vampthenewblack | Lifehacks for AO3 (Reply)

There's a few things I've found that have made sharing and reading fic easier and less stressful for me. Thought I might share :)

Post Anonymously

There exists a collection on AO3 solely for the purpose of posting anon. Anonymous is for any fandom and for any reason you'd like to post anon. Lots of kink authors use it instead of a sock account, or instead of orphaning (you retain control over the work and can deanon later if you so choose).

Author name shows as Anonymous, and there's no link back to your profile from the work. Any comments or replies you make while logged in show as anon. And if you decide to deanon at a later date, they all automagically change to your pseud.

I'll sometimes use it until the work gets bumped off my dashboard (so I don't have to look at it). Various reasons. Crazy kinks, potential wank magnets, things I'm not entirely happy with but just need to get off my hard drive so I can move on.

Could be an option for Mating Games participants who don't wish to deanon. Just because you don't value the work, there might be someone else who does.

Spare Your Subscribers

I've found that some pairings *cough* stilinskicest *cough* or themes result in lost subscribers. If you give a shit (I don't, IMO if they're going to unsub for the odd rarepair in a sea of sterek it's their loss), posting your work to an anonymous collection means no author subscription email will go out to your subscribers. Leave it there for a bit, a day to be safe, then remove from that collection. No author subscription email will go out (that only happens if the entire collection is deanoned).

Also handy for backdated works for that fandom you wrote for years ago and are slightly embarrassed about now (but archive them anyway - it's history, and god knows FFn isn't a safe place), dodgy kinks, anything you'd rather not go out to your subscribers but still wish to post and have control over.

Keep in mind that you probably have some subscribers who'll want to read anything you write, regardless of pairing or crazy kink.

If all you're doing is posting a bunch of backdated (or current, whatever) works and don't want to spam the hell out of your subscribers, if you get them all posted in quick succession, they'll go out in one email.

There's no definite time limit on this, but there is always a delay before the emails go out. So if you get them done quick, depending on how many there are, you can be quite confident that you won't flood any inboxes.

Switch Author

Ever post to a sock account and regret it? If you delete from one account and post to another, you lose all the kudos and comments, and anyone who bookmarked it will see a 'sorry, this was deleted' message. I hate that.

It's actually really easy to switch a work from one account to another without deleting it or losing anything. Just edit it, and add the pseud you want to transfer it to as a co-author.

You'll have to log in and out of each account a couple times as you accept authorship on the other account, and then go back to the first. There's an option there to remove yourself as author, leaving a single author on the work.

I've done this before, and it didn't send out an author notification on the switch. If you add any more chapters to it however, it will.

Subscribe to a Fandom or Pairing

Useful for rare fandoms or rarepairs (I don't recommend this for sterek, you'll drown in emails) use 'Feed > New feed item' on IFTTT to send you an email whenever anything posts to that fandom or pairing.

This is the same process used by the ao3-feed tumblrs.

Subscribe to Additional Tags

You can also use IFTTT to get emails for your favourite kink. Use 'Feed > New feed item matches', give it the feed link for the fandom or pairing you want, then define a single tag as the keyword (use the canonical for best results), and you can set it to send you an email whenever something posts with that tag.

It's not infallible, and may not work if the author doesn't use the canonical tag.

Can also be used to subscribe to an author to get only the works they post in a particular fandom or pairing (use the author's pseud instead of a tag).

Userscripts

There were a bunch of AO3 userscripts hosted on userscripts.org until that site fizzled and died recently.

There were scripts for hiding certain tags/works/authors, greying out incomplete works, saved search filters, new work autofills, 'you've already read this', and more. One of my faves is the kudos ratio script by theaeblackthorn.

At this time there doesn't seem to be an established alternative (via a quick google, I could be mistaken) to userscripts.org yet, but I'll update this when there is.