DW fic archive thoughts

[extrapenguin]

I, unlike some, am not boycotting AO3, but I have made a NeoCities backup archive for my fics, vids, art, and singular IF. (I might add a resources page for stuff I've found useful in my time in e.g. cfandoms.) I'm wondering whether I should back up things to a DW comm as well and maybe get some actual non-AO3 feedback. Apparently even if you backdate things will show up in order posted, not ordered by the set date? Which means I'd want to post them in chronological order. Possibly starting with 2020 fics? Or 2021 - neocities is 2021 + outliers from before.

Tags would be for fandom and I guess I'd want some sort of topic tag (e.g. for t: smut: f/f, t: worldbuilding), but what other sorts of topics/themes/etc would people find useful/interesting on a DW fic archive? What about character tags? (I am at heart a gen author. Ship tags are almost certainly not happening, though ships would be mentioned in the preamble of the post.)

None of this is happening until ... well, possibly very slowly later this month, but let's say mid-October. Unlike with neocities, I won't be bulk uploading, but taking a more measured pace, sort of like a time travel jaunt. I'm not sure if anyone else will be interested in this pacing for a reread/retread of my 2020 output, but I figured it might be a cool way to do crossposting in a manageable way.

Comments

[starandrea]

Apparently even if you backdate things will show up in order posted, not ordered by the set date?

This is true on other people's reading lists (if you don't check the box "don't show on reading list," anything you post will be organized by the time you started writing the post, regardless of when or whether you backdate it), but anyone visiting your journal will see posts organized by the date you backdate them to.

[fiachairecht]

This is only true for personal journals unfortunately - you can't use dates to reorder posts in communities, unfortunately, nor can you 'don't show on reading pages' a backdated post.

[starandrea]

Oh, that's good to know!

[atamascolily]

This is a great question and one I've been contemplating myself. For myself, I decided that while I might copy-paste AO3 tags into the main text body, DW tags do not function like AO3 tags, and I'm not going to try to force them to be, so I won't be using as many tags as one might expect on another platform.

The Fancake community has a lot of useful tags I plan on cribbing--in addition to fandom, they also tag by fic length, and they have a long list of themes and common tropes. Not all of those are necessarily relevant, but it's a good place to start.

[extrapenguin]

Oh yeah, fic length! That would be a useful thing to tag. Now I'll just have to make a histogram of my fic lengths to figure out the most useful length category boundaries!!!

Fancake doesn't work for me at all because of its format (I read canon-first, am not into most of the common tropes, and theme/trope-based reccing just plain Does Not Work for me), but it is a potentially useful list of themes/tropes... *goes to crib*

[trobadora]

I still intend to back up my stuff on neocities too, and update my DW fic index, but haven't found the time yet. *sighs*

Apparently even if you backdate things will show up in order posted, not ordered by the set date?

Yeah, on a personal journal you can change the order however you like, but on a comm it'll always remain in the order posted because it's meant to work for multiple people all seeing each other's stuff as it's posted, regardless of time zones and time stamps and so on.

[extrapenguin]

Ah yes, time, that thing neither of us have. I had project deadlines at work get rearranged and now it seems this will be a December project.

[independence1776]

The tags in my fanworks backup comm fall into five major categories: character, fandom, format, genre, and rating. I have a handful of ship tags because my occasional shipfics are mostly rare pairs or triads and I figured people might like to find those more easily. The other thing I did was create appendix tags to sort fics into some themes; for example: "appendix: order 66 didn't happen."

* It's is nowhere near ready for public viewing because of the "can't backdate or hide from reading list" thing so all posts are locked until I'm done crossposting in chronological order. It's very slow going.

[extrapenguin]

Main character might be a thing worth tagging, yes. I write a broad enough spectrum of ships that I'm afraid of running out of tags if I do them all (plus I'm just ... not that ship-motivated tbh), but I might end up with something like tags for ship: f/f etc so people can e.g. find all the Mace Windu gen. (c: mace windu,ship: none?mode=and)

[flowersforgraves]

I have length tags and tags for specific events (e.g. "event: hc_bingo: round 8" or "event: fffx: round 1"), as well as topic/genre tags -- stuff like "type: experimental" or "type: character study". still unsure if I want to include specific kink tags, so reading along in the comments here.

[extrapenguin]

I don't think I'll tag for specific events (beyond maybe a "for: exchange" + "for: me" binary/trinary), but yes, length tags are a good idea. I guess kink tags would be useful if you think the kinks are a/the major draw, or if you write enough of each of them to make it A Category rather than a single post with a single floating tag?

[krait]

From 'back in the day' when posting/archiving fic on LJ/DW was more common, I think the most frequent tags I saw were fandoms, characters, pairings, with length, series, and kink/trope less frequently tagged but still pretty usual.

Given the tag character limits, the categories were often abbreviated, e.g. f: Fullmetal Alchemist, c: Edward Elric, c: Alphonse Elric, c: Alfons Heiderich, p: Edward/Alfons or similar. In addition to being helpful in distinguishing what you were looking at, when that might not be apparent by name alone (if a fic was just tagged "Fullmetal Alchemist," you wouldn't know if that was a tag for a fandom or for a specific character, and might miss out on some fic if you didn't realise it was the character and you needed to check another tag for FMA fics not featuring him), it also kept the tags together by type thanks to DW alphabetising tags, so it was easier to browse all the available fandoms, or all the characters, etc. instead of scrolling through a list where the different types of tags are all mixed together.

[extrapenguin]

Oh yes, length! That is probably also a thing people might filter for? And I'll definitely be abbreviating & categorizing the tags.