Exchange Apps

[karanguni]

I code apps for fandom exchanges because the AO3 interface is atrocious.

Automagic App Generator

Exchanges can generate their own apps automatically via https://autoao3app.fandom.tools.

If you want to search for requests across all exchanges, use https://autoao3app.fandom.tools/#/everything.

Fun stats from the aggregated database: overall numbers and top 100 fandoms by requests

Bugs?

Please leave a comment here, stating which app/exchange, what the bug is, and steps I can take to reproduce it. It helps if you leave me your browser type, but I don't necessarily need it. Thanks! :)

Requests

If your exchange operates in a way that needs more features in the app, please leave a request here detailing what that might mean!

I currently only code standalone apps for Yuletide. If you are a mod who needs non-app code, feel free to DM me here or on Discord.

Caveats

Apologies in advance if I am slow in responding: I generally am not fandom active except around the Yuletide season. Thanks for understanding!

Known Issues

Nothing major at the moment.

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Announcements

Due to AO3 rate limiting changes as of 24 Feb 2025, scraping might be unsuccessful more often, but should still work eventually.

Comments

Duplicate exchanges in exchange list

[erlkonig_gheyn]

Hello, would it be possible to make scraping case-insensitive? Some exchanges are showing up multiple times based on case, for example relationshipping_2022 and RelationShipping_2022. Thanks!

Re: Duplicate exchanges in exchange list

[karanguni]

Yep - it's "soft" case-insensitive, but I should really do a better job of it... In the meantime, let me know if I ought to nuke one of the relationshippings from existence.

Bug?

[(Anonymous)]

I'd love to be able to link non-exchange friends to an exchange's prompts for a particular ship, fandom, or character, but when I click on a ship name while browsing Grouped Requests (instead of clicking "expand requests") it takes me to a blank page.

Thank you for making this!

Re: Bug?

[karanguni]

Ah, my bad - that is a bug, in the sense that linked pages for non-fandom groupings don't quite work yet. It's on the list to do, but those should never have been links yet. I'll try to get to it in the next week!

[paranoidangel]

Thank for you doing so much work on this, it's been so useful.

I have what might be a bug or it might be that the exchange is too niche. https://autoao3app.firebaseapp.com/#/tardis_festivities_2022 doesn't show anything in Grouped by Fandom. It does have a tag set, and the sign-up includes a Fandom field in which you can only choose fandoms from the tag set. However, the tag set only includes fandoms, it doesn't include characters or relationships. It's also possible to include multiple fandoms in one request and to repeat them.

[karanguni]

Oh, that is indeed weird that it's not picking up the fandoms from the tagset. I'll give it a look! Might take till late tonight it though :)

Bug?

[(Anonymous)]

I've been having a lot of bugs trying to browse yuletide 2022 on the app... Zero fandoms showing up, then when they finally showed up and I bookmarked some, the bookmarks disappeared... now it's back to zero fandoms showing up, so I can't re-bookmark.

Using chrome, if there's any other details I could provide to help let me know.

Re: Bug?

[(Anonymous)]

same bug on Edge as well.

downloading csv returns empty csv

I see:
First Previous Requests 1 - 100 of 985 Next Last
and can press the prev/next links, but all I get is empty pages with nothing in them.
sometimes if i switch to bookmarks and back, I see the results flash briefly on the screen before disappearing.
search all requests tab shows: Showing 0 of 0 filtered requests out of 0 total requests.

narrowing down by category or filtering to fandoms with letters does not help.

[westiec]

Thank you SO much, this is wonderful!

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you incredible person for all your work. I check the app every week and it's made exchange treating so much easier.

I have an oddball request - assuming you're scraping request info page by page, would it be possible to add an option to link that page, as of last scrape, on each request? Like https://archiveofourown.org/collections/COLLECTION/requests?page=NUMBER&sort_column=created_at&sort_direction=ASC. If that's not possible, maybe an option to show the request/prompt date?

This would be really cool for prompt collections that allow anonymous requests (e.g. kink memes, extra/"Madness" collections for non-participant prompts), where you need to find the prompt on AO3 to click Claim/Fill, but you can't sort the list by requester.

I completely understand if this isn't technically feasible or not in the spirit of the app! Thanks again for your consideration! ♥

[karanguni]

Belated, sorry! This week is a bit full, ha. I've been thinking about prompt memes for a while and seeing if we can get a link to the prompt itself (it is a pain, innit): when I've got a smidgeon more time after FIAB/Yuletide, this'll be on the list alongside a few other features :D Not sure how it will actually work when it does come out, but I'll try my best.

possible bug when browsing grouped requests?

[knave_of_swords]

I noticed this on the Candy Hearts page, in Google Chrome (
https://autoao3app.fandom.tools/#/CandyHeartsExchange )

where when I press 'next' on the 'grouped requests' tab, it doesn't load the next page of fandoms. I also can't group fandoms by type-- it just shows as continually loading/blank. I tried using a different url for the app (like the firebase one), but the same issue happened.

Re: possible bug when browsing grouped requests?

[karanguni]

Hello! Hm, it's paging along for me right now - could you do a total hard refresh (cmd/ctrl-shift-R) of the page and see? Might have been that someone was scraping an update at the same time.

Also, are you grouping by the default Fandom?

[burnishedvictory]

This is SUCH a cool app!! Thank you for all the time and energy you put into creating it and maintaining it!

The Formula 1 RPF fandom is running a kinkmeme right now, but signups don't close for quite some time so the prompts never get bookmarked, although anyone can claim and fill a prompt at any time. As there are currently over 1100 prompts, searching it manually is a pain. Would it be possible to bookmark the prompts before signups close, or maybe scrape the date that the prompt was requested so the searcher only had to look at the prompts from that date? Or something else that you think of to make finding the prompts on AO3 easier after someone has used your excellent app to find a prompt they want to claim?

https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Formula_One_Kinkmeme_Round_One/requests - here's the prompts list

https://autoao3app.web.app/#/Formula_One_Kinkmeme_Round_One/all

[karanguni]

Hello! I sympathise with the problem. Hmmm, if prompt memes have prompts that can be filled at any time, I'll see what I can do about bookmarking, but it may be a bit: I am, alas, about to do some major travel, so it might be a week before I can really sit down with it. For typical exchanges, it creates more headaches than it solves to let people bookmark while prompts might move around, sadly!

[southerncontinentskies]

Hello, I bring you a new issue/request from the KJ Charles exchange! Because we're using only one "fandom" to throw all the relationships into, I'm using the Group By Relationship option instead. But I can't bookmark the relationships the way I can fandoms. We're still in sign-ups, so *prompt* bookmarking is, I know, disabled - but would/should it be possible to bookmark the relationships, either before or especially after sign-ups?

[karanguni]

Hello! It's certainly a thing I should open up - alas, I am travelling solidly until mid-february, but I'll try to get that in once I'm more reliably free!

Exchange missing from fandom search

[antimony_medusa]

Hi! I follow a specific fandom tag through the app, in this case Dream SMP, and I noticed that a new exchange has posted with Dream SMP sign ups in the data set— MayDay_2023, but when I search everything by fandom, the MayDay exchange doesn't show up. When I go to the exchange specifically, I can see and sort by fandoms, but this doesn't apply when I'm in Everything. I double-checked it and this problem also applies to other fandoms listed in the MayDay exchange— I tested Yuri!!! On Ice and The Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner . I'm using safari as my browser.

Re: Exchange missing from fandom search

[karanguni]

Thanks for the report! I am, alas, pretty AFK for the next few weeks due to travel, but if a moment opens up or after I get back I'll take a look!

[(Anonymous)]

Hi karanguni, first thank you so much for your efforts in this APP. It has been so useful to use, and I really appreciate your hard work. It says in this post that we can leave suggestions for features that might be useful for the APP.

Since the APP has an option to search everything, I was wondering if there was a way to incorporate a 'randomizer' option that would look in the database of data collected and based off filters we choose (fandom and ship probably being easiest, perhaps also filtering years if you only want old prompts from say 2020), it gives us a random prompt from a previous exchange?

Kind of like a combination of the existing "Search everything" functionality with a button you can click that would just automatically pick a prompt for you rather than scrolling through the prompts.

More details in this discord convo here:

https://discord.com/channels/400186474861166593/711756205650870294/1128334623940812830

Thank you for your consideration!

[thracedt]

The scraper doesn't seem to be working since AO3 came back with the Cloudflare set up!

[karanguni]

Thanks for the report! Here's my general update on the situation that I've posted in Discord:

Hello, general app PSA for anyone worried about Cloudflare on AO3: I'm going to wait for the dust to settle on AO3 figuring out their new rate limits, but I highly suspect we will Be Okay in the end. The app obeys the (old) rate limits AO3 sets for its human users and will obey any new ones.

It's highly likely that it got hit by a stricter rate limit today the same way a whole bunch of humans also got rate limited doing perfectly normal things. Once rate limited, the app was probably put in the Timeout Sin Bin for anywhere up to an hour, which probably compounded when anyone subsequently tried to scrape and went "oh no!" We don't currently have rate limiting language telling end users in the app that the app got rate limited because the app, by design, was never ever meant to hit AO3s limits... ever. But those have changed, is all. Reports say that at least one or two scrapes have succeeded recently, so things may be calming down a bit.

Once things settle down For Real, I'll update the language on the app to watch out for rate limiting, and I imagine that the worst that will happen is that there might be times where we're less able to scrape if AO3 decides to use, say, dynamic rate limiting at hairy times. I think we'll be okay, but I'll keep my eye out.

If the app has outages over the next little while, just go grab a (long) cup of tea - re-scraping will only make things worse and will likely end up with the exchange you're rescraping getting previously-scraped requests potentially cleared out. The app does not keep database updates and cannot restore lost scrapes. I'm, alas, at work and can't get the updated handling in yet.

Super long psa sorry haha.

FFFX AutoApp Bug

[tavina]

Hi Karanguni!

I'm using Chrome, but it looks like the 2023 version of FFFX has been stuck in "scraping" mode for a couple hours now. I did attempt to rescrape it about 30 or so minutes ago as of the writing of this, and this did not clear up the "stuck in scraping" issue. It also doesn't look like my attempt to rescrape at roughly 2:50PM EST has done anything because it's also still displaying Last scraped: 8/5/2023, 1:23:32 PM (local) for me.

FFFX 2023 is here: https://autoao3app.firebaseapp.com/#/fffx2023

Re: FFFX AutoApp Bug

[karanguni]

Hiya! I'll kicked the app backend and am rescraping FFFX now - hopefully that fixes it. I'll check on things more properly when I'm back at a keyboard!

[(Anonymous)]

Could you please add another column to the USERNAME/tagset csv export, so that it states which exchange slug the data is being imported to? This CSV import is so helpful, but I wish there was a way to know which exchange I used it from so I could look up my prompts for it again.

Thank you!

[karanguni]

Yes, I can! I may not get to it today, but give me a kick if I don't get to it by next weekend!

App Inquiry

[mongoosegraham]

Hi karanguni, is there a way to make it possible to link to specific "everything" results after applying a filter ?

like if I wanted to show my filtered results for just the Fandom 'Original Work',
is there something I could do to the URL like..

https://autoao3app.fandom.tools/#/everything/search/user/hughmikkelsen/filter?fandom=Original%20Work

or something like that, like how AO3 does their filters ?

Thanks!

Re: App Inquiry

[karanguni]

Not right now! I'll put it on the requested feature list that I'm going to work through once life clears up a little!

[southerncontinentskies]

Currently, at least for FIAB which is still in signups, each request entry is titled "Request by [username]," and that entire phrase is the red link to that user's requests - but clicking on that title tries to take you to all the requests by user "RequestBy Username," rather than by "username," which of course fails. Is it possible to fix this?

Example:

[karanguni]

Oh boy, seems like AO3 may have changed something. Let me look.

[enigmalea]

Hey there! I just ran the scraper for the first time on this year's DA Poly Exchange and it looks like our use of (optional) titles for our requests is breaking the tool. Titles are showing up as part of the username for username search.

[enigmalea]

oop just saw the post above, and I'm pretty sure they're a related bug. I'm not sure how it was before but it looks like they've shoved everything from title to username into a single h4 tag without any selectors other than "heading".

If you split the string on " by " and take the second part it should give you just the username.



This was certainly a choice on their parts.

Enhancement Request!

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you so much for this app! Putting in a small enhancement request: right now when you change the grouping on the Grouped Requests page, it doesn't impact the URL, so as far as I can tell there's no way to link to the page grouped in a certain way.

For single fandom exchanges, the default grouping of Fandom isn't useful, and we also tend to have a lot of participants who aren't very familiar with AO3 exchanges or the idea of tagsets. It would be really cool if I could link participants directly to the Grouped Requests page grouped by Relationship or Character (even if it's a string I have to manually append to the URL).

(If I'm getting greedy, it would be even cooler if the grouping defaulted to whichever is populated of Relationship or Character when there's only one fandom in the tagset. It'd also be neat if I could link people directly to the tag searching page with Category and Fandom pre-selected so they don't need to figure out how to get to character/ship searching.)

Re: Enhancement Request!

[karanguni]

Hello! I am quite swamped right now but that's a good idea and I'll try to get it in in December!

Thank you

[glassesofjustice]

Just a note to say thanks and I appreciate all you do for the exchange community. I hope the wind down to a new year is a restful one for you.

Candy Hearts 2024 not loading properly

[(Anonymous)]

Hi there! Sometime early this afternoon ET Candy Hearts 2024 seems to have stopped loading properly, and a bunch of prompts are missing (for context, only one of the 15 fandoms I have bookmarked currently shows that there are prompts, but they all had prompts a few hours ago. Some of those are from my signup, so I know for a fact they haven't been deleted). I've tried rescraping twice since it started to no avail. Have tested it on both Chrome and Firefox on desktop, and in incognito with the same issues

https://autoao3app.firebaseapp.com/#/CandyHeartsExchange2024

Re: Candy Hearts 2024 not loading properly

[karanguni]

Taking a look

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks for all of your work creating and maintaining this magical tool! I cannot figure out why the app isn't working for the current version of unsent letters: https://autoao3app.fandom.tools/#/UnsentLetters2024

From what I can tell, it is set up exactly like the one for last year, which worked fine, but I know I'm probably missing some really obvious error. Anything jump out at you? (And, obviously, no hurry at all -- I'm sure there's a lot more urgent stuff to deal with b/f this!)

Thanks again!

[(Anonymous)]

Ummmm ok nevermind it is working now?!? Sorry, clearly I am the problem here.

bookmarking an exchange

[(Anonymous)]

Hey, I love being able to bookmark an exchange so it shows up top of list, is there any way a button to do that could also be added to the exchange page, so I don't have to find it in the list to bookmark it?

(Also I can't figure out where everywoman2024 is in the list, hence the request. Maybe it's due date is somehow messed up and causing it to be sorted were?)

Re: bookmarking an exchange

[karanguni]

There's now an option to bookmark the exchange on the exchange page now.

everywoman2024 is at the bottom because the exchange doesn't have a due date, and exchanges in the dropdown are sunk to the bottom if they don't have one. You can use the autocomplete search bar on the main page to find it more easily!

[westiec]

Hi! Non-urgent feature suggestion — would it be possible to add either a filter or sort by # of tags used in a request? Looking through big exchanges with lots of tags (cough*battleship*cough) and it would be nice to be able to easily find people requesting their One Very Favorite Kink for gifting purposes.

As always, thank you SO much for building and maintaining the app; it really does make life better. <3

[karanguni]

Hi! Do you mean more than what's available in the Search All Requests page? Or do you mean "find the number of times someone has requested X"...?

[shadaras]

Hello! I was trying out the "use toggles for prompt text" option on the "search all requests tabs" and was surprised to find that when I hit the "show prompt" option for one request it also expands every other prompt (and the same goes in reverse). I was expecting this to work in the same way as the "toggles for optional details" on the "grouped request" page.

This might be an intended difference in use cases/functionality, but if that's the case I would find it nice to have more distinct language for the different code functionality!

[karanguni]

That's a bug; I'll try and get to it tonight!

[almach]

Not a bug, but I just noticed the example CSV links at https://autoao3app.fandom.tools/#/help?goto=sheets still use the herokuapp URL instead of the fandom.tools one.

Edit: Or... my mistake, I didn't realize the CSV endpoints were hosted on a different domain that doesn't also serve the app's HTML UI (?). It might be good to mention that on the help page, since it's kind of unusual and there are probably quite a few people who remember that the app used to be hosted on a different domain but have forgotten what it was 😅 Sorry for the confusion, thanks for all your hard work!

[karanguni]

Hi! The backend is indeed on a different domain, and folks shouldn't need to remember it! But I can leave a note on the help page if it's confusing for folks doing the exports :)