Hi! Support here, again! In fact, Support is always here--when you submit a ticket through the Support and Feedback form we'll respond as soon as possible to register your feature suggestion, pass your bug report on to our coders, or do our best to help you out with a problem. However, when it comes to explaining how to do things or why something doesn't seem to be working right, the formal back-and-forth emails of a Support request aren't always ideal.

After receiving positive reviews of our previous chats in November and February, we're continuing on with Open Chat sessions with the Support Staff in our public chat room (the link will be made available on the day of the chat). We will be there this coming Saturday, May 04, 2013 at 16:00:00 UTC lasting through this Sunday, May 05, 2013 at 04:00:00 UTC. Members of Support will be available to interact with you one-on-one in live chat. See what time that is where you live. We are going to try to have future sessions at different times to make sure we eventually cover all time zones. If you can't make it to this one, keep an eye out for the next!

The Archive of Our Own is growing rapidly! We now have over 145,000 registered users, and about 275,000 unique visitors a day. All these visitors rack up roughly 4.3 million pageviews a day (that's almost 3,000 a minute on average). It cost more than US$52,000 to keep the Archive up and running in 2012. Our costs will only increase as the Archive continues to grow, and we anticipate spending at least US$70,000 in 2013.

The Archive is funded entirely by donations to the Organization for Transformative Works. As part of the OTW's membership drive, we'd like to share some details of what we have to pay for and how much it all costs.

Preface

The OTW Board is pleased to announce the newly updated Archive of Our Own Roadmap.

The Roadmap is a broad outline of planned improvements and changes to the AO3. It is maintained by the Accessibility, Design, & Technology committee with input from many OTW committees including Abuse, Internationalization & Outreach, Open Doors, Support, Systems, Tag Wranglers, and Translation. While such an involved cross-committee process takes time, we are happy that it includes input from so many committees because we believe that collaboration results in a high-quality document and (hopefully!) a shared understanding of how and why we do the things we do.

Updating the Roadmap is a huge task which involves:

1. Talking to everyone to learn what is needed and wanted (which can be different for everyone but thankfully there is some common ground)
2. Talking about priorities (because our wish list is way larger than our ability to grant wishes)
3. Working out what we need to do to get from A to C (sometimes that means people get B first on the way to C even though B was low priority)

AD&T walked the Roadmap through multiple drafts (the first rough outline was created in August 2012) and worked with multiple versions of the Board (there were five new Board members in this period) to reach a final version. The Board would like to thank everyone who worked on this task for the energy (and patience!) given to make this possible. We really appreciate all the time the staff and volunteers put into this.

Continue reading on AO3 News

There has been a very active and thoughtful response to our recent announcement in favor of allowing meta on the AO3. We'd like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to everyone for raising their concerns, showing their support, and otherwise engaging with us as we work to define our policies, refine our processes, and improve our communication. In addition, we'd like to respond to a number of the issues raised and clarify how this decision was reached and what the process will be from this point forward.