by ssskay
Summary: What the four squares on an AO3 blurb mean, and how the tags under them are organized.
This page is a sample saved web page for the demo shelf. The archive keeps the article and drops the site's menus, scripts and footer.
Every blurb on the Archive of Our Own starts with a small grid of four symbols. Together they give the rating, the archive warnings, the category, and whether the work is finished.
The rating is one of General Audiences, Teen And Up Audiences, Mature, Explicit, or Not Rated. The warnings square says whether the creator applied any of the archive's required warnings, applied none, or chose not to use them.
Categories describe the kind of relationships in a work: F/F, F/M, M/M, Gen for works without a romantic or sexual focus, Multi for more than one, and Other.
A work can carry several categories at once. When it does, the square shows the multi symbol.
Below the squares come fandoms, relationships, characters, and then the freeform tags, which creators write themselves. Freeform tags cover everything else: tropes, moods, settings, and running commentary.
Volunteer tag wranglers connect tags that mean the same thing, so a search for one spelling also finds the others. That is why two works with differently worded tags can still turn up in the same search.
Readers also use a few words for length. A drabble is traditionally exactly one hundred words. A ficlet is a short piece, usually under a thousand. A one-shot is a single complete chapter.
Saved from I Can't Believe It's Not AO3.