A tutorial for ao3 savior by someone who doesn’t know anything about computers
I have very little coding background and basically guessed my way into this BUT. I am here for everyone who needs help blacklisting things on ao3. Here’s a tutorial for ao3 savior that starts with “turn the computer on” because that’s what I needed. Ao3 savior blocks ao3 search results containing tags, users, words, and summaries containing phrases you have specified. Once running, you do not have to retype these blacklisted terms every time you search ao3. A lot of people have been calling for ao3 to implement a blocklist like that on site, but you don’t have to wait for the massive undertaking an on-site blocklist would be because userscripts already do that! You can even specify whether you want a “this result was blocked because” message or if you want it to just vanish as if it had never been there at all.
Part A: Installing Tampermonkey
1. Turn on your computer and open your browser (firefox, chrome, safari, brave, opera, etc) This should be the browser that you use ao3 on--if you use more than one browser, or more than one device, you will need to go through this process on each device and each browser.
2. Type “tampermonkey” into the search bar. Click the result that says something like “Tampermonkey is a free browser extension.” You need this to run the script--otherwise, the script is just a bunch of words and your computer doesn’t know what to do with them.
3. On the page that opens, there should be two boxes. One says “Tampermonkey stable” and the other says “Tampermonkey beta”. Click the green download button with a downward pointing arrow in the box labeled “tampermonkey stable” and follow any install instructions.
4. Once the green download button has changed to a gray “installed” button, you have downloaded the extension. Now, find the extension on your browser--on brave and chrome, extensions are on the right side on the top of the browser, underneath the “tabs”. The tampermonkey icon is a square with rounded corners and two circles in the bottom half of the square. Remember where it is.
Part B: Downloading Userscripts
it is extremely important that you only download userscripts from sources you trust--this is a source that is recommended under the heading “What tools can let me filter out triggering, offensive, or unwanted content?“ on ao3′s faq, here: https://archiveofourown.org/faq/unofficial-browser-tools?language_id=en#userscriptplugins This is important because untrustworthy userscripts are quite literally, a code someone wrote to tell your computer to do something, and there are almost no limits to WHAT that something is. Bad userscripts could be reporting your entire search history to nefarious people, or doing other bad things. Only use scripts you trust!
1. Open a new tab and go to this link: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/3579-ao3-savior 2. Click the green “install” button on the left side of the page. If it prompts you to download, tampermonkey is not installed properly. 3. Open another tab and go to this link https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/28782-ao3-savior-config 4. Open ao3 and click on the tampermonkey icon (rounded square with two circles inside it). This should open a drop down menu, with the following being the first three listed items: “Enabled” with a green checkmark, “ao3 savior”, and “ao3 savior config”. (“Ao3 savior config” and “ao3 savior” might be in any order, and if you already had tampermonkey downloaded you might have other userscripts, in which case scroll down to find “ao3 savior config” AND “ao3 savior” you need them both. You need this window open for part C. Part C: Configuring your ao3 savior 1. Find “Ao3 Savior Config”--this is the only script you need for a working blacklist. You do not need to open the “Ao3 Savior” script at all.
2. Directly to the right of ao3 Savior Config, there is a plus sign. Click on it. Click “edit” 3. Ao3 Savior Config includes prompts for you to follow. It is very important that you only change the words that are indicated for change--for example, when you see this string of words: // Set to false if you don't want to see why works were hidden. showReasons: true,
You should ONLY change “true” to “false” if you don’t want to see why works were hidden. Do not change any of the “showReasons:” prompts, otherwise the script will not work. For the true/false fields, do not change any of the punctuation either. The words you can change are colorful, rather than white. True/false is shown in purple, while the blacklist words are dull yellow. 4. Blacklist prompts: For these prompts, you need to change some of the punctuation. This is what you will see:
tagBlacklist: ['dobby', 'jar jar binks', '*mimes'], This is the tag blacklist, but the process is the same for author blacklist and others. You do not need to delete any of these suggestions, as they are not actually blacklisted. In order to blacklist works tagged “dobby”, “jar jar binks”, or “mimes”, you will need to replace the single apostrophe ‘ with quotation marks. In order to add new blacklist terms, you need to put the term in quotation marks, with a comma outside the quotation marks and a space before the next term. This is what it would look like: tagBlacklist: [”dobby”, “jar jar binks”, “*mimes”], You will notice that “mimes” has an asterisk in front of it. This means it is wildcarded. That means that “*mimes” should blacklist tags like “mimes and roses”, “french mimes”, “mimess”, etc. I haven’t used this function so I don’t know its exact perameters. You can blacklist other terms, not blacklist any tags, or blacklist more than three tags--as long as you have one term in the field you’re good. 5. Within the tampermonkey window, there should be a bar with headings “file, edit, selection, find...” Click file, and then save. Close the window and reload ao3--it should be done!