It may have seemed a bit quiet in Archive terms for a while, but that is because our designers, coders and testers have been beavering away behind the scenes on some big projects. We're happy to report that the HUGE amount of new code produced over the past few months has now been deployed to the Archive - we're very excited about the new features being introduced, and we think that you will be too!

A big deploy is imminent!

We'll be deploying a whole bunch of new code to the Archive of Our Own this afternoon (North American time). There are lots of shiny new features in this release:

• New front end! (The Archive is having a facelift and will look a bit different after this deploy.)
• New collections and challenges code!
• New tags code!
• USER ICONS!

Full release notes coming after the deploy.

We'll post to the AO3_Status Twitter before we begin the deploy, and again once it's complete. The site will be down for a (hopefully) brief period while we deploy, and will return with many shiny new things!

In this last spotlight post of our March Membership Drive we want to talk about the importance of international diversity, and how central that diversity is to the organizational vitality and inclusive mission of the OTW. Chances are, if you're reading this, you're in a fandom that uses English as its lingua franca. With many EFL (English as a foreign language) fans "passing" as native speakers, there's often the default assumption that everyone is US-American. But as anyone who was surprised to discover that their favourite author is actually from Israel, or Argentina, or Malaysia knows: that assumption is only true on the surface.