AO3 is making a change to how tag wrangling works. Starting January 24, tags will be sorted differently for wranglers to interact with.
Before now, wranglers for a particular fandom were only automatically shown tags from works that were tagged with the canonical tag for their fandom. That meant, for example, that wranglers for How I Met Your Mother would only automatically be shown tags from works tagged with How I Met Your Mother.
With the new changes, however, wranglers for a particular fandom will also automatically be shown tags from works that are tagged with a synonym of their fandom’s canonical tag. That means, for example, that wranglers for How I Met Your Mother will now also automatically be shown tags from works tagged with HIMYM.
This change means that more tags will get to the correct wranglers faster, which will make wrangling more efficient overall. However, it also means that, when the change kicks in, a bunch of tags that hadn’t gotten to the correct wranglers before will be resorted all at once, and wranglers will have an extra-large pile of tags to deal with.
While these extra tags are being dealt with, it may take up to a month for new tags to be wrangled, rather than the usual goal of two weeks. Tag wranglers are unpaid volunteers, and there’s only so much they can do at once. We’d like to ask you all for your patience as this backlog gets worked through. We’ll work hard to get caught up as soon as we can.
In the meantime, you can keep creating new tags the same as always. Nothing will be changing on the user side of things. So go ahead and add as many tags as you’d like to your fanworks.
Tag Wrangling would like to thank the Accessibility, Design & Technology committee for this new feature. We’re as excited to have it as you are to have the server performance improvements that come with it!
And as always, thanks to our users. Without your support, none of what we do here at AO3 would be possible.