Context is obsessively running searches on Supernatural fic to distract from dissertation, specifically (this week) canon or canon-adjacent Sam/Gabriel longfic. And in this fandom, at least half of authors writing human!AUs don't tag them.
Here is current iteration, in case it's helpful for anyone:
- Obvious: exclude crossovers and incomplete works, pick a date range (since 01/01/2017), filter out the most popular AU tags in the sidebar and add an exclusion for a/b/o.
- less obvious: embrace rather than reject Dean/Castiel; most sam/gabe otp fic is going to be human!AUs, and even though what remains will include a lot of background pairing, i don't mind having it in the search.
- using your summary search trick, this morning I added "-summary: au AND -summary: novak" because sometimes people put AU in the summary but not the tags, and also most people use Novak as the last name of human!angels (which is kind of ugh but also understandable).
I don't have a word count filter yet because most of high-kudos stuff rising to the top in this current iteration is already >5k.
So that's down to 500 works. It's probably filtering out a lot of good stuff (e.g. does '-summary: au' exclude, like, sausage?) but it's spn so there's still a sh!tton. And there are still about 5 obvious AUs on the first page by kudos, but it's better than before ...
People often do tag their AUs with like "mechanic dean" or whatever, but I'm not about to add exclusion filters for every possible alternate profession for every character.
no subject
Here is current iteration, in case it's helpful for anyone:
- Obvious: exclude crossovers and incomplete works, pick a date range (since 01/01/2017), filter out the most popular AU tags in the sidebar and add an exclusion for a/b/o.
- less obvious: embrace rather than reject Dean/Castiel; most sam/gabe otp fic is going to be human!AUs, and even though what remains will include a lot of background pairing, i don't mind having it in the search.
- using your summary search trick, this morning I added "-summary: au AND -summary: novak" because sometimes people put AU in the summary but not the tags, and also most people use Novak as the last name of human!angels (which is kind of ugh but also understandable).
I don't have a word count filter yet because most of high-kudos stuff rising to the top in this current iteration is already >5k.
So that's down to 500 works. It's probably filtering out a lot of good stuff (e.g. does '-summary: au' exclude, like, sausage?) but it's spn so there's still a sh!tton. And there are still about 5 obvious AUs on the first page by kudos, but it's better than before ...
People often do tag their AUs with like "mechanic dean" or whatever, but I'm not about to add exclusion filters for every possible alternate profession for every character.