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).