I have no idea how to find stories on AO3 that I like but I am discovering many exciting ways to find stories that make me uncomfortable

@kasdeya

that's so relatable >///<

I've had so much trouble figuring out how much I have to filter out.

@kasdeya it sounds like you're about to discover the wonderful world of tag filtering

there’s a way to filter out tags on AO3? I’ve been trying to figure that out but so far I’ve only found a reddit post from 7 years ago saying that you can do a workaround involving creating an RSS feed

@kasdeya you can do it per search or - get this - you can permanently block them using a site skin

@smolcasm woahh huh! using CSS to hide them is really smart

do you know of a guide on how to use AO3 that goes over stuff like how to filter out tags? because I can’t find that anywhere in the UI and this site is so complicated lol

starting to think that AO3 writers are competing to create the most intricate and demented media crossover stories possible

@kasdeya there's the site skin thing i linked, but if you just want to filter on a per-session basis, check out the side search bar when you're browsing a tag or fandom to finetune your search results

@kasdeya oh, right, i forgot how inefficient the site's keyword search is. i tend to get much better and more granular results when i search by tag

if you're looking for a particular fandom (for instance, TNG) it tends to help to find and click its fandom tag (there's a big list in the Fandoms button on the top left) so you can use the tag search's filter and sort functions (which are far less robust on keyword search)

if you're looking for a specific character, ship, or even something more freeform, you can search by those tags too

@smolcasm omgg thank you! I thought I was going crazy lol or maybe I was stuck on some weird experimental version of AO3. now I see what you’re talking about, and this is way better for searching for things

I found a TNG story that started off pretty interesting with Geordi La Forge in sickbay recovering from a mysterious illness and everything was leading to an interesting plot twist of some kind but then the plot twist was him and Data kissing

omg wait I actually found a pretty good one! about Q helping Picard in his own irritating way while he was assimilated by the Borg