astridv | (no subject)

Today's a gloriously sunny fall day, ideal for climbing. And here's me, having a cold. $%#&! So far it's not even a bad cold *knock on wood* but climbing is gonna be a no-go for at least a few days.

On the plus side I had six Leverage eps stored up and used yesterday's forced inactivity to catch up on ep 5, 6, and 10 (because... Sophie, Nate and Sterling ♥) That did help put me in a better mood.

I was lamenting AO3's lack of searchability with some fellow Nat/Clint shippers and we got to talking about how what this archive needs is a way to distinguish between main vs secondary pairings/characters.

So that when I search for Rodney/Jennifer I don't get listed 90% breakup fic with endgame McShep; and when I search for Nick Fury I don't get 1800+ results with no way of finding the five or six stories which are actually centered around him. Not exactly conductive to diversity if the less popular content gets drowned out by more popular stuff to the point where it becomes almost impossible to find.

I don't know if the chances for a requested feature to be implemented are better the more people ask for it, but just in case:
These are the feature requests, the main/secondary tags suggestion is listed in the left column. You can add your vote on that site but I don't know how. I added my vote by submitting a new support request.

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what this archive needs is a way to distinguish between main vs secondary pairings/characters.

I would love that! It would mean being able to find Tony/Pepper that is actually about them and not about them breaking up on the way to other pairings! But I couldn't figure out how to vote either. Maybe you need to log into that site?

Yeah, finding actual Tony/Pepper among all the Steve/Tony and Tony/Bruce has to be frustrating, too.

ashen_key said she joined trello and then voted with no problem. But if you submit a support request on your own and say you want to add your vote to the already existing request, it works just as well. I noticed that my request already got added less than an hour after I submitted it.

Cool. I will look into doing that.

this archive needs is a way to distinguish between main vs secondary pairings/characters.

That would be seriously awesome, although I have no idea if it's possible. The way you enter meta information, there's just one field to put in the active ships in the story, and all of them go there. There's no way to distinguish between which is the primary one, as they go alphabetically.

Yeah, but I understand they getting rid of the original string search setup right now, in favor of a system that works? Guess we'll find out when tag search comes back online.

I don't know how difficult it would be to implement... but this is a pretty fundamental flaw in my eyes so I really hope it'll get fixed.

I wish they had this distinction too, and I really struggle with it when I'm tagging my own fic. Because I agree with you that searching for Minor Character X really sucks when you get eleven billion fics in which they only play a small role! But on the other hand, when the list of characters for a fic only consists of Main Characters A & B, I might skip it and miss a really great scene between A and B and X buried somewhere in the fic.

A main and secondary pairing distinction would be nice. I mean, being one of the sheeple I myself mostly end up reading the popular pairings anyway, but it still would be useful.

And I sympathize with you on the cold. I have picked up an annoying, wet cough and stuffed nose germ somewhere too.

This would be an awesome feature. I've hit this barrier too when trying to find more Steve/Natasha fics.