Good news for users browsing fandoms on the AO3 -- alphabetizing titles by articles such as "the" or "das" or "los" is now a thing of the past!

With this latest AO3 release, the Fandom names on the media pages now will sort alphabetically regardless of articles. Previously, the code that generated pages like the Theater Fandoms page sorted by the first letter of the canonical fandom tag name. Because we wanted the tags to be sorted alphabetically, we had to remove articles from the names of the fandom, unless the fandom name was only two words or otherwise was confusing without the article. Needless to say, we've been seeking a solution to this for some time, but required something internationally compatible that wouldn't strain our servers.

A number of users have reported receiving malware warnings from Avast when accessing the Archive of Our Own. We haven't been hacked, and there is no cause for concern - the warning was a false positive.

Avast is erroneously flagging a file used by New Relic, which we use to monitor our servers (you can see more details in (this thread). New Relic are working with Avast to resolve the issue, and we expect things to be back to normal very shortly (we have had only a small number of reports today).

Thank you to everyone who alerted us to this! If you see something unexpected on the site, we always appreciate hearing about it right away. You can keep track of the latest site status via our Twitter AO3_Status, and contact our Support team via the Support form.

It's the season of giving! So, we're pleased to announce that invitation requests are back on the AO3!

Once upon a time (i.e. six months ago), users with Archive accounts could request a few invitations to give out, allowing them to share the Archive with friends and help form communities of like-minded fans.

The following is a post created by the Tag Wrangling Committee to address some ongoing questions and discussions involving tag wrangling on the Archive of Our Own.

The question has been raised in various places of how sustainable the Archive of Our Own’s tag wrangling system is, and whether it will continue to be viable as AO3 continues to grow and the number of fandoms and tags increases. The AO3 wrangling committee would like to address some of the concerns we’ve heard, from AO3 users as well as wranglers (including the staff).