I’m currently building a new fanfiction archive and recommendation platform, heavily inspired by AO3 and FicHub.net. My core architecture is based on AO3’s model, but I’m expanding it with the ability to scrape and download fics from multiple other sites, alongside integrated forums and a recommendation engine.

My motivation for this project came from using Reddit user u/NTaya’s recommendation engine. While brilliant, it was too slow for my liking because it had to scrape AO3 bookmarks in real-time every time I requested a rec. A local database would make this process nearly instantaneous, but I quickly realized I couldn't easily source that volume of data on my own.

That realization led me to build a community-driven archive: the more people use the platform, the better the recommendations become. With that in mind, I started adding features I believe users would appreciate, such as a forum for discussion, built-in translation tools, and a few ideas I picked up from the AO3 roadmap.

To help guide my development, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the fanfiction ecosystem. What do you think the various sites (FFN, Wattpad, etc.) do well? More importantly, what are the worst parts of AO3 specifically? Since I’ve based my archive heavily on AO3’s structure, I want to know what pain points to avoid and what features are truly essential to the user experience.

Thanks in advance for your feedback.

 

For me, ao3 is pretty good, but missing a few key bits of functionality to make it fantastic.

The first is primary pairings vs secondary pairings. I could care less if Hermione/Draco is a background pairing, but I certainly don't want it was the primary pairing. The second is POV. I hate that I search for 'Harry Potter' as a character, and can get 90% non-HP focused stories, but they still tag him because he is present in some fashion.

This is where ffnet shined. Because you only had four characters to list, you only tagged the most important ones.

Many people on DLP will say they dislike Ao3 freeform tags and the fact people overtag (which is true), but I think the real issue is that there is no main 'important' tags that are limited to x amount of tags (like 4-5 tags/pairings). You would need to change the search functionality to handle this too.

In the end, tags would be split into two sections. Primary, which are limited to four or five tags, and Secondary, which can be dozens and freeform. The search will allow things like avoid Hermione/Draco as a primary tag but allow it as a secondary tag.

Another bit, I dislike how I cannot add fics to a collection. I can bookmark it to a collection but to officially add it to a collection, it has to be done by the writer (or they have to disable a setting that is automatically disabled for a new user).

 

Some things I wish Ao3 had. I'm sure someone will tell me that there's ways of doing these anyway, though.

1 - in my favourite/followed author list, a "last update published" date. This is doable for followed stories, but not for an author

2 - an "exclude" option for a specific story, fandom, or tag - in my "follow". For instance, if I want to stay subscribed to updates from the author GRRM, but don't care about his HOTD series, that's not doable.
Similarly, a "expand to more" option in the Exclude option in searches. Otherwise it's just using the freeformat search box.

3 - "My searches" to be a predefined list of searches you can apply. So I can have a saved "finished fics over 50k" or "WiP, updates within last 30 days, over 15k, 3+ chapters", rather than using bookmarks in my browser.

4 - Echoing Lindsey, major and minor tags. I don't want to read a Jurassic Park story with a focus on the author's Ellie Sattler/Sarah Harding pairing... But I don't care if they're married and together on screen.

Edit:
A few things Ao3 does that I really like

1 - "view entire work" button. Very nice, thank you.

2 - "download this work". Absolute perfection. One of the best features on a site.

3 - Collections. (Yes, I know FF does the same, but they're a bit trickier to navigate)

4 - Pseuds. Lets you group usernames from other sites, or split your writings by genre/fandom/smut level

5 - clickable tags. The design is very human.

6 - Series, and not being locked to a single one.

 

To be honest, it might be nostalgia but I like ffnet's minimalist system. Short summary, tags limited to a couple genres and characters, and a search system that actually works with these. Give it an actual living admin and proper bot filtering, and it would still be the dominating ff site. Maybe add some other categories for all the people who can't live without their trigger warnings or whatever, but the basis is more than sound.

As for AO3, I concur the tag system is the main issue. At this point, most of them are completely useless as a way to know what the story is about and only make the search pages feel bloated. Personally I just read the first couple relationship tags to know who the story is actually about, read the blurb if they're characters I give a damn about, and only parse through the other tags to check obvious red flags.
- I hard disagree with Lindsey about freeform tags, but I mean mostly the ones feeling like a five-year-old's first blog article cut into ten tags. I'd rather some moderation decides whether a freeform tags deserves being added to the pool before it appears (or tells you there's already an existing tag for that) or dumped, but I get with AO3's volume it might not be feasible.
- main/POV pairings/characters would be great, of course (although that's just copium to use AO3 while admitting ffnet is better)
- the ability to blanket-block some tags outside of searches, like you mute users, would be a godsend to save some time.
- I'd like to downvote wrongly applied tags sometimes, though most people probably can't make the difference with "I don't like this tag".
- categorise the tags depending on how spoiler-y they are. They are things you absolutely don't want to be surprised by, but there are also plot developments you don't want to know beforehand from the tags (I'm thinking "Major Character Death" or "Betrayal" here). Or is that something only boomers enjoy nowadays?
- child tags are a must. Like, if I filter "Modern setting", I'd like it to filter all the trash "Coffee shop" or "Highschool" AUs or whatever next bs they've invented. Or blanket remove "Incest" and have all such pairings blocked whether or not the author thought of making a separate tag, for e.g.

- would be useful for characters who have several names, too, to make the tag box less bloated. I'd choose "Lelouch/Kallen" every day over "Lelouch vi Britannia | Lelouch Lamperouge/Kallen Kozuki | Kallen Stadtfeld", and it's the same for all the superhero fandoms.​

For both sites, one change that would be worthwhile imo is to add the possibility to give a review of the entire work, aimed at potential readers, in addition to the current comments on a specific chapter (which are more akin to a PM to the author, or a forum message on AO3).

 

Grabbed the best feedback here and shipped it.

Primary vs. secondary tags. We split character and pairing tags into primary and secondary tiers. A fic registers its main characters via an attribute (the "dark Harry protagonist" case is tracked, so a search for the MC returns fics where he's actually the MC, not just present). Pairings carry a polarity field (romantic vs. platonic), so a background Draco/Hermione doesn't pollute your search for a Draco/Hermione ship fic the way it does on AO3. Range, threshold, and polarity filters all work against this.

Exclude a specific fic, fandom, or series from a follow. Exactly as requested. Subscriptions to an author are per-follow, and each follow can carry exclusions for individual works, series, or fandoms. You keep the author's updates, silently dropping the one series you don't care about. Straight port of the GRRM/HOTD example.

Saved searches. Native saved searches: name a query, run it from your library, and it persists. You can save "finished fics over 50k," "WiP updated in the last 30 days," whatever—no browser bookmarks. The saved-search filter takes the same operators as the main search, so "finished >50k" is a one-liner.

Add fics to collections. The writer-gated collection problem is gone. Anyone can submit a fic to a collection; curators vote, and it lands. The submission and approval queue is the same one we were already using for work submission, translations, and such.

I think the only thing left from these is viewing the entire work and being able to add a fic to multiple series.

- View entire work
- Download in EPUB/MOBI/PDF/AZW3, plus a mail-to-Kindle path
- Collections with a way in that isn't the author's opt-in
- Pseuds / multi-account pen names, and grouping pseuds across other sites
- Clickable tags
- Series that don't lock a fic to a single one

Two things from the thread we didn't ship yet, flagged.

1. Blacklisting tags site-wide.
2. Child tag / alias normalization (Lelouch/Kallen instead of the full pseud soup). A tag-alias system is the plan but hasn't landed.

On ffnet's "minimalist is better" take: partly agree. The four-character limit forced signal over noise, but it also threw away everything else. I've opted for letting curators edit the tags with an approval queue so that other curators can vote, and I'll probably sort the tags by the total positive minus negative votes they get to show higher-signal tags first. I'm working on a moderation system similar to Discourse forums, where users gain trust and privileges over time so the site is self-moderated, so there shouldn't be issues with there being no admins present.

The recommendation engine is built too—local, near-instant, with no real-time bookmark scraping—and it gets sharper the more the archive gets used, since it's running against our own data instead of whatever AO3's rate limits let us pull.

 

I suppose that the public bookmark system can act as a sort of overall review feature on AO3. I often delve into an author's bookmarks to find new fics, and authors who know that they have an audience and care to curate their bookmarks a little bit sometimes leave proper reviews there, and keep their plain bookmarks private.