Archive of Our Own/YMMV

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• Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things:
  • Originally, there was no limit to the amount of tags a work could have, and many authors used that for fun and commentary as much as they did for warnings and archiving. Thanks to this lack of restriction, many fans tended to overtag their fanworks, which in many fandoms generated what fans called "The Bruce Banner Problem" (basically, tagging every character that has a presence in the fic regardless of plot relevance, to the point of obfuscating the search for works actually starring said character, named after the MCU character most affected by this problem). For years, the site admins refused to do something about it, as overtagging was seen as something annoying but usually harmless. Unfortunately, the creator of a fanfic titled "Sexy times with Wangxian" absolutely pushed overtagging to its limits, adding an ever-increasing number of tags and fandoms with little to no relevance to the actual fic - this obfuscated searches in several standard categories, and caused browsers to crash in some cases whenever said work appeared on-screen. Any attempt to communicate with the author to address the issue only caused her to add more tags out of spite, with the number reaching over 2300 tags before it was hidden by the site admins. After the work was blocked, the site was updated to only allow 75 tags per work.
  • Because the site has very little censorship when compared with most mainland writing host sites, Chinese fans began to use AO3 to host their own fanworks. Then, in early 2020, some fans of Chinese actor and singer Xiao Zhan took offense over the presence of fanfiction depicting him in ways they deemed "vulgar" and "offensive", so they reported the site and it ended being blocked by the Great Firewall of China. This, in turn, incensed other Chinese AO3 users, who took their outrage into boycotting and cyber-accosting the actor, his fans, his sponsors, and any person directly related to him, in what became known as the Boycott against Xiao Zhan Incident.