ElvenSemi on Ao3, author of Keeping Secrets and other things that no one really cares about. My FAQ page is sooo outdated. I will fix it, one day.
This blog is mostly me interacting with my readers, posting Dragon Age (and other game) stuff, and crying about that stupid goddamned egg that ruined my life.
Hey guys, remember the sexy crab? Remember the sexy crab? Now he lives, fully voice acted by @darkandtwistedasmr and featuring the glorious art of @densewentz who cannot escape the crab! Enjoy him and his glorious accent! Enjoy the plot! Enjoy the evil seagull harpies!
I am both vindicated and extremely frustrated that this creative writing class has been exactly as bad as I assumed it would be before allowing people to talk me around on creative writing classes
[image ID: an AO3 tag that reads ‘implied suicidal thoughts’ but with exclamation marks in place of the letters i]
if you do this, congrats, you’ve totally defeated the purpose of the tagging system!
AO3 is not tiktok. it is not run by a mega-corporation that sanitizes content for advertisability and shadowbans or deletes content. it’s an ARCHIVE.
by doing this, it means people won’t be able to exclude or include your tags. and if they use a text-to-speech reader, you’ve made it ten times harder to understand.
this goes for tumblr too!! if you put “su!c!de tw” anybody who has “suicide tw” blacklisted will still see your post. it’s not a warning if the words aren’t able to be read or recognized by the systems.
no hate if you’ve been doing this! just fix your tags and don’t do it in the future.
This has likely already been said, but - while this is otherwise true - it’s not really how ao3 tags work. The tag wrangler can still read that and connect it to the tag that you can use to include or exclude. Probably still a pain for text-to-speech, though, and not at all necessary.
(The kind of ao3 tags that are the hardest to use to filter - they’re still perfectly fine otherwise - are ones that are really hyper-specific or include a lot of different concepts - for example, if you try to fit three different warnings into one tag. Anything that is unlikely to be used enough times to have a canonical form, although it’s surprising what does get used enough sometimes, so you never know. Anyway, people can still read them, and definitely no hate if you do that either, but if your goal is to have things filterable, that’s more what you need to watch out for on ao3).
yeah, the example tag has been used exactly once and that on a work that was posted two days ago in; it will undoubtedly be synned to canonical freeform Suicidal Thoughts as soon as a tag wrangler gets to it, and the moment that happens, the fic will vanish from the view of anyone who told the AO3 Exclude filter to avoid showing them works tagged Suicidal Thoughts or Suicide
allow the AO3 volunteers some time to do their thing
but also yes, be kind to screenreader users, because screenreader users will hear the example AO3 tag as “implied su exclamation point S exclamation point dal thoughts”, and obviously that’s no fun for anyone
Agreed. While yes, eventually the tag wranglers will get it under an appropriate parent tag, 1) this is one they shouldn’t have to do, and 2) until that happens, it’s still showing up for anyone who’s excluded the “suicidal thoughts” tag, and the way it’s written their eyes might skim over it without registering what “su!c!dal” is supposed to mean - I know I probably would.
Just use normal fucking letters and try to use existing tags for content warning unless you literally cannot find an iteration of what you’re trying to warn for.
cannedf0wer
elvensemi
unclefather
ilustrariane
flanexism-draws
neukgol
happydorid
1000feuille
saintofanything
savoryspectres
alexseanchai
madgastronomer
ruffboijuliaburnsides
