#tagging help

[grapenehifics]

I'm writing a 3-chapter fic where the POV goes Anakin->Anakin->Obi-Wan. Would you tag that:

POV alternating

POV multiple

Both of the above

Voting ended onDec 15, 2025

Personally I feel like 'alternating' connotes switching POV every chapter, which this fic doesn't do, but 'multiple' also sounds like there are going to be more than two narrators. But if I'm the only one with this hangup then I will tag it POV Alternating and move on with it 😀

[myfandomrealitea]

You seem p good at answering AO3 questions, so.

I'm writing a story for a fandom that has A Lot of characters. I am making a whole lot of characters show up, mostly for a scene or two here or there. The whole story will be 5 chapters.

Would "cameo character A" etc work for those characters that show up? They DO have dialogue and interact with the main cast for a moment at least. But I don't wanna mislead fans of the characters by tagging names of ppl that show up like twice.

The 'Cameo Character A' tag is a great tag for this, yes. Its also not an official tag but you could also use 'Brief Character A Appearance.'

The purpose of tags is to tell your reader what your story entails and contains and where possible, to what degree. The best way to think about how or what to tag is 'will people search for this' and 'will people want to exclude this.'

Its also why there's multiple variations of one tag, to communicate the depth of which it is present in the work.

(E.g; violence/graphic violence/mild violence)

To go back to The Salmon Analogy, lets say you go to a restaurant and see that they've got a 'salmon platter' on the menu. You'd more or less expect salmon to be the primary or at least a significant ingredient, right? So it'd be pretty misleading if there was only a small sample portion of salmon amongst many other ingredients.

[spectralarchers]

Tagging help for smut on AO3 🥲

As someone very new to smut, has it always been etiquette to comment on fics and let authors know they've incorrectly tagged who the bottom is when other tags are context clues as to what's going on?

Like if someone is getting penetrated, do they need to be tagged bottom(character) regardless of whether they're Dom or Sub? 🤨

I'm at a loss because I don't have a lot of Ao3 tagging etiquette when it comes to smut, but my reasoning was "this person is Dom, is getting penetrated but the Sub isn't allowed to come until they've switched" so the whole bottom thing felt unusual in this scenario, but two different people have told me that I need to tag the Dom character as bottom too? 🤨

Is this a Call of Duty Fandom thing or is it just me who has vastly misunderstood etiquette?? 🥴

[whovian378]

Harry Potter Fanfiction Help

Hi, so I'm having a bit of trouble getting attention for my fic on AO3, and I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong

It's a Harry Potter fanfiction with a female Harry Potter (Lilith Potter) who's on the Dark side and has to survive against people like Albus Dumbledore and Molly Weasley who want to take advantage of her. She has spent her whole life being abused and stabbed in the back, but now she's fighting back.

It spans all years at Hogwarts and the few before where Lilith gains the family she never had (in the Malfoys and Hermione) and learns to trust people again

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

We posted a teaser a few months ago that got a lot of interest, but now it seems like everyone's wandered off and we don't know what to do.

Can anyone help? What are we doing wrong?

[dancerdedue]

i’m going to bring this question here in case someone can help me, but i have another blog that i run and what not and i’ve been having this very weird problem and i just want to know if someone can help in any way!

basically, my blog over there is acting as if i have the ‘can not be searched’ option on, except i do not at all. and for people who have never used that, basically, people aren’t able to search within your blog and, sometimes, it means your posts don’t make it into the general , public tumblr tags.

so basically, for example, i’ll make a post with a tag that’s like ‘bnha’ but when i click the ‘bnha’ tag, my post does not make it into it. i’ve had this blog for a long time now, so it isn’t the ‘new blog waiting period’ thing either. and, yes, i’ve also tried to give the posts a couple of days to show up, but still they do not show up. 

it’s really, really frustrating and i just want a solution that isn’t me having to remake that blog!!! i want my posts to show up in the tags!!!!

[etoilebleu27]

Something has been bugging me...

To make it simple, I wanted to use this site to upload my songlyrics. Sadly I don’t know how to make music, so I was wondering, will it be ok if I add a video of a song I used to “place” my lyrics along with the music / structure of the song? I’ll give appropriate credit (as the only thing made by myself are going to be the lyrics)...Uhhhh...I’m sorry, I don’t have any idea about how to share “songlyrics” (they’re not poetry, neither quotes...how should I share them?)

[fadingmoonbasement]

Tag List Hack

So I recently found a hack for tagging people that works a lot better than the post that was going around recently. The lovely @nyxwordsmith allowed me to fiddle with their taglist and attempt to bring order as well as allowed me to use said taglist and their posts as my examples for this step by step.

This is the final product, not all of it but definitely some of it.

  Step 1-Option 1: There are two options for step one. Here is the first. You go to a post that has your entire tag list tagged on it and then copy and paste each one into the Google excel spreadsheet one by one. OR

Step 2- Option 2: If you have them saved in a draft and tagged all one by one you can copy and paste from there as well. Sometimes it works better if you save the draft rather than just copy and paste from the post before it is saved.

Step 3: Copy and paste each of the tags individually. If you do more than one at a time it WILL NOT work. I know it is time-consuming but in the long run, it saves time. The important part of this step is to keep the hyperlinks!!!

Step 4: After you have moved your tag list into google docs and organized it the way you like. For example, Nyx has columns separating portions of the alphabet. You can also separate each tag list into different pages, which you can see in the photo below

Step 5: Copy and paste from the google doc into your Tumblr doc, I wouldn’t do too many at once because it might overload this hellsite. When they appear they will already appear tagged, rather than tagging them individually. 

Advice: If a blog will not tag and you know it should open a draft on tumblr tag that person then save the draft. Once the draft is saved then copy and past the link to google excel. 

The main take away is you NEED the hyperlinks for this method to work. It will take a long time for to get this set up but I promise once you do it is great. 

This concludes the tutorial on how to tag oodles of humans without pulling your hair out. Nyx used it on Chemically imbalanced last night and it seemed that all the tags worked and it took about 5 to 10 minutes for tagging people rather than the normal half an hour to an hour. 

If you have questions feel free to message me or shoot me an ask so I can help. 

Imma tag some authors who I know might need this: @a-valorous-choice @tinysidestrashcaptain @randomslasher @thelogicalloganipus @anxious-patton @sanders-sides-thuri @not-so-innocent-bi-sander @fanfictionsideaccount @fandomsandanythingelse @justanotherpurplebutterfly