Everybody asks for RSS feeds for specific tags, but this is so much better.

First, you have to know your AO3-fu. Go to AO3′s Search Works page and click on every “?” next to the field titles to learn your operators. The operators for the “Any Field” field is super important when it comes to custom-building a search results page full of your favorite tags, ships, etc, and with all the filters you need. 😃

Once you read a bit about the operators, it becomes clear that AO3 has given us the opportunity to search for extremely different fics all at once. So here’s one of my favorite elaborate searches on AO3 called “Sam Winchester AUs”: anything in English, complete, over 10k words, with Sam Winchester as a character, and anywhere in the fic’s description (so go back up to the top and find the “Any Field” field), there’s an instance of the word: Android or Robot or Fairy or Fae or Seelie or Unseelie or Planet or Universe or Dragon or Dinosaurs or Zombie or Undead or Post-apocalypse or Dystopia or Eldritch or A/B/O or Agent or Officer or Psychic or Amnesia. This makes it so I’m getting very specific Sam Winchester AUs that I totally love 🤗

Be sure to sort by ‘date updated’ & ‘descending’ sort direction so anything new on the first search results page will be newly updated/completed fics you’ve never read.

For further tweaking, on how to filter ships using the works search page visit this tutorial by @filter-me-ao3​. Let’s say I wanted to filter out wincest in this giant search, I’d write “ -filter_ids:35" into the “Any Field” field. You can also write “-dubcon” and whatever other tags you want filtered out of the results page. So in the "Any Field" field, it’d look like this: -filter_ids:35 -dubcon Android* || Robot* || etc.

So that elaborate and amazing works search results page looks like this.

With all that done, now the good stuff: I don’t want to have to create or manually check this search ever again. I just want to get email updates whenever a new fic appears in these search results.

Enter ChangeTower. A service that monitors websites for content changes over time. With a free account you can track a maximum of 3 work search pages.



After a couple weeks of trying this out, I’m loving it.

When there’s a change to that search results page, I get notified by email. The email format title reads, “[New Change Detected] Sam Winchester AUs.” The email content looks like this when there’s a new story (green highlight means it’s all new content, ie: the story’s details):

Those are different search parameters, lol, but you get the idea. It gives you all the details of the fic in the email! It’s great! At the bottom of the email, it gives you the handy links to “View All Changes”, “Visit Page” (your AO3 search page, so you can click on that and click the fic and hit ‘mark for later’ if you’re so inclined), and “Edit Monitor.”



IT’S NEAT AF!

“As succinctly as possible, tell me what I need to know to set this up.”



1. Design your AO3 search parameters wisely. You can make as many URLs to track as you want but ChangeTower will only allow you to run 3 at a time (for free accounts; you can track a lot more URLs if you want to pay).



2. Sign up for a free account. Once signed in, you should be at app.changetower.com/monitors.

3. Click “new monitor” –> “content monitor” (I’ve tried other ones; content monitor seems the best imo) –> “single URL.” Paste your AO3 search results URL in there. When you do, the full page screenshot of the URL will be AO3′s cookies notice. Don’t worry about it though bc if you scroll down you’ll see the search page content is all there. Click “continue.”

4. After experimenting, my recommendation is to make it notify you when 5% of the page has changed. Any lower and you’ll get notified of changed kudos & comments numbers of already-existing fanworks on that page.

And the rest is gravy! Name your monitor, suggest the frequency it checks your URL (I have mine set to every 12 hours), etc. and click “Save.” UPDATE: Don’t run 3 monitors every 12 hours because free changetower accounts only get 180 checks a month. You’ll run out of them early if you do set them to every 12hrs. UPDATE: you may also be able to do the same thing using https://distill.io/

Congratulations, you’ll now get emailed any time a new fic enters your search results page! 🍷📚🛀❤️