melannen | (no subject)

So. Busy. Have had so much to do it seems like there is no time left for anything-- we lost four of our most experienced people at work this month, and several of them were the sort of people who hoard responsibilities, so that's been fun. And then the friends I do comics with decided we were running a kickstarter NEXT MONTH so there's all my non-work free time. And then con.txt is in TWO DAYS and I totally over-extended myself there so we'll see if I get any of the 17 things on my "pre-con panic" checklist done. And then there's what's happening with church...

*shoves the 5,000+ words of new kent parson fanfic under the couch* that's not mine I haven't had time to write haha funny story actually it just blew off this dumpster, I think it caught an updraft from the fire

Plus it was Heat Wave Time so as soon as I get home from work I just want to melt into a 2-dimensional puddle with maximum heat-shedding surface area. Will I get four cosplays finished in the next two days? Stay tuned!

Anyway one of the panels I'm doing at con.txt is for AO3 tips & tricks, so, circle mine, what useful thing about the AO3 do you think I should share (ways to use the archive, docs or help resources, external tools, etc.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

oooh, con.txt! Hope you have so much fun! I won't be able to make it this year. :( flamebyrd has a great bookmarklets for ao3 that I love, which gives you the download links for multiple fics at once. I then select them, copy all links to clipboard, and JDownloader queues up the fics for me.

All of Flamebyrd's look really cool! Thanks.

I honestly don't think a lot of users know how tagging works at all. I wish people would at least stop using all the syns of things for the sake of completeness (as in Len/Mick, Leonard/Mick, Mick/Len, AND Mick/Leonard) all on the same fic. I think people do that because the way tags work on tumblr, but it just makes things cluttered on AO3.

Also how to filter out fandom and pairing tags by entering "-[digital syn]" on the side bar.

Preaching to the choir on that one, believe me!

This page has a number of external tools for AO3, but the one that has saved my life (or at least my fic reading habits) so many times is the StripEmpties feature, which gets rid of all the unnecessary extra space between paragraphs that some fics have.

Also, I just recently realized that you can get all the pairing tags for a given character by first going to that person's tag (example: Sybil Crawley) and then clicking on their name at the top of the tag, which takes you to their tag page (example). This is GREAT if you just want to find all the rare pairs for a character, as long as there aren't more than 300 child tags for the character, in which Ao3 will only show you the first 300.

That you! I'll make sure I include that.

Also, yeah, the tag landing pages could be more usable than they are, but I am so happy they were made available, even if it's not obvious where they are.

That would be on my list too. I think if more people knew about those pages and could see how things went together, they'd tag in a more useful manner.

PINCH HIT HELPER aka exchange mod lifesaver