I think this AO3 filtering trick deserves more attention

[ratcreature]

Unfortunately the tag filtering on AO3 still doesn't have an easy way to exclude stories with certain tags, but I didn't realize that you can use a - with the "Search Within Results" in the sidebar to narrow things down and not only in the full search. (I almost never use the full AO3 search, I dislike it.)

And even better, you can (in an admittedly somewhat tedious way) exclude wrangled relationship tags by their id, so that you don't exclude text matches in the summary accidentally. This archive news post describes how. I won't use this for casual searches, but it is worth looking up the ids of the few pairings I really loathe to get them excluded in all my searches. And apparently there is an unofficial userscript for this too, so maybe I'll install that... Right now I use a blurb blocker to filter, but it would be more efficient to get the search right rather than hide results.

Comments

[astridv]

Oh, I have to check the id out. Right now I'm using blurb block for things like clint/coulson because otherwise I get too many false positives, but now half my search pages consist of yellow blocker bars.

[ratcreature]

Yeah. I block several Loki pairings like that, but for some searches that is a lot of blocker bars cluttering up the page.

[musesfool]

Ooh, thanks for the link to that! Now with the relationship id tag, I can get rid of Steve/Tony without losing stories that Tony is also a character in.

[ratcreature]

Yeah. I want to get rid of Loki pairings without loosing stories with Loki as character. It's a bit tedious, but better than not being able to exclude pairings at all.

[sholio]

I knew about the minus (although the results are often not exactly what I had in mind) but the tag ID sounds like a better way of excluding certain combinations without blocking too much (i.e. in White Collar, excluding any pairing combination of Peter, Elizabeth, or Neal basically excludes every fic in the fandom).

I didn't know about blurb block, either. How does that work?

[ratcreature]

Blurb block is basically like the Tumblr scripts that collapse posts for you. You install the userscript in your browser, set up certain strings, like mine is set to collapse 'Loki/Thor', and it collapses that story blurb, just telling you that it blocked something, and if you still want to see it, you can click to expand. You could probably set it up for kinks you dislike or anything else too. The downside is that you don't see more stories isplayed, so if you block a common thing, your browsing page is just a bunch of collapsed blurbs.

[krait]

Yay! I discovered that "-[tag]" works by sheer desperation, a few months ago, but never thought to tell people about it; I figured everybody else already knew, and it was just me being clueless and flaily that was behind me not knowing.

I use it to exclude Human AUs, which it works very well for since that is not a thing that comes up in-text much if at all. (And which there is a vast overabundance of in my largest fandom, making sorting through fic hard without some means of exclusion!)

[ratcreature]

Yes, exclusion is really useful in large fandoms. I hope it gets implemented in a more convenient way soon.