Useful things for Archive of Our Own

[sally_maria]

While I was sharing things, I hope that people might find some of these helpful.

Some of these are userscripts, for which you need Greasemonkey (Firefox) or Tampermonkey (Chrome or Opera).


AO3 Crossover Savior - For hiding stories with too many fandoms from the search pages.
AO3 Lazier - Adds a button to take you to the latest posted chapter
AO3:Kudosed and seen history - for those of us who forget whether we've read a story before - show the ones you've given kudos to or marked as seen.

AO3 Saved Filters - a way to apply a specific filter every time you search on the archive, so you can block stories from a specific fandom, or with a specific pairing. It combines very well with...

"The "Search Within Results" Field and You" - instructions on how to rule items out of searches, using the internal number codes for certain tags - fandoms, pairings or characters.

Something else I went looking for was a way of loading stories without the collections they are part of, as I'm picky enough to want all my bookmarks to look the same. I asked over at the dreamwidth AO3 community and somebody made this bookmarklet.


So, if there's any particular function you want to know about, it's worth looking there, at ao3some or at all the userscripts people have written for the archive.

Comments

[sallymn]

Oooh, thank you! It may take me a while to work out how to use them (Luddite me) but they will be a godsend for reading...

[sally_maria]

You're welcome - and if you do have any problems sorting them out, do let me know, and I'll do my best to help.

[heliopausa]

Thank you! This looks intriguing. :) I've heard vaguely of some of these, but thought maybe they weren't available for non-paying members. You've mentioned Crossover Savior - what is [ordinary] Savior (which I've also seen mention of, but haven't known where to ask about)?

[sally_maria]

You're welcome. :-) As these are things you run in your browser, rather than something supplied by the website, they do require you to know about them, but there's no cost involved.

The original * Savior was Tumblr Savior, which enables you to block posts on Tumblr that contain particular words or phrases. There's an AO3 Savior userscript on the page I linked to that does pretty much the same thing for the archive - one way of blocking stories from search results you don't want to read.

(By default AO3 search is very good at positive searches, but not so good at eliminating things you know you don't want, which is why people have created these unofficial ways of doing so.)

[amalthia]

Crossover savior is amazing!

[sally_maria]

:-) I've edited it to make the threshold value slightly higher (I went with 5) because a lot of perfectly good MCU stories have multiple fandoms attached to them, but it does a great job of blocking both massive multi crossovers, and the "stories" that consist of lots of ficlets in different fandoms.

[amalthia]

I edited mine to 5 as well... :)