Official info post on Additional/Freeform Tags

I'm really happy that they say in comments that they're looking at ways to make it optional for users to hide single use tags. That's probably my number one wish for the moment. But when you look at that post alongside this one - archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/267 you can see how much the archive relies on keeping their volunteer pool. As the additional tags are increasing faster (as per those graphs posted a while back) it stands to reason that they'll need more volunteers as time goes by. And the wranglers on my flist and getting increasingly burnt out and frustrated by the attitude of "it'll all work out, we'll always have plenty of people."

The things they say when they talk about what could happen if wrangling stops at some point make no sense at all. The search/browse functions would be a complete mess and readers would find it very hard to find fics. The example they give "Fullmetal Alchemist", "Full Metal Alchemist", and "Hagaren is a bit of a smokescreen. It wouldn't be three different tags, you'd have to make individual searches for all the many different ways fans tag a fandom, and that doesn't even count the misspelled or oddly formatted tags. The fact that they'd continue to allow free tagging if wrangling fell apart is a really bad idea. But it seems like they aren't willing to even consider making a change to their original plans and the T&Cs.

Now that the side bar filters only show the top ten, search is much faster, but browsing is much more limited. You can use the tag landing pages, but for popular characters the child tags lists have already grown past the 300 limit of visible tags. That problems is made worse by having all the different combinations of a tag showing up on a list Sam/Dean Dean/Sam, Sam/Winchester/Dean Winchester, sam/dean, sam/dean (sort of) to give a small example.

If freeform tagging is to continue in it's current form (and let's face it, there's no chance of getting anyone to reconsider the format) then much better filters and browsing options are needed. As good as the new search is, you can only search for something if you know it exists. I've seen post after post lately of people saying they only read at AO3 if someone recs a fic, because browsing is just too much of a mess.

If the archive doesn't shift the balance of it's priorities away from writer's freedom, to reader's useability at least slightly, then they're going to continue to put people off. A good archive should balance the needs of posters and users, but from the outside it looks like AO3 has weighted their balance 90:10 in favour of the posters.