more people need to understand that ‘creator chose not to use archive warnings’ is already a proper archive warning AO3 provides its users. it means an author chose not to say if there are any trigger warnings applied to their works or not, or what these warnings are (if there are any).
therefore you, a reader, must proceed at your own risk. no one forced you to read anything. but if you, on your own free will, chose to read a work that’s tagged as ‘creator chose not to use archive warnings’ then you accepted the risk of being exposed to topics that can trigger you in said work. you know the risk. you decided to read it. it’s on you.
Unpopular opinion incoming, but I don't want my writing to ever get good. Partly because the title of quote-unquote skilled writer is too much for me to bear, but also because being a quote-unquote skilled or quote-unquote good writer is not what I'm aiming at. That's not my end goal. Really, my end goal is just writing something occasionally, maybe, and then having lots of corny, tropey, nothing-burger fanfics I would have so much fun creating and so much fun showing to my three followers, one of whom will actually read some of them. And that's actually good with me. There is gonna be so much stuff in my life, so many things that are gonna require an actual skill and actual experience that, I really do not want to turn my writing hobby into one of them. So I'm not only letting it be bad, but if that happens, I'll let it be bad forever because I don't actually want it to be good
Bookmarked fics that have been deleted or put in a private collection that you just don't know what that fic was. There's just a note you've left about how amazing it was.
Lack of comments / difficulty coming up with comments?
Can only kudos once?
Unable to remember if you've already read a story before and can only figure it out after re-reading the whole thing?
Unsure if you private'd all your bookmarks?
What if I told you I had a 1 stop solution for all of these issues?
I have (with a little help from friends) written some code that you can download and use fairly easy. It even works on mobile! (Though you may have to download a different browser).
What it does:
"Rekudos Machine" that turns any additional clicks of the kudos button into a random "additional kudos" comment. (You can also edit and customize this list yourself!)
Bookmark note helper: automatically adds fic info (title, author, workID, and summary) in a collapsible element to bookmark notes (workID can be used to recreate the url for a wayback machine). This is also compatible with any existing bookmark notes you have as all the fic info is just added in front of any existing notes. If the fic info is already in the notes (determined by the presence of the workID), no changes are made to the bookmark notes. (Though for a WIP you can have it automatically add the last chapter up as an indicator as to how far you got before any future updates are made, and you can also get a read date added to the bottom of the notes each time the bookmark is updated.)
Bookmark auto tags: automatically adds tags for the wordcount range [for <1K words, 1-5K words, 5-10K words, 10-20K words, 20-40K words, 40-60K words, and >100K words] and tags unfinished works with "WIP" and a "Read up to chap X" tag.
Bookmark auto privacy: sets all new bookmarks to default to private, but keeps the existing privacy setting for any existing bookmarks.
This script also clones the subscribe button and the "Marked for later/Marked as read" button at the end of the fic. This is convenient to subscribe to an in progress fic or mark a previously marked for later as read.
Please note that as of right now, only seems to work for works, not series. Additionally, doesn't work if there is no summary. I am working on it though!
You can also see and edit the code yourself for everything! Get your fingers in there and customize it to your system and needs!
How to get it:
First you will need to have a user script manager. I personally downloaded Tampermonkey which I use with Firefox on desktop and the Kiwi browser on mobile. I also have the info from greasyfork as to what script managers are recommended for which browsers:
You will also need to download the script. I have uploaded the script to a website called "Greasyfork" (link here: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/470448). You will need an account I think but I don't remember exactly. Greasyfork is where I got the idea to create this, inspired by some of the scripts for AO3 that were up there (which I would highly recommend going through any of the scripts that come up when you search AO3, there's so much cool stuff out there). If you are not comfortable downloading from this website, feel free to dm me directly and we can figure out a different way. But I have downloaded many scripts from greasyfork and trust it personally.
Lastly, how I use this:
I personally bookmark every fic I read and (with the bookmark private'd) assigned it a 1-5 star rating on how likely I would recommend or re-read the story. (Though I do have the top tier bookmarks public)
Having every single fic in a bookmark collection allows me to see a better idea of my reading history than simply going to the history page as I can filter based on fandom, word count, pairings, etc.
I currently have around 7000 bookmarks, and it took me about 6 days to get all of my bookmarked works updated to this new system. This includes the time it took for me to tweak and de-bug the code and the fact that I was also sleeping, going to work everyday, etc. So even if you have A LOT of bookmarks, it's possible to convert all of them! Honestly after de-bugging the code, what was slowing me down the most was going so fast AO3 gave me the "retry later" error and my own finger cramps.
If you have any issues or ideas let me know!! I'm definitely a hobbyist and not a professional coder, so I'm open to improvements and learning! Just trying to spread the word since I spent so much time developing and testing it and have found it super helpful.
How to remove extra spaces between paragraphs from your ao3 fic
I've noticed a lot of fics on ao3 have double spaces between paragraphs, and that people sometimes complain about them.
So, here's a guide on how to remove those double spaces if you don't want them in your fic.
Here's an example of how the fic looks before, with the extra spaces ⬇️
🚨🚨🚨 Before doing ANYTHING, BACK UP YOUR FIC!!! ao3 does not save versions, so if you mess it up here, it will be messed up permanently.
To back it up, copy and paste the HTML code to a .txt file on your computer. Or copy and paste the Rich Text version to Google Docs or wherever you write your fics.
🚨🚨🚨 DO NOT CONTINUE UNTIL YOU HAVE A BACKUP. SERIOUSLY.
Okay, I'm assuming if you continue on, you have a reliable backup on your computer. This way if you mess up you can at least manually restore your original fic.
Step 1: Go to "Edit" and then make sure you have ✅ "HTML" selected, not 🚫"Rich Text" ⬇️
Here's the fic with the double spaces present. They get added if you write in something like Google Docs and you press Enter twice between paragraphs, to add a blank line between them.
When you copy and paste to ao3, that blank line turns into a blank paragraph that has one blank space in it. Because there's already space added between paragraphs, the extra blank paragraph creates a ton of extra space on ao3.
Here's where we get into a bit of coding....
In HTML, a paragraph is text surrounded by <p> at the beginning and </p> at the end.
What we want to do is remove all of the lines between your actual paragraphs that say:
<p> </p>
You can do this with a text editor program on your computer.
Step 2: Select all the HTML code for your fic in the ao3 editor.
Step 3: Copy it.
Step 4: Go to your computer and open up a text editor (I'm using Notepad on Windows).
Step 5: Paste the text from ao3 into Notepad ⬇️
Step 6: We're going to do a Find & Replace on those blank paragraphs. Select one of them, making sure you select ALL the code including the angle bracket symbols!
Then open the Find and Replace menu. On Notepad you can do this with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-F, and then click the little "^" symbol to expand the "Replace" part of the menu. Or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-H to show both Find and Replace.
Step 7: Paste the <p> </p> into the first "Find" textbox. Make sure you included the entire line, but don't have any extra spaces. Then in the second "Replace" textbox, leave it BLANK.
Step 8: Press the "Replace all" button. Your HTML code should now look like this, with full paragraphs and no empty paragraphs between them. Don't worry about the extra line breaks between paragraphs, they won't mess anything up and will be automatically removed when you save. ⬇️
Step 9: Select all the text from Notepad and Copy it.
Step 10: Go back to the editor in ao3, again making sure you're in "HTML" mode and not "Rich Text" mode, and paste in the code from Notepad to replace all the old HTML code.
It should look something like this. Again, don't worry about the extra blank lines in the HTML code.
Step 11: Click "Preview" to double-check that the fic looks the way you want. It should look like this, with no extra spaces between the paragraphs anymore. I recommend doing a manual eyeball check of the whole fic/chapter to make sure the formatting is correct.
Step 12: Once you've checked your fic over and you're sure that it is the way you want, press "Update" to save your changes!
If you mess up anything in the process and you have NOT pressed "Update/Post" yet, you should be able to press the "Cancel" button to go back to your original version.
But again, please make a back up of your fic beforehand-- it's the safest way to make sure you don't lose it if something goes horribly wrong.
PSA: When you “Subscribe” on a work’s page on Ao3, it subscribes to that work specifically.
If you want to subscribe to a user, you must click their name and hit Subscribe on the user page.
If you want to subscribe to a series, you must click on the series title and Subscribe from the series page.
(I’m saying this because I get subscriptions on one-shots that I have given no indication of planning to continue, including one that was in a series, so if I was to continue it, the subscribed person would not even know because it would be a new work in the series.)
Edit: okay, okay, I know you have your reasons... one day I'll make a ranking on my judgment upon all of them.
I remember seeing a post somewhere where someone was criticizing not being able to find their ships on AO3, because Merlin/Arthur was always the top ship in the fics. People were getting pretty mad about it, and I know what it’s like to be in a fandom where you don’t care about the dominant ship, so I thought I would share a little tip I saw on the feeds that people may or may not know about.
On Ao3, there is a way to filter the number one ship in a fic, to only find your own!
If you use it on desktop, you can put “otp:true” in the Any Field section of Work Search,
along with your ship of choice, and the results will filter out any fic where YOUR ship isn’t first in the tags! It’s helped me out a lot, so I hope it will help somebody else ! :)
When I first started using Scrivener it felt really complex and overwhelming, and all the templates were way more complicated than they needed to be. So, I made a template that’s VERY simple and solves a lot of common AO3 formatting issues. If you’re new to Scrivener, this template will be an easy way to get started!
⇢ get the template
Template is for Mac only, if you’re on a phone when you read this, go to your computer before you download it. [update: apparently it also works on Windows with Scrivener 3]
- Paragraph formatting similar to how it’ll look on AO3, with...
- No line break issues!
- No need to re-format your text inside the AO3 editor after you paste it in - bold and italics will be preserved (update: I’ve learned that sometimes people run into issues with AO3′s text editor on different browsers – if you have any issues, try a different browser or compile your scrivener file into html)
- Simple organization for your story, tags, summary, and author’s note
Template installation instructions below (it’s slightly more than just opening the file). Additional suggestions for easy posting and getting started with Scrivener are inside the template once you install it.
If you just try to open the template file like a normal file, Scrivener will refuse, and give you this incredibly useless error message.
You need to install it as a template first:
1. Open Scrivener and from the New Project screen, select Options > Import Templates:
2. Select the AO3 Template file you downloaded. It will be installed on the New Project screen in the Fiction Templates section, and you can open and use it from there.
