AO3 News

Updates to "No Fandom" Additional Tags, April 2025

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Published:
2025-04-15 16:15:54 UTC
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Spotlight on Tag Wrangling

AO3 Tag Wranglers continue to test processes for wrangling canonical additional tags (tags that appear in the auto-complete) which don't belong to any particular fandom (also known as "No Fandom" tags). This post will provide an overview of some of these upcoming changes.

Previous Tag Wrangling updates can generally be found the @ao3org Tumblr. While we plan to announce No Fandom tag updates on AO3 News going forward, this may not be true of all wrangling updates. It's likely some updates may remain solely distributed via the @ao3org Tumblr, especially those that only affect one or two fandoms. The way we distribute updates is subject to change as we work through this new process.

These discussions were the result of internal follow-up discussions related to January's updates. They involve creating new canonical No Fandom additional tags or updating the format of older canonical tags, but none of these updates will change the tags users have added to works. If a user-created tag is considered to have the same meaning as a new canonical, it will be made a synonym of the canonical tag, and works with that user-created tag will appear when the canonical tag is selected.

In short, these changes only affect which tags appear in AO3's auto-complete and filters. You can and should continue to tag your works with any version of these tags you prefer to use.

Reader and Reader-Insert-related Canonicals

During this round of updates, we tested a discussion method which permitted many related canonicals to be canonized at once, instead of each canonical having its own separate discussion period. This allowed us to canonize over 200 additional tags from one discussion.

Consequently, we've canonized many additional tags related to Reader-Insert. All Reader-Insert modifier tags will be subtags of Reader-Insert. The full list is available via tag search.

Pregnancy-related Canonicals

As mentioned in the last update, we will create a canonical for Trans Mpreg | Trans Male Pregnancy. We will also create a new canonical for Past Trans Mpreg | Trans Male Pregnancy, which will be made a subtag of Trans Mpreg | Trans Male Pregnancy.

To improve clarity, we will also be decanonizing the current canonical Fpreg and canonizing two new tags: Female Pregnancy and Fpreg | Female/Female Pregnancy. Tags which are currently synonyms of Fpreg will be made synonyms of Female Pregnancy or Fpreg | Female/Female Pregnancy as appropriate.

Lastly, we will be making 3 new canonical tags related to pregnancy in Omegaverse settings:

  • Omegaverse Omega Pregnancy
  • Omegaverse Alpha Pregnancy
  • Omegaverse Beta Pregnancy

In Conclusion

These are just some of the changes we are making to No Fandom canonical additional tags. Some of these changes have already been implemented, while others are currently underway. Creating and renaming tags requires a lot of work from wranglers to implement, so large changes will likely take some time to complete after this post has been published.

While we won't be announcing every change we make to No Fandom canonical tags, you can expect similar updates in the future on the tags we believe will most affect users. If you're interested in the changes we'll be making, you can follow AO3 on Bluesky @wranglers.archiveofourown.org, Twitter/X @ao3_wranglers, or Tumblr @ao3org for future announcements.

You can also read the previous updates on tags updated and created through this process, linked below:

For more information about AO3's tag system, check out our Tags FAQ.

Lastly, in addition to providing technical help, Support also handles requests related to how tags are sorted and connected.​ If you have questions about specific tags, which were first used over a month ago, please contact Support instead of leaving a comment on this post.

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