Comment on Searching and browsing on the AO3

  1. Nary Sat 21 Feb 2015 01:18AM UTC

    Not all those who wander are lost

    Hi Marlow,

    (I'll copy the same response I gave to Jeane25 to make sure you see it too!)

    Hi there!

    Many thanks for asking about this issue. You can already exclude works by using the filters, though the feature currently has some limitations.

    How to do it:

    1) Go to the work list you want to filter — for example, the Harry Potter fandom work list: http://archiveofourown.org/tags/Harry%20Potter%20-%20J*d*%20K*d*%20Rowling/works

    2) Select the tag you want to get (for instance, Hermione Granger/Harry Potter) if it’s among the Top 10 tags of any type, or start typing it in the ‘Other Tags’ field.

    3) Write the tags you want to use to exclude works in the ‘Search within results’ field, surrounded by quote marks and preceded by a minus sign, like the following:

    -"Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley"

    4) Click the ‘Sort and Filter’ button. This would be the result:
    http://archiveofourown.org/works?utf8=%E2%9C%93&work_search%5Bsort_column%5D=revised_at&work_search%5Bother_tag_names%5D=Hermione+Granger%2FHarry+Potter&work_search%5Bquery%5D=-%22Harry+Potter%2FGinny+Weasley%22&work_search%5Blanguage_id%5D=&work_search%5Bcomplete%5D=0&commit=Sort+and+Filter&tag_id=Harry+Potter+-+J*d*+K*d*+Rowling

    The main limitation is that the ‘Search within results’ field doesn’t use the tagging structure — so you can’t use one version of the tag, like “Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley”, and expect the Archive to know, for example, that you want works tagged with “background Harry/Ginny” also excluded. Basically, that field only does a textual match.

    To make the search more accurate, you can instead use the tag’s ID, which in this case would be:

    -filter_ids:3548

    This would be the result:

    http://archiveofourown.org/works?utf8=%E2%9C%93&work_search%5Bsort_column%5D=revised_at&work_search%5Bother_tag_names%5D=Hermione+Granger%2FHarry+Potter&work_search%5Bquery%5D=-filter_ids%3A3548&work_search%5Blanguage_id%5D=&work_search%5Bcomplete%5D=0&commit=Sort+and+Filter&tag_id=Harry+Potter+-+J*d*+K*d*+Rowling

    You can read more about how to browse and search the Archive (including how to find out a tag’s ID number) in these posts: http://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/329

    Apart from that, there are some unofficially made userscripts that can help you hide or block blurbs with predetermined preferences, or to set search preferences - both BlurbBlocker and AO3 Savior can be helpful:

    http://archiveofourown.org/faq/cool-stuff

    Please don’t hesitate to contact us again if you have any other questions or run into any problems.

    Best,
    Nary
    AO3 Support

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