Greetings, 21st Century!

[dmarley]

Okay, so I'm sort of caught up with all my immediate things-I-want-to-be-caught-up-on. I have hit my NaNoWriMo goal for today (35,106 words!), and if I just write a little more than 1,000 words a day I'll get it done.

I have also uploaded all my stories to Archive of Our Own. So far, I'm pretty happy with it. I didn't have any technical problems getting my stories on there, and I like most of the tagging and labeling features. There are couple of things that I suspect still need to be refined a bit, notably what, exactly, the various warning options are supposed to mean, but on the whole what's there is workable.

One thing I finally did was enter the 21st century and leave my mailing list/Usenet story formatting behind. I've been meaning to turn all my ASCII format asterisks into em tags for a while, but when I realized that if I didn't do it now I'd have to re-load 2 sets of stories, that was sufficient motivation.

The tagging of the formerly-asterisked formatting went very smoothly, thanks to TextWrangler, but I did learn something very important when I decided to add pointer links to my story index at the end of all my journal-posted stories: When doing a simultaneous search and replace on 25 files at once, using a relatively common pair of words such as "THE END," do not forget to make the search case-sensitive. Yeah. Luckily, what multi-file search and replace can screw up, multi-file search and replace can also repair, yea verily. Still *headdesk*

I'm also, like many others, wondering what the heck to do with the tags on AO3. As anyone who's ever glanced at my Delicious account knows, I love my tags. I love them so much that I haven't yet upgraded the Delicious add-on because the current one can be used as a work-around for the 50-tag limit and I'm afraid that the new options might have fixed that loophole.

So, my impulse is to tag a lot, but every time I type in something like "frottage" and find that there isn't a tag for it yet (seriously, I was the first person to tag "frottage"? I find that hard to believe), I worry that I'm Doing It Wrong. But I figure that the archive is still growing, and once more people get in there and tag, the uncertainty about what to tag will lessen. At least I hope so. For now, I'm being a bit conservative myself, trying to figure out what tags are useful for my stuff and which would be clutter. One which is definitely the former is the "m/m/m" tag. :)

Comments

[zvi]

I've actually found that there has not, so far, been much traffic in tagging actual sex acts. (I've also found, through surfing latest posts, mockery of people tagging sex acts, but when you want to read about frottage, that's what you want to read about, am I right or am I right?)

Also, I'm not sure that unwrangled tags come up in the autocomplete. Yours are not the only frottage stories in the archive, for instance.

[cesy]

Most sex acts have been tagged but not wrangled yet, as there is currently a big project going on behind the scenes to be appropriate and tactful about when "if you filter for one of these, you probably want the other to show in the results" implies "these two acts are the same" even though they're not. Also, which term for something is "official" can be tricky - do you go for the medical term, or the most popular term? So they're there if you search in the search box, but you can't yet filter or find them in the tag cloud until they've been wrangled, and that'll take at least a few days.

[dmarley]

Yeah, I figured it was probably just a "OMG we have to wrangle *how* many new tags?!" issue. :)

The wrangling actually reminds me a bit of what goes on at Library Thing, where books are collected under "works" so that the thousands of different editions of Hamlet (and Hamlet: Prince of Denmark, and Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, a Tragedy, etc.) all end up being counted under the work "Hamlet," and not under each individual edition. At Library Thing, though, anyone can collect or separate a title from a given work, and there's a constant battle between the lumpers and the splitters. Having watched that battle with great interest over the years, I think a discrete group of wranglers is probably a very, very wise move. :)

[dmarley]

I have discovered, through answering requests on the Torchwood genre finding community, that there is very little that fans won't, eventually, look for. And be very happy that there's a tag for it. :) I only feel silly tagging stories with "showersex" until someone asks for it (true story!). :)

Yeah, I figured I couldn't possibly be the only one to want to tag their frottage, and that it was likely just a wrangling lag. Just yesterday there wasn't a Sha're tag in the characters, and today there it was! Magic!

Also, while you're here, thanks for suggesting the Character of Color tag and the World Building tag. I've been using the others you mentioned on Delicious, but those will definitely be added soon, and I've already used Character of Color on my own stuff at AO3.

[zvi]

You're welcome.

You can see the stories tagged with an unwrangled tag at http://archiveofourown.org/tags/exampletag or by clicking on the tag as it's applied to a story or bookmark, but then it has be an exact spelling match.

[lunaris1013]

With the exception of some obvious things (5 Things, First Time) I withheld on the tags. I did add one, because I just couldn't believe it wasn't there - Crossdressing. I mean, honestly!

[dmarley]

Crossdressing is a must-have, I agree.

I admit, I've been rather conservative myself, partly because I want to see how the tags shake down before adding bunches of them. Also, my own stories don't really inspire a lot of tagging, not like some of the stuff I've tagged for Torchwood. It's funny, because I'll tag everything and the kitchen sink on someone else's story to help me sort them, but when it comes to my own stuff I'm thinking, "Oh, that doesn't count, I'm not going to tag it." I'm sure there's some deep-seated psychological reason for this. :)