THE SMASHING OF 2 AVENGERS FANDOM TAGS

Hi there, Marvel fans!

Your friendly neighborhood Marvel wranglers are here to bring you some news and a little bit of tag wrangling history. As the title of this post hints, there are going to be some changes regarding two Avengers fandom tags: The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom and The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types.

WHAT'S HAPPENING?

The Marvel team will be dismantling the The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom (AF) and The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types (AMT) tags and flattening them into the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) tag to help make it easier for users to filter for Avengers works \o/

The MCU tag, in the Archive, is the top level tag for all movies and series independently produced by Marvel Studios.

WHY?

About 20 Marvel movies ago, before the first Avengers movie even happened and when metatags had just become a thing in the Archive, wranglers were faced with a Situation: two users had tagged their work with a plain "Avengers" tag to mean the 1960s British spy show while everyone else using the tag meant Marvel.

Since metatags were still pretty exciting, wranglers thought they had the perfect solution for this ambiguity issue! They just needed to create the AF tag to let users know wranglers weren't sure if those works were about the British spy show or Marvel. The AMT tag was also created due to a bit of ambiguous tagging between Marvel fandoms. With both tags, the majority of uses have always been for MCU works--the AMT tag has also been thought of as interchangeable with the MCU tag, even though it is its own separate thing.

As we can see now, creating these two tags did not solve any ambiguity issues. They just made it harder for users to filter for and find works. Keeping in mind that both tags are mostly used for MCU works, and in consultation with the British spy show wrangler, we are going to gently Hulk smash the AF and AMT tags and make them synonymous with (i.e. fold them into) the MCU tag!

This means that works tagged with AF and/or AMT will not show up as crossover works when filtering anymore and will instead show up in the tag that the vast majority of users actually mean: MCU. \o/

WILL MY WORKS ALSO BE SMASHED?

They won't! You do not have to worry about your works getting lost. They will still show up when filtering for MCU tagged works, since AF and AMT will be made synonymous with the MCU tag. Even so, here are some steps you can take if you want to be sure your work is tagged with the specific fandom it belongs to:

If you have used the plain "Avengers" tag to mean the British spy show, we strongly encourage you to switch to its canonical tag: The Avengers (TV 1961).
If you are a Marvel fan who has used the AMT or AF tags to mean one of the Avengers related cartoons, video games, comics, or even movies, we strongly urge you to tag for the actual specific canon source instead of AMT or AF, since they will soon redirect to MCU! If you're unsure what canonical tag would apply to your Marvel/Avengers works that isn't the top MCU one, you can find all canonical Marvel fandom tags under the Sub tags header on the Marvel tag landing page.

By following these steps, it will make things easier for users who are searching for a specific Marvel/Avengers related canon to find your works \o/

Thank you for coming on this 10-year journey with us and keep avenging!

The Marvel Wranglers

From time to time, ao3org posts announcements of recent or upcoming wrangling changes on behalf of the Tag Wrangling Committee.

#tag wrangling changes #avengers #marvel #mcu #archive of our own #ao3

ao3org

Marvel Fandoms on AO3: Small Makeover to Help the Unicorns Run Free

Hi Marvel fans! Your hard-working AO3 Marvel wranglers have voted unanimously to make one change to the Marvel fandom tags to help the servers (and their unicorns) run more smoothly. This will mean fewer errors when you try to access the site and fewer indexing problems for Marvel-tagged works.

We will be removing the extra middle layer tag "Marvel (Movies)". That tag will become a synonym of the existing plain "Marvel" tag. All 13 unrelated movies/franchises directly subtagged to it will be moved up to be subtagged directly to plain "Marvel" if they don't already have another Marvel metatag (most do).

We are making the change for 3 reasons:

The tag is meaningless now. At this point there are 13 separate subtagged universes that are completely unrelated to one another, other than that they're Marvel-related.
It's confusing. Some users seem to think "Marvel (Movies)" means the Marvel Cinematic Universe and are unhappy to find X-Men, Spider-Man, and other unrelated works there.
We like our servers and their unicorns, and we want to reduce the amount of work our fandom makes for them. (Unicorns are the workers which actually make the requests of the servers every time a user requests a page or a wrangler wrangles a tag.) Large metatags create huge amounts of server strain, as they require more unicorn workers for each user request. The deep layers of the Marvel tree are very large indeed.
Removing this layer would remove 5.15 million duplicate bookmarks from the filters, thus reducing filter load and improving server - and unicorn! - performance. These bookmarks are duplicates because they already appear in two other places: the Marvel metatag, plus the individual movie fandoms the works are tagged with.

You won't need to change the tags you're using on your works or bookmarks. Works tagged with "Marvel (Movies)" right now will be filterable as if they were tagged with "Marvel". Works tagged with subtags will not change their filtering.

You can read more about the AO3 Unicorns and the balancing act that they perform in this news post here! For more information about wrangling, please see the Tags FAQ.

Got questions not answered at the links above? Please contact the AO3 Support team! This Tumblr account belongs to AD&T and is not set up to respond to questions.

From time to time, ao3org posts announcements of recent or upcoming wrangling changes on behalf of the Tag Wrangling Committee.

#ao3 #marvel #avengers #X-men #spider-man #tag wrangling #tag wrangling changes