, in the ‘Custom Stylesheet’ dropdown, and use
<div class="rtl">TEXT</div>
around your text (you can change “rtl” to anything, as long as you change it in both places: your skin and your text).

The skin should:
* set the directionality for the document to RTL
* replace the font with Guttman David, and fall back to Arial if the reader doesn't have GD. (Chosen for the example as it's one of the more consistent Hebrew fonts, according to our respondents.) Watch out that you don't get "smart" quotes around the font names.

If you have any questions, leave them here or give us a shout at the Support page!

poulpette

Hello everyone,

After

theaeblackthorn posted their greasemonkey script last week, I was inspired to make my own, the AO3 kudos tools.

The script does three things:
- change the background of the kudos ♥ button to a white on green gradient if you have already given kudos to the work,
- highlight your username in the kudos list (white on green background, rounded shape),
- highlight other usernames in the kudos list (white on blue background), if you have listed their username in the script.

ETA: You will have to edit in your username in the script to make it work for you.

I mostly use the last feature to have a quick gauge of whether people I know have similar tastes in fanfic to me have read/liked the work.

If anyone decides to try this, I'd be glad to know if the contrast is correct accessibility-wise.

Current Mood: accomplished

facetofcathy

I like the Podfic community, and one of the things I like about them is that they are a community with that spirit of let's get together and organize stuff! Yay!

One of the things they did is produce a consistency of tagging and presentation of their posts on the AO3 so that they are really easy to recognize.

Almost every one has [Podfic] in the title and is tagged as Podfic and/or Podfic and Podficced Works.

So given that beautiful organization, I had this idea to make Podfics in a page of work blurbs even easier to spot for people who like to browse by category or fandom or pairing.

.work .blurb a.tag[href*="Podfic"] {
  background-color: COLOUR;
}

will make the background of any tag which contains the work Podfic in it the colour of your choice.

You can do the same thing for works tagged as Vids too--they're also beautifully orgainized:

.work .blurb a.tag[href*="vid"],
.work .blurb a.tag[href*="Vid"],
.work .blurb a.tag[href*="AMV"] {
  background-color: OTHERCOLOUR;
}

I imagine you could do Fanart as well.

Try it out, either in a script or a skin--but you might want to be judicious in your colour choices.

theaeblackthorn

Hi all,

I made a greasemonkey script for AO3 that has some handy shortcuts in it.

Essentially this is just me sharing with the rest of the internet something I made to make my ao3 reading easier.

With this script:

- when viewing the works page in AO3, left arrow goes back a page in the pagination, right arrow goes forward a page, like tumblr's navigation.
- when viewing an individual work in AO3, left arrow goes to the next chapter, right to the previous chapter
- when on a work pressing the following keys causes the following behaviour:
-- 'd': downloads the .mobi version of the fic
-- 'k': leaves kudos
-- 'm': marks it for later
-- 's': subscribes
-- '#': sets the filters to 'english' and 'completed works only'*

Like I said, not comprehensive, just something I made to make my reading experience lazier and I thought other people might like as well.

(*pretty tailored to me, but I've left it in there incase someone else wants to use it)

It'd be great to hear if anyone else finds it helpful :)

elf

It's high time for the tag wranglers to start wrangling some of those loose incoherent tumblr-style freeforms.

I speak, specifically, of the "I was drunk when I wrote this" concept. I don't know if the canonical should be "written while drunk" or "drunk author" or "drunk writing" (not that, I think; it sounds like it refers to the contents of the fic, not the meta-state of the author) or something else. These decisions are for tag wranglers. *insert airy handwave*

The tags that should be synned include, but are not necessarily limited to:
i was drunk when i wrote this
I was clearly drunk when I wrote this
Drunk Writing
I write when I am drunk
Things I Write While Drunk
I wrote this when I was drunk.
don't judge my drunk
jfc i wrote this drunk at 3 am two years ago
I might have been drunk when I wrote this
Because apparently drunk me writes porn
Don't Drink and Write, which has been used on two fics by different authors! One more and it's eligible for canonicability! Which is a totally cromulent word that's perfectly appropriate to a discussion about fic that was written while drunk.
this is what happens when you let me write while drinking
what was I drinking when I made this
I was drinking okay I regret nothing

Making it canonical would merge several similar tags, encourage future similarity of tagging, and--BONUS!!!--make it easy for people who hate that kind of fic to avoid it.

(Disclaimer: I was not drunk when I wrote this. But I am coming off four days of five hours' sleep each.)

wrangletangle

I started a Tumblr earlier this month to talk about tag wrangling: what it does, how it works, etc. Since then, Tumblr's begun rolling out some changes that make it hard to access that blog without frustration, so I went ahead and made DW and LJ mirrors.

wrangletangle on DW

wrangletangle on LJ

They will both mirror all regular posts to the Tumblr, as well as archive some of the reblogged conversations there.

I won't be spamming this comm with the posts, though I may drop by once a month or so to offer a digest/synopsis.

In February: Femslash February! I'll be posting daily about femslash and female-centric tags at AO3.

tuff_ghost

Here are a couple scripts to tweak the works index pages. They run on Greasemonkey in Fx or Tampermonkey in Chrome.

filters: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/153118
dl buttons: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/153119

Please let me know if you got questions, or if I made any mistakes!

EDIT: Adding ao3 savior, it acts like tumblr savior...meaning you'll get index pages with expandable hidden fics, whereas the saved filters script will filter them out altogether. Savior is better if you want to be able to view what you've blacklisted, or if you want to blacklist only specific fields like author or tags.

sarken

A couple weeks ago, I was playing around with skins and came up with a way to truncate the text of longer freeform tags. Basically, stick this CSS in a site skin and it'll turn "This is my very very very very long freeform tag" into "This is my very very very ver..."

You can change max-width: 15em to a smaller number if your personal definition of long is different. This only applies to freeform tags in the blurbs, so there's no need to worry about long character names or relationships getting cut off, and you can still see the full tag on the work itself. If you want to truncate it there as well, change .blurb ul.tags li.freeforms to .blurb ul.tags li.freeforms, .meta dd.freeform li

ETA: Updated to work in Chrome in addition to Opera, Firefox, and Safari.

flamebyrd

http://random.fangirling.net/fun/ao3/downloader.html

This will provide download links for the ebook versions of all stories on an AO3 work listing (author's works, search, series, etc) in a little box that floats on the page after you click the bookmarklet.

It is undoubtedly very buggy, so let me know if you encounter any weirdness!

colls

ao3vidders is hosting a multifandom vid exchange using AO3.

Fandom Nominations are open now and signups begin July 21st.

FANDOM NOMINATIONS: July 10th - July 20th
VIDDER SIGNUPS: July 21st - July 31st
VIDS DUE: September 30th

heartequals

Mods, feel free to tell me to delete, if this is inappropriate but...I made an AO3 fanmix because I am a) ridiculous and b) in love with AO3/fanfic/fandom/mostly just AO3 though.

it's called "it started with a whisper" and it's here on lj.

birdsflying

I could really do with an extension similar to tumblr saviour that would not display fics with certain user specified tags when I'm browsing a03 (specifically, when I'm scrolling through a fandom tag result page) - anyone come across that?

I am prodding the sourcecode for tumblr saviour to see if I can do a quick and dirty modification but I am also mid-relocation and new job and extremely rusty with javascript, so very much a bear of little brain right now, so if anyone else has done it first, I would love to know. (and personally, the stuff I'd like to avoid, I would be unlikely to want to reveal, so if it just said 'fic removed from view' or similar, without the unhide link, as a quick modification that would also be A+)

Current Mood: curious

samjohnsson

Someone posted earlier about IFTTT and the way you can set up all sorts of nifty "recipes" to automate the web for you.

Well, it's been driving me nuts - one of my favorite writers has been writing in "Fandom A" - which I adore - but is still also writing in "Fandom B" - which is the sole reason I installed tumblrsavior. But as you all know, if you subscribe to a feed for an author, you can't pick and choose a fandom, and if you follow the fandom feed, you get every author.

Enter IFTTT.

This creates a recipe that will watch Fandom A's feed and email you any works by Author X. (Numbering here is wonky to align with IFTTT's steps.)

-1. Create an account on IFTTT.
0. Create a new recipe.

"This"
1. Select Feed
2. Select "New Feed Item Matches"
3. Enter Author X's name in "Keyword", and the Fandom feed address in Feed URL. You can get that by going to the Fandom A page and right-clicking on "Subscribe to the Feed".
3a. Click on "Create Trigger".

"That"
4. Select "Email". (Even if you have a Gmail. This is simpler.)
5. Choose "Send me an email."
6. Format what you'd like the email to include. "Entry Content" will automatically contain the Summary and all the Tags.
6a. Click on "Create Action".
7. Give it a description and click on "Create Recipe".

8. Sit back, and watch the filtered goodness come in to your inbox.

Caveat: because this works off the feed and not the author, it won't pick up Archive-locked works. Still, it catches the rest of everything, so it's a start!

flamebyrd

I edited the default Pinboard bookmarklet (the button you put in your browser bookmarks to let you quickly add links to Pinboard) so that it will grab the tags and summary from AO3 and include those in the Pinboard tags/description.

~~Would anybody who uses Pinboard for their bookmarks rather than AO3 be interested in that if I posted it?~~

I made a generator for the bookmarklet to allow people to choose which tags to include and so on. http://random.fangirling.net/fun/ao3/bookmarklet.html

(I tried to do the same for Delicious but it doesn't look like I can pass tags to it.)

torachan

I posted this in my journal the other day and now realise I should have posted here instead/as well.

So

cesare recently made a post talking about feedback, and she talks a bit about how she keeps a folder in her email for kudos so she can see the total for all ber stories. She had mentioned this before about a year ago and I thought it was an awesome idea. Now, her reasoning is totally different from mine, because she uses it as a way to help stop obsessing over story stats, which she in general doesn't want to see, whereas I use it as a stop-gap since AO3 doesn't offer any sort of stats page for authors (you have to look at each individual story, which is not practical if you have a lot of stories on there as I do).

But it is a thing that works for both of us, and so I have been saving kudos notifications ever since she first mentioned it, along with a handful of older notifications which I had deleted but were still in the trash. So I have a folder in gmail going back to March of last year, and out of curiosity I counted them all up (unfortunately I can't just look at the total number, because some notifications thread and it shows threaded convos as one email) and in one year I have gotten a total of about 470 kudos.

That is pretty amazing to me, especially considering in that time period I have only posted five new fics. Those five fics did, of course, get a good chunk of kudos just for being new fics and thus being more likely to be noticed, but all together they didn't even get a hundred, so that is almost 400 kudos on OLD FICS. Guys. I don't know what your fandom experience has been, but mine has been that feedback comes overwhelmingly from new fics, generally within the first few days, and then you are lucky if you get a comment or two the rest of the years its posted, maybe a bit more if someone recs it. And this has held true on AO3. I do get the occasional comment on older stuff, but it's rare. Really rare. I have over 200 fics and for the most part, while I assume people are still reading them, for the most part the only time I get comments is when they're first posted.

So those 400 kudos? Those are 400 comments from readers that I would otherwise never have heard. Maybe kudos take away from comments on newer fics, I don't know (and it's really hard to measure that, because there are so many other factors, too). But I know there is no way I would have gotten 400 comments on random old fics. Hell, I wouldn't have gotten even 100. Maybe 50 tops. But I have still been getting comments here and there, at a rate that doesn't really feel appreciably different to years when there were no kudos. So maybe I've lost 10 comments on older fics, or hell, let's say I've even lost 20. But I gained 400 in the form of kudos? I...I'm really not seeing the downside here.

I didn't mean this to be an experiment when I started saving the kudos notifications, but I'm really glad I now have solid proof to point to when people say kudos are only replacing comments, etc.

There has been a lot of talk recently about kudos and readers, but when I read the comments on posts like that, it often comes off as people saying "I'm a reader and I like kudos because" and "I'm a writer and I hate kudos because". I know some people are saying they like/hate them from both sides, but it still seems like when people make arguments for/against kudos they talk about it in those terms. I want to talk about how awesome kudos are as a writer. They are super awesome!

littlemousling

Poll #10088 Meaning of Kudos

This poll is anonymous.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 363

When I click the Kudos button, it most often means (one or more of) the following:

View Answers

Good job!
258 (71.1%)

I liked this!
334 (92.0%)

I finished this and didn't hate it!
57 (15.7%)

I ADORED this!
202 (55.6%)

I like clicking buttons and assign no meaning!
4 (1.1%)

None of these options apply
6 (1.7%)

This is a sort of follow-up to

bethbethbeth's great Kudos/Comments poll here. There are a number of comments there discussing the various reasons people click the Kudos button, some of which may be more common reasons than others.

Feel free to expand on your answer!

mumblemutter

UPDATE: As of Release 0.9.2, which introduced some changes to the search form, the syntax below won't work anymore. I'm working on updated versions and will post them here ASAP. /UPDATE

Long story short, these are bookmarklets you can use to search for a pre-specified subset of works for a fandom, character, pairing or random prompt. It makes use of the somewhat under-documented Advanced Search syntax (explained in more detail in this tutorial) and can be customized to accommodate even the most obscure reading preferences. /brazen claim

I've included the basic syntax (totally stolen from another bookmarklet) and several examples under the cut. Dreamwidth won't let me create draggable bookmarklets, so you will have to create and name the bookmark yourself, putting in the contents of the respective text field as the link location/URL. It's wildly important to delete any line breaks in the code before you do this; it needs to be one long unbroken string starting with javascript:s. A simple text editor, such as Notepad, works nicely for this.

Once bookmarked, you can click on it and it will either take a word you've highlighted on the page you're on, or ask for a prompt, and then plop that prompt into a pre-defined AO3 search. Prompts can be multiple words (such as character names), but they will be treated as one discrete search term. You cannot put in [Avengers Batmann] and expect crossover matches. Sorry.

( Basics )

( Examples )

Feel free to shout if anything seems off to you, or if anything is unclear. I could have rambled on more, but I tried to keep the explanations short. Short-ish.

elf

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who really loves the Kudos feature at AO3. I don't mean, "wow, it's great that there's this option for people too busy or overwhelmed to leave a comment, so authors can know someone liked their story," because sometimes that comes with the unspoken (or not unspoken) followup of, "but of course people should be leaving comments, so if it causes people to not leave comments, maybe it's not so good." I love kudos. Unreservedly, with no caveats. I maybe like them more than comments.

I love comments. Pretty much everyone loves comments, and I write little enough fic that I treasure every single one of them. Comments tell me what worked, tell me when I've managed just the *perfect* way to get across what I was thinking, tell me if I've failed to cover the (obviously brilliant and compelling) backstory & other bits in my head. Comments tell me that someone else loves not just my favorite characters, but loves them the same way I do. Comments tell me I've succeeded in intriguing or disturbing or arousing the reader, or maybe all three at once.

Comments help me grow as a writer, and I feel horribly guilty for everyone one of them I don't reply to. I know lack of replies means it's just a bit less likely that person will leave comments in the future. :( Bad elf. No cookie.

( But kudos are (is?) always a happy thing. )

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AO3some

Archive of Our Own (AO3)

April 2013

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Recent Entries

Sticky: Introduction, and links

Searching AO3

FYI for userscript authors

Right-to-Left Workskin

AO3 Kudos tools

Colouring in the tags

AO3 Navigation Tweaks

The Offspring of Booze and Keyboard

The ins and outs of tag wrangling at AO3

userscripts: download buttons, saved filters, tumblr savior

Tag truncation

Another bookmarklet!

Multifandom: Vid Exchange

AO3 fanmix

Ao3 tag killfilter?

Using IFTTT to hack a "Works by Author in a Fandom" subscription

Pinboard bookmarklet for AO3 works

A year in kudos

Meaning of Kudos

Custom search bookmarklets.

What's the collective noun for kudos?