There have been a couple conversations about this floating around recently, so I wanted to share some tips on successfully filtering/blocking fics you don’t want to see on AO3.
AO3rdr
A truly life-saving extension available for Chrome and Firefox, which allows you to block tags in a similar way to Xkit’s blacklist function on Tumblr. After you download the extension, you’ll see these buttons at the bottom of every fic summary on AO3:
Click on the gear button and it will take you to the Settings page, which looks like this:
Go into “tag blacklisting” and you can type in any tag you don’t want to see. Fics with blocked tags will show up like this when you’re browsing:
If you ever want to see a blocked fic, click on the blind eye and it will be temporarily un-blacklisted.
Blacklisting Tips:
The AO3rdr blacklist will match the words in your blacklist in any position in a tag, which means you can take advantage of this feature to save yourself some time. As well as blocking entire tags, you can:
blacklist Character Name/ and /Character Name to hide all ships with a specific character
blacklist the /Â character to hide all ships (this will overdo things but I feel better choosing, for example, to scan my blocked tags and un-blacklist things like hurt/comfort than to see full summaries for squicky or potentially triggering fic)
for blacklisting triggers: put in the shortest/single word version and it will match the most tags. You don’t need to put a * at the end to make it match extra characters like with some tumblr blacklisting software.
This doesn’t make use of AO3′s tag wrangling, so you may need to blacklist multiple versions of a tag to block it completely (eg, switching the order characters’ names appear in a ship tag)
AO3 Filtering
It’s possible, after putting in all the tags that you need to blacklist, that your results will look like this:
There are ways of using AO3′s built-in filtering options to make certain things not show at all, which cuts down on the amount of time you spend scrolling through pages of entirely blocked results. So. Let’s get rid of all that Bill////D/ip
Please note that unlike the AO3rdr blacklist, AO3 filters are not saved and will need to be re-entered every time you search, so if you have many tags you never want to see I recommend setting up AO3rdr first and using the filtering options as a refinement.
The “Search within results” field is your friend! You can type in a tag or word preceded by a minus sign to exclude it from your results. If it’s a multi-word tag, be sure to put it in quotation marks. This, like the blacklist, will match the words used in the tag, but there is a way to blacklist wrangled AO3 tags, which are much more effective at blacklisting ships because they will catch synonyms.
The standard format for blacklisting an archival AO3 tag by id is  -filter_ids:tagid You can blacklist Fandom, Character, or Relationship tags. I’ve found “Relationship” most useful since many fandoms have one very popular ship that really clogs up your search results if you aren’t interested/are squicked by it.
How you figure out a tag id:
First, ironically, you need to click on the very tag you want to block :(. This will take you to its main page, where you’ll see this in the upper right corner:
Hover, don’t click on the RSS Feed button. Then look at the very bottom of your screen and you should see something like this:
That number, in this case 1016330, is the tag id. If I go back to my results page and put -filter_ids:1016330 in the “Search within results” field, that will hide all fics tagged with that pairing! Now I can actually see things I might be comfortable reading!
(need to blacklist a ship tag but can’t bring yourself to go to the tag’s main page? Message me and I’ll get the id for you.)
Happy browsing!
Given recent discussions about the popularity of triggering ships in the Gravity Falls fandom, this seemed like a good time to bring this post back. AO3 can be hard to use because you see so many tags for upsetting content, but because most people do tag properly you can use these tools to avoid all the ships and tropes you don’t want to see.
If you find this confusing or need more help, you can message me.
kototyph 