Now I'm perturbed. I think. I'm not protruding.

I really do like having tags it makes it easier to skim through stories, especially when I'm randomly searching through tags just to see what's up.

But there there are some people who OVER TAG. Seriously I found one story with over 100 tags. I stopped counting, and most of them were doubles. Male Slash, slash, the pairings, the characters names, the characters names with the fandom listed, the type of POV listed three times, Alternate Universe listed three different ways.

And then there are the random phrases or the "apologies" like "don't blame me!" or "this just happened" "I don't even know!" "This turned into something else".

One of the most useless tags I've seen was "Can't tag for this, it's a spoiler" followed by "Can't tag for that either".

Stop being witty and just don't tag for it.

LJ has a way to spoiler cover tags, right? I appreciate when someone says they'll put them in the notes. At least they're trying, because some stuff is...I'm not going to claim triggery, but why ruin an experience and generate dislike towards yourself?

I'd also love to see exercises in third party tagging. I'm assuming wranglers only read tags and normalise them, right, Debet?

Which reminds me--what does "freeform" mean? Sometimes they seem like normal tags, and I'm never sure if it will show up when I do a tag search. Which I do more and more. I'm getting moody as fuck.

Is the OTW newsletter intrusive? Can anyone sign up?

Stop being witty and just don't tag for it.

I hate coy tags.

One series I'm following on AO3 has summaries at the end for people who find specific things triggery. So if you're fine with, say, the violence in some chapters but have major problems with the hospital scenes in others, you can skip to the summary at the end of the hospital chapters and stay up on the plotlines for the series as a whole. I think that's a helpful way to handle things.

I've only seriously tag nagged once--Castiel was a rape survivor, and they described some of the abuse, AND had his brother and Dean harangue him for not being ready to get physical with someone else.

I told her she should tag for past rape and continuing emotional abuse of survivors, and I got one out of two. I think she really had no idea what she was writing, though.

(Things like, "tag this with the big bang! More people will see the awesome!" don't count)

Do you guys expect all expect tagged content warnings at this point?

I'm choose not to warn on principle (the principle being that my mental health will always come before a reader's mental health, and I could tl;dr you, but it comes down to the grimly amusing twist that attempting to tag is actually a triggering act for me, and no, I'm neither kidding nor exaggerating, and the uptick in warnings-as-de-facto-requirement is one of the many reasons I don't write as much these days), so you'll probably *not* find me tagging on AO3 stuff in terms of warning beyond maybe a "possibly disturbing material" tag. Maybe.

Got tag/warning nagged once, and added it (though, dude, I think possible dubcon is kind of implied with sex pollen), but only because it was in a ficathon community and I didn't want to find myself in any sort of wank over not doing it. (The story was hella old when I was tag/warning nagged, too.)

And, honestly, I still kind of resent the tag nagging.

I mean, I suspect I'm not the only one out there with the perfect storm of personal history and anxiety issues for whom this is an issue.

I haven't found anything in text triggering, so I don't really have expectations on tagged warnings for myself. If I did have specific triggers, I would probably avoid stories that don't have specific warnings or I'd let a trusted friend read them first. For me, tagged TWs fall under the heading of "good to have, but not required."

I try not to tag to the point of spoiling major plot points, but if there's nastiness afoot I may put in something like "very bad people doing very bad things, tread carefully." I figure people should know their own issues and can read their own maps. But I do appreciate tags for major thematic things, like d/s and omega and the like.