I do not donate to AO3 and I do not volunteer for AO3, despite the fact that I post to AO3. And this is because every time I consider doing so, something else happens to make it obvious just how much it's a broken organization full of petty fiefdoms where no one with higher powers is willing to take action to remove toxic powers. (Really, what AO3 needs is a board that's willing to unilaterally remove a large number of the longtime missing stairs without regard for "but they've been here forever!" or the massive drama-splashback that would cause among a certain subset of enablers. This is never going to happen.) As evinced in the current drama: the destruction of the tag trees.
Now, the destruction of tag trees has been going on for a while and it's been a terrible idea for a while. Child tags are great-- if I just filter on "pregnancy" with no exclusions I should still get mpreg, to offer up the example that comes first to mind-- but there's also synning, when you declare two tags as synonyms, and canonization, when tag wranglers mark tags as "common", which permits you to use them as filters and for the wranglers to syn all the misspellings and things like that to the one tag so searching gets you what you want whether someone wrote it oddly or not. (It also puts it in the drop-down so you know "this is how to tag thing.") And in fandoms with a lot of overlapping canons, there is "all media types," which is kind of the ultimate in parent tags:
everything which is a subset of any given thing.
People actually don't tag things straight-up with "all media types" that much... unless you're in something with Frankencanon, where you're not writing a specific interpretation so much as pulling details from everything. My go-to example for this is actually Witcher, where I'm mostly reading modern AUs (sometimes of the "coffeeshop" sort of thing and sometimes "witchers survived into the modern day and are still secretly fighting monsters") which are pulling a mix-and-match characterization from the games and show and books, which has somewhat melded into "this is how people are generally written in these AUs" which is a consistent thing but could not be visibly assigned to any of the individual canons.
Or sometimes we're just not fussy about which version of canon we read and we'd rather not have to check the tags for every single one, or we hate one particular really popular adaptation and we want to filter that one out while seeing all the other things. (Remember this use case. We will come back to this use case.)
My understanding is that originally this was a technology issue; the indexing involved was challenging on the servers, so they moved to cut down on the tag trees. But the technology issue has long since been fixed... and no one mentioned it, so they could continue to justify cutting down the tag trees, because they dislike the tag trees. At no point has anyone given an actual justification for this behavior beyond "people are tagging in a way we don't like." People have been getting upset about this for a while, more people with each fandom they remove it for. People have been communicating that. People have been ignored. This has been going on for
years.
And then they made a mistake.
They probably could have gotten away with this if they'd synned it to ACD Holmes. People wouldn't have been thrilled, but it wouldn't have disrupted the most common use cases. But they proved just how much this
isn't about convenience for the users or any kind of use case anyone might actually use, because they stuck with the hard rule of "we syn the all media types to the most popular."
The most popular single adaptation in Sherlock Holmes and Related Fandoms is... BBC Sherlock.
The thing is, Sherlock Holmes fandom is such a huge, sprawling thing that while they may have a plurality, they don't have a majority. Actually, a majority of the fandom quite hates BBC Sherlock and wants nothing to do with it. (This is partially an artifact of SuperWhoLock and The JohnLock Conspiracy, which... I'm not even going to
try to explain TJLC; suffice it to say they managed to get a Vox article about how badly behaved they were... but it's also got to do with Sherlock being so far from, like,
every other adaptation in terms of tone and structure.) This particular change made it impossible to search for "every Sherlock Holmes adaptation except BBC Sherlock" without going around one by one to every adaptation's individual tag.
Sherlock Holmes is a huge, sprawling fandom.
They managed to piss off all of it.
(Sidenote: the broad Cinderella fairytale tag got synned to the Disney Cinderella. Why that's bad should be self-explanatory.)
Hundreds of reports were sent to the support form. Anger spread across social media. AO3 responded
remarkably quickly for them, especially for an issue that's been slowly pissing people off for years which they've been quietly ignoring. They produced
this mealy-mouthed statement which you note just mentions an indefinite period of looking at it. Note that there is no suggestion of public comment. No suggestion that they will involve the user base. Just "reevaluate the tag wrangling guidelines" as though the people in charge of doing that won't be the very same people who caused this entirely predictable mess in the first place... and they'll discuss it and let us know what they decide. You know what that really means? They're going to try again in six months hoping that the furor will have died down by then.
And some people involved in AO3 have the absolute
gall to suggest that write-in campaigns to support ("spamming") are an inappropriate way of handling this. Y'all brought this on yourselves by permitting tag wrangling to exist the way it does. It was suggested to me that it only
looks like it gets a response within a week and a single email would also take a week. Which, one, an email
to who; the sole official contact point for AO3 is the support form (because AO3 really does not want to have a way to be officially aware of just how much people hate some of their decision making; it would make it harder to feign ignorance), and two, the only way to bring tag wrangling to heel is to involve another department. Sending hundreds of reports to support forces support to go to tag wrangling and ask what the hell, and support has the power to escalate that if tag wrangling ignores it-- which tag wrangling
knows, which means they
have to respond. Is this ideal for support? No, absolutely not, but until AO3 is willing to fire the tag wrangling chairs and promote someone who's willing to be descriptivist rather than prescriptivist, this is the only way to get results.
Please, AO3. Fire the tag wrangling chairs. Create an organization that wouldn't be toxic to volunteer for. I would love to volunteer for AO3, but not at the cost of my mental health, and that's true of... quite a lot of people besides me. Just the mere fact that non-fandom canonization has been stalled for years solely because the tag wrangling chairs dislike non-fandom tags while they go about these projects everyone hates should be grounds to fire them. They've proven they can't prioritize effectively and that they'll prioritize personal bugbears over anything the broader user base actually wants. This
will not get better until you fire the tag wrangling chairs.
Not that my word means anything; I'm not a BNF and none of the people involved care about anything anyone says unless it's said by someone with clout. (Honestly I am kind of wondering which person with clout got pissed off by the change, because I don't think even this level of reaction would have moved the needle without an actual BNF poking them behind the scenes.) But I am willing to say it in namespace, and you may feel free to link this around.
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