I don't believe they change tags; they sometimes recategorize them. Some tags are syn'd with others; sometimes they un-syn a set of formerly-connected tags. And they assign tags to meta-tags, and subtags to some tags.
So if your fic was tagged with "car sex," that might be set as a subtag of "cars" or "sex" or both. "Sex in the Batmobile" might be synned to "car sex" or made a subtag of it.
If your fic was tagged with "great sex in a car," it would be syn'd to "car sex," so people searching for "car sex" could find it, but it'd still show up as "great sex in a car" on your story. And if your fic were tagged "car seXXX," it'd be synned the same way.
It looks to me like the changes are (1) someday, we'll add a "work type" category, and we may assign works to what seems the appropriate category; (2) we'll change language tags if they're obviously wrong; (3) we may change fandom tags if they're obviously wrong.
And "obviously wrong" doesn't mean tagging something for Thor when it's an Avengers story; it means tagging it for Batman fandom because Ton wears a Batman t-shirt at some point.
They said they're not planning on changing relationship or freeform tags at all.
So they are going to decide which tags the author "wrongly" put on a work. Does this only work for completed stories or for WIPs too? Can I no longer tag all relevant fandom in a WIP because I may have had a Batman Tshirt foreshadowing but no Batman yet and it has taken me six months to add another Batmanless chapter?
In that case I'd probably put up an author's note explaining why I use the tag from the beginning although there are only Batmanless chapters now. (Also I wish I could finally mark something like this as a crossover to make this clear right from the start.)
I don't think this will lead to "random retagging". This is a way for Abuse to react in isolated cases and when there were readers complaints and it's an obvious mistake/miscategorization (like RPF listed under the canon fandom and so on). I think that's reasonable, especially in cases where it's obviously a mistake.
I understand why you feel a bit on the fence about it, but I don't see the TOS changes indicating that the freedom of creators to chose tags will be taken away.
The process will be very similar to how Abuse cases work right now. If a user claims a story is tagged with an incorrect fandom the Abuse team will investigate. If the author, for instance, tagged the work as 'The Hobbit' when it is clearly a 'The Hobbit RPF' work, we will contact the author and ask them to change it. If we do not hear back, the fandom tag will be changed to something like "Unspecified Fandom". The author can edit this to add the correct fandom tag at anytime.
In the aforementioned case, as long as it is noted or referenced somewhere the work will eventually be a crossover, Abuse will not take action. If the author prefers not to indicate it's a crossover, to avoid confusion I'd recommend not adding the fandom tag until the crossover is actually introduced.
I know that as a reader, I would strongly prefer for stories that might cross over with my fandom at some point in the future not to show up under my fandom until the crossover actually happens.
Comment on Proposed Content Policy ToS and FAQ changes
Mu (Guest) Fri 28 Jun 2013 08:53PM UTC
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Elf (Guest) Fri 28 Jun 2013 09:25PM UTC
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Mu (Guest) Fri 28 Jun 2013 09:36PM UTC
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Elf (Guest) Fri 28 Jun 2013 09:44PM UTC
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Mu (Guest) Fri 28 Jun 2013 09:49PM UTC
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Subarukun Fri 28 Jun 2013 10:11PM UTC
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AO3_Support (Official) Fri 28 Jun 2013 10:28PM UTC
Last Edited Fri 28 Jun 2013 10:30PM UTC
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Lydia (lydiabell) Sat 29 Jun 2013 02:00AM UTC
Last Edited Sat 29 Jun 2013 02:01AM UTC
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