Subscribing To AO3 Tags

copperbadge:

itstheclimb17 replied to your post:

Woah! How do you subscribe to tags on AO3?! This will change my life…

A GUIDE APPEARS! 

One thing to note: with a subscription to a tag, new stuff will show up in the subscription BUT updates of old fics will NOT show up. (I get round this by subscribing to individual stories if I want to keep track of them, then unsubscribing when the story is finished or if I lose interest.)

In order to get the “subscription”:

1. Find a fic with the tag you want. It can be any tag, not just ship tags, though for demonstration that’s what I’m using. (ETA: this may be incorrect; it seems only tags that belong to single fandoms, or possibly only ship tags, have feeds.)
2. Click on the tag. A page should load with that tag’s works in order from most recently updated to oldest.
3. In the upper right corner you should see a line of buttons: “Works” “Bookmarks” “Subscribe To The Feed”.
4. Click on “Subscribe To The Feed”. A new page will open.

Now, from this point you can do several things.

• If you have an RSS reader like Netvibes or Feedly, you should be able to copy the URL (it will look something like “http://archiveofourown.org/tags/32197/feed.atom”) into the “new feed” option on your RSS reader.
• If you want the feed streamed into your email, it looks like BlogTrottr can take the URL and your email and set that up for you. I haven’t used it, but it looks easy and harmless.
• If you use Live Bookmarks, which updates your bookmarks when new fics come in, you can go that route too.
• You can simply bookmark the feed page, though at that point you may as well just bookmark the tag page instead.

I use an RSS feed for everything I possibly can, including podcasts like Welcome To Night Vale and Caustic Soda, webcomics like Girls With Slingshots, and proper blogs like Chicago Architecture Blog. You can even use it to stalk tumblrs you don’t want to visibly follow (I have a few NSFW tumblrs that I follow on my feed rather than my dash). It’s very handy if you tend to forget to check sites you like to read.

One caveat — until you are getting a feed you don’t really have a sense of how many new fics are posted per day. I subscribe to Steve/Tony, Steve/Sam, Tony/Pepper, and a few others, but while I like Steve/Bucky I had to unsub from the tag because it was too busy for me to cope with on a daily basis.