Overtagging

Synonyms:	wall of tags, Bruce Banner Syndrome
See also:	AO3 Tagging Policy Debate, Archive Of Our Own, Filtering Tools
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an extreme example of overtagging, 2021

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Overtagging is the act of adding an excessive amount of tags to a fanwork on AO3, to the point of being superfluous or irrelevant to the work. When many creators overtag their own works, other users have difficulty finding works on the topics that they are interested in. The term can apply to characters, relationships, and additional tags.

The condition of a character tag after mass overtagging is also known as Bruce Banner Syndrome.

Overtagging is one of the reasons why many fans have advocated for a secondary characters field or better Filtering Tools on AO3.

History

This can occur in a variety of situations. One of the most common is when a user posts a collection of drabbles as a single work, with each chapter being a separate drabble. Ao3 does not have chapter-level tags, so any tags added when uploading a new chapter will simply be added to the work's tags. Large, multi-fandom crossovers are also prone to overtagging, as well as some groupchat fics.

It can also happen to younger authors who are unaware of the site's tagging system and deliberately use it as if it were the author notes section, or that by those who migrated from Tumblr who have a long history of using tags as part of the body text of their publications.

But there are cases where the author is neither unaware of the tagging system, nor uses it excessively out of necessity, but does so by

a) to troll and flood the site, causing the system to crash, as a way to get in the way for pure pleasure;

b) they do this to trick fans, using overtagging along with multiple fandoms in order to hook any user to increase their read number, the hits on works.

It is most of the time these last practices that have led many users to complain about overtagging, even more than the difficulty of scrolling the feed across the cell phone screen or other electronic device.

Issues

The use of overtagging can be good or bad for a job depending on how it is used, but invariably this method has not become popular, and can be considered flood or despair.

Overtagging a work can result in some users giving up reading, who see in the act a faulty way of attracting attention, which inevitably culminates in their removal.

But there are cases where the fanreader doesn't give up on reading, but actually takes a deep interest, sometimes in an attempt to alleviate your curiosity if in fact that work really uses all those tags, or if they are just honeypot very well articulated. Reactions to the use of tags vary depending on the reason for their use.

If excessive tags are actually used as a whole in the work, the fan can feel rewarded for having traveled that arduous path. But if they were just baits, using the most famous tags to try in vain to increase the number of hits of the work, the fan may feel deluded, dismayed, and even used to having gone into that work head-on and receiving not gold but ashes.

Proposed Solutions

AO3 Tag Limits were introduced to the archive in 2021 after several high profile incidents of extreme overtagging. Some fans expressed their hope that the new limit would discourage overtagging in general, but others thought that the limit (75 tags) was still too high. A small proportion of fans objected to tag limits and didn't think overtagging was a problem at all; some proposed the AO3 solve the visual clutter problem by implementing an expand button to hide excess tags.^{[citation needed]}

Meanwhile, the Ad Astra archive, which adopted AO3's source code in 2023, has rules enforcing stricter "tag discipline" on users. Fandom, character, and relationship tags should only be used if they are the main focus of the story, and the archive owner reserves the right to edit tags on users' stories. Ad Astra is a single-fandom archive with 1,559 total works as of July 2024.