How to find auctions!

Feb. 21st, 2025 04:23 pm
[personal profile] fth2025offerings

The easiest way to find the auction(s) you want is to use OUR TAGS!

How our tag system works:

The basics:
  • We tag for: username, fandoms, highest rating, fanwork type, specialty tags, and audience (who can bid: all ages or 18+)
  • Use ctrl/command-F or Find in Page in the menu of your mobile browser to search the tag page page for the fandom, fanwork, or username you want, or scroll through the list to see what's available.
  • Fandom names do not have "The" at the beginning.
  • There are several constraints on tags, so check every possible version of your fandom's name, especially if it's not originally in English.
  • If you still can't find what you're looking for, you can also search our journal.
  • WE HAVE HAD TO SPLIT UP SOME OF OUR TAGS THIS YEAR TO ACCOMMODATE THE NUMBER OF OFFERINGS. Please read the stickied post below this one for fuller details.

NEW: The golden needle tag is live! This tag contains all of the auctions that do not yet have any bids. You could be the first bidder on one of these hidden gems!
 

Finding Your Fandom
If you’re looking for a particular fandom, you can find the full FTH tag list here. If it has a tag, it means that the fandom is on offer this year! The tags are arranged in alphabetical order, but you can also ctrl+F (or command+F for macs) to search for the name within the taglist. Your fandom not listed at all? Try Fandom: Any to find people who will create in literally any fandom you want.

A few things to keep in mind as you search for your fandom: It's often better to search for one or two key words than an entire fandom name, in case you call it something slightly different from what we called it. There is a character limit on tags, so some fandoms have to be abbreviated, and some non-English fandoms are under only their English or non-English name instead of both. Be sure to search anything we might have used! All fandoms that start with "The" have had "the" removed to make alphabetizing more uniform. For example, if you are looking for The Boys, you'll find it under "fandom: boys".

How nested subfandoms work: Some fandoms with many branches are broken up into subfandoms. You can see this reflected in the nesting on the tags page. In all of these cases, the auctions are tagged with both the subfandoms chosen and the larger fandom. So if you're looking specifically for Captain America auctions, check Marvel: Captain America (along with Marvel: Any, Marvel: Avengers, and Marvel: All MCU). If you're looking for everyone offering Marvel of any kind, look under the main Marvel tag, where you will find everyone who chose at least one Marvel subfandom. If you're looking for people who are offering to create in a subfandom you don't see listed, or a combination of subfandoms others aren't offering, you should look at Marvel: Any and Fandom: Any.

In general, if a tag doesn't specify a date or type of media, you can assume that any media that might fall under that fandom name is included. Remember, though, that whatever the tags say, the creator is only being held to what is in their auction text. If the tag is a general one that might apply to a book or a movie, and they say they are only interested in book canon, don't expect them to write about the movie.


Finding a Creator
There are three main ways to find a particular creator:
  1. Scrolling down the taglist until you get to the username: tag category. Within this tag you will find all of the 2025 FTH creators, who are tagged with the preferred pseudonym that they provided.
  2. Instead of scrolling down till you find the creator you’re after, you can simply ctrl/command-F (or Find in page) the name once you are in the taglist. If you do not see someone who you think should be listed, try searching only part of their name (in case we had to strip out special characters) or check with them in case they gave us a different pseudonym than you know them by.
  3. Finally, you can use the search bar on the left side of the page (or here) and enter their username in the search, but all of the above caveats apply.


Types of Fanworks

All posts are tagged according to the type of fanwork being offered: written fanworks, fan art, podfic, video, fan labor, or other digital fanwork. If you scroll beneath the fandoms on the tag page (or just ctrl-F the word "fanwork"), you'll find the fanwork tags.

Written fanworks, fan art, and fan labor are also broken down by the subtype(s) the creator is offering! You can look just at everyone offering cover art, for example, or culture picking. Just like with subfandoms, you can still see everyone offering every subtype when you click on the written, fan art, or fan labor tags. You can combine these subtype tags with fandom tags just like the other fanwork types, as explained in the next section!


Searching Multiple Tags
If you’re looking for a specific category of auctions such as E-rated Our Flag Means Death fanfiction, or for auctions in multiple fandoms, for example fanart that is being offered in the Good Omens fandom or the Doctor Who fandom, try filtering by multiple tags. Dreamwidth does enable searching in this way; the trick is to separate the individual tags in the URL with commas. For example, let’s search for particular Star Wars auctions:


The ?mode=all option is necessary for making those last three combinations work. With it, you will get only auctions that are podfics and rated explicit and in the Star Wars fandoms. Without it, you will get all explicit auctions plus all Star Wars auctions plus all podfic auctions. Using it without ?mode=all finds everything with one tag or the other. This can be useful if you are a fan of both Sherlock Holmes and Teen Wolf, as it means that you can look through all the offers for both fandoms without having to switch tag search. However, it is important to use the option if you are trying to narrow your search to certain parameters.

NOTE: If you are searching one of the split tags, you will need to search each one separately! So if you want to find all of the explicit Star Wars auctions, you will need to search three times:

https://fth2025offerings.dreamwidth.org/tag/fandom: star wars,rating: e?mode=all
https://fth2025offerings.dreamwidth.org/tag/fandom: star wars,rating: e 2?mode=all
AND
https://fth2025offerings.dreamwidth.org/tag/fandom: star wars,rating: e 3?mode=all

Again, we realize that this makes things a lot harder, but it's the best compromise we could make to ensure everyone's auctions are findable in the relevant tags.


Special Interest Tags

Special Interest tags make it easier for bidders who are interested in certain topics and types of stories that are less common/popular to find creators who are especially interested in working with those topics.

When creators signed up, they were given the option to choose from a list of special interest tags, which can be used just like our fanwork, fandom, and ratings tags (and combined with them as above) to help bidders find the creators who are the best match for their interests.

The interests we included this year are:
  • Ambiguous endings
  • Canonically trans or nonbinary characters
  • F/F pairings
  • Genderswap/genderbending
  • Nonwhite characters' racial or cultural experiences
  • Poly ships
  • Racebending
  • Reader Insert
  • Trans or nonbinary readings of canon characters
  • Unhappy endings
  • Aro/ace characters (New!)
  • Gen/platonic works (New!)
  • Rarepairs (New!)
You'll find these under special: in the tags list.

These don't mean that those are the only things that creator is willing to create, so if you're not looking for any of these things don't let that discourage you from bidding on creators who use them! And just because a creator didn't use a tag doesn't mean they're unwilling to address that topic (unless it says so elsewhere in their auction). These are just a tool to try and help bidders who are really excited about certain topics find the creators who are just as excited about them.



Let us know if you have any questions! If you are a creator and believe your auction is missing tags or has been mistagged, please use the editing form we've sent you via email.
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