Gift Shaking

Synonyms:	Shake Gift
See also:	Category:Gift Exchanges, Gifts, Secret Santa, Exchange Fandom
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In gift exchanges on ao3, participants can "shake" gifts prior to reveals to learn the tags and word count of their gift. While this doesn't allow one to read the gift, it gives some hints about the contents of the gift, much like shaking a package containing a gift physically. Exchange fandom has documented how to do this in various places, manually via search/filter or with copying and pasting url pieces or via a script that creates a clickable button.

How to shake a gift

Shaking gifts via filtering a collection by fandom tags was common, then fans figured out how to filter by work ID for more precise shaking.

In 2019, lailah_tov published a guide:

1. Go to your Gifts page: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YOURUSERNAME/gifts

2. Right click or cmd-click and click View Page Source.

3. Ctrl-F or cmd-F and search down the page for 'mystery header'.

4. Just above it will be something like id="work_11111111". Copy just the numbers from the work id, not the work_ part.

5. Go to the Works page for the collection the work is in: https://archiveofourown.org/collections/COLLECTIONNAME/works

6. Scroll down on the right-hand sidebar, all the way to the bottom, and put id: followed by the work ID number (like id:11111111) in the Search Within Results box.

7. You'll get one work that's your gift and then you can open all the filter boxes to see how it's tagged.

(with many thanks to AH#5438 on Discord)

In 2022, exuvia published a user script to automate the process on Greasy Fork, creating a "Shake Gift" button. In 2023, another similar script was published by Chris S.

Discussion of shaking gifts

Gift shaking dates back to at least 2014, when people began discussing their plans for shaking gifts. Some exchange participants shake their gifts to get some hints about what they got, and some are annoyed by the practice, because it reduces the mystery of the gift.

[Fail-Fandomanon; Re: Bangs, Fests, Exchanges - Shake Gifts Button]
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/438468-shake-gifts-button

Adds a 'Shake' button to unrevealed gifts.

Enjoy!

Welp. Back to tagging everything with Undisclosed Fandom and nothing else until the last possible second I go.

In a lot of exchanges the mods say specifically to not do this unless your fandom hasn't been wrangled. Also... Everyone could always shake their gifts, so you're trolling.

No, I just don't like gift shaking. And it was just enough work that most of "everyone" couldn't be bothered.

Fans often shake their gifts and discuss the results other fans, eagerly anticipating the gifts they will receive.

[coaltide; Shaking gifts]
If you have one. How does it look?

Fun! It went out to pinch hit and I ended up getting a much smaller fandom than the one I was expecting to match to based on signups. Plus it's tagged with something that surprised me at first, but on reflection I can see how they got there from my prompts, and it could be great with these characters, actually. I'm hyped!

Nothing yet. I can't judge tho because I just posted myself.

The tags make me neither worried or excited, so it'll all depend on the execution. Could be worse.

I am getting E-rated F/F and I am excite!

It's an awful lot of tags for how low the wordcount is. I'm setting my expectations low.

Disappointing through no fault of the author. I should have considered my requests more carefully and stuck to the fandoms I was sure I'd enjoy roughly equally. Unrelated, I'm hoping more people will add tags to their bus passes so I can shake better! So many of the fics I've looked at have no shakable metadata except for what's mandatory.

Intriguing, because it doesn't have any canonical freeforms and so I know the pairing but not at all what it is about... 👀

These discussions of upcoming gifts can include dread or concern, and can also result in wank about whether or not shaking is appropriate in the first place:

[Fail-Fandomanon; Re: Bangs, Fests, Exchanges - Shake Gifts Button]
I am shaking a gift, and I got one with the dreaded (anticipated) creator chose not to use author warnings. Since the characters are all adults, and I didn't DNW character death, I'm guessing this is for character death. Welp.

Above nonnies are both missing the point and obnoxious. It's always a dick move to tag a gift fic with CNTW. CNTW absolutists don't belong in exchanges, IMO.

No, the real problem is shaking. You shouldn't shake your gifts and build up ideas in your head about them in advance, whether positive ones that the fic might not be able to live up to or negative ones that probably aren't justified if your creator is participating in good faith. If it turns out after reveals that they're not, go to the mod and get an EPH.

OK I'm being as extremist on the other side as possible to make a point, but there definitely are exchange fics I've posted CNTW because fulfilling the request involved putting in content on the borders of mandatory warnings, and ticking the box would be a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. The people who seek out that sort of content would have been disappointed with what they found it I had tagged, the people who try to avoid it would have been upset if I hadn't. So I CNTW and no wank comes my way.

All my gifts are written for that specific recip to the best of my ability, but if I'm doing an exchange I'm intrinsically posting them on AO3, not just emailing them to that one person or something like that. They don't get posted in a vacuum and I'm entitled to take that into account in my tagging choices.

Shaking isn’t going away, and many people use it to have fun and to manage their expectations sensibly.