Archive of Our Own ^beta

• Part 1: The Basics
• Part 2: Advanced Filtering
• Part 3: The Round-Up

This concludes our little series in advanced searching and browsing! As always, all the tricks and little hacks mentioned here are very much optional. Simply clicking your way through the Archive tags and playing around with the existing filter options will already give you what you're looking for in the vast majority of cases.

For those wanting to build more complicated searches, here's all information in handy list format:

• The "Search Within Results" Field and You, Part 1
• The "Search Within Results" Field and You, Part 2
• Tag IDs for your convenience:
  • Categories:
    • Gen: 21
    • F/M: 22
    • M/M: 23
    • Other: 24
    • F/F: 116
    • Multi: 2246
  • Ratings:
    • Not Rated: 9
    • General: 10
    • Teen: 11
    • Mature: 12
    • Explicit: 13
  • Warnings:
    • Author Chose Not To: 14
    • No Archive Warnings Apply: 16
    • Graphic Depictions Of Violence: 17
    • Major Character Death: 18
    • Rape/Non-Con: 19
    • Underage: 20
• Unofficial userscripts and tools (incomplete list)
• Searching and browsing on the AO3 (tutorial)
• Archive FAQs

A friendly note to fanwork creators:

As we've said before, you are free to use whatever tags you wish on the Archive. However! Descriptive tags, common concepts that people might want to search and filter for, and a work blurb that is easy to scan when scrolling down a list of works - these will help other users find (and then read, watch, look at, or listen to) your stuff.

For inspiration, you can search through all existing tags by character name, keyword, or phrase. Tick the "Canonical" ticky to only see tags that will show up in the filters! Examples:

• all canonical Relationship tags containing the word Ichabod
• all Additional tags containing the word Ichabod

Clicking on a tag (e.g. Ichabod Crane/Abbie Mills) will show you how it relates to other tags on the Archive.

Happy tagging!