Archive of Our Own

At the recent April Showers Import Party, the topic of tagging came up. Unsurprisingly — there were fanworks finding homes on the Archive of Our Own, after all. And one of the most amazing things about the AO3 is definitely its tagging system.

What makes this particular tagging system so amazing? It's specifically designed so that users can use any tag, in exactly the form they want it on their works, while keeping those works as organized as they would be in a strictly classification-based archive. Perhaps even better organized, since AO3 tagging not only allows users to search for works using tags based on traditional classifications like fandom, character and relationship, but also tens of thousands of canonical "additional tags" that go far beyond the limits of genre. And the more you tag, the better it works overall (more on why that's so later).

So, you may be asking, what’s a canonical additional tag? And how does a tag come to be one?

First, a bit of tagging history is in order. The indexing of information using keywords isn’t a new practice, of course. When del.icio.us launched in 2003, the new part of their model wasn’t the link collections or the keywords themselves — those had been around on the Internet pretty much since the start. Their innovation was to give users the power to attach keywords to those link collections. Nearly ten years on, the AO3 has made a great start at putting that sort of descriptive tagging power in the hands of fan creators when it comes to archiving their fanworks.

A great deal of that power comes from additional tags (originally called freeform tags). They're tags that don’t fall into the standard fandom/character/relationship groupings, and include kinks, tropes, genres, story elements, word counts, recording lengths, video formats, fan art media, POVs, episode tags, additional warnings, and whatever else users can think of! And all those additional tags gain their useful descriptive power when they're made canonical, appearing in the search filters and the auto-complete box as the most useful, general forms of particular tags, with many other synonymous tags linked to them. Tag wranglers — fans who have volunteered to curate the tags belonging to particular fandoms — do the linking, so for a tag to have been made canonical means that a wrangler has either recognized it as complying with tag wrangling guidelines or created it in compliance with those guidelines specifically so they can attach another tag to it.

What that means is that when an additional tag appears in the archive, a tag wrangler assesses whether people searching for works would like to be able to search for works tagged with it. Often the answer is yes, but sometimes it's no — and that's fine! That doesn't mean that you shouldn't tag your works using whatever tags you like; those tags will still bring up works, after all, even if they aren't canonical! A tag wrangler making your tag canonical just means that they judged it a useful addition to the filters — and one that other people might want to have the option of tagging works with, as well.

So if you can tag with whatever you want, how do you effectively use additional tags to shine a spotlight on your work?

This is where we return to the question of how more tagging makes the system work better. You see, additional tags make it possible to bring up works tagged everything from Accidental Marriage to Zombies — and everything else in between. So, using tags which highlight tropes or kinks (among other things), means that people interested in these topics can more easily find your works containing them. And this isn't just limited to fanfic — there are additional tags which describe aspects of other types of fanworks that people might be looking for, as well — whether it’s a crochet pattern, a short podfic, or an example of digital fan art.

What it comes down to is this: your were-creature accidental marriage fic/podfic/painting/quilt with zombies and a female BAMF character of color lead might be exactly the work Fan X was looking for. And they might never know it exists, if you don't tell the world exactly what awesome stuff it contains. There're a lot of awesome fanworks featuring a lot of awesome stuff on the AO3 just waiting for people to spotlight those awesome qualities, so go forth and tell people that your fic is epistolary or your comic features a mythical being or creature or that your podfic is a cast recording.

While many of us love the diversity that additional tags bring, if you don't like seeing additional tags on works, you can always choose to ignore them, or even hide them completely using a custom skin and the Blurblings Hide freeform tags skin.

*****

If you'd like to know more about tagging on the AO3, or about what tag wranglers do, the Tag Wrangling Committee is having an open house on Sunday, April 22, from 19:00 to 21:00 UTC (see when this is in your timezone) in OTW's public chatroom on Campfire. The chatroom can be accessed at: https://fanarchive.campfirenow.com/c6440 Feel free to drop by at any time during the session to ask questions or just to hang out.

The AO3 and its tagging system are funded by fans, for fans. To help keep it growing, please donate today.

Have you ever wondered about what it is tag wranglers do? Are you thinking about volunteering as a wrangler? Do you have a question about tags on the Archive of Our Own? Is your fandom in need of some temporary assistance? The Tag Wrangling Committee is hosting their second open house! This is a drop-in session where you can ask us what's on your mind, or just have a chat about tags.

All are welcome! The chat will be held on Sunday, 22nd of April, 2012, from 19:00 to 21:00 UTC
(see when this is in your timezone) in OTW's public chatroom on Campfire. The chatroom can be accessed at: https://fanarchive.campfirenow.com/c6440. (Please note: This url has changed since this post was originally posted! Apologies for any confusion.) Feel free to drop by at any time during the session to ask questions or just to hang out.

Additional Tag Wrangling Open Houses are planned for July and October. If you can't make this one, never fear - we'll be holding future sessions at different times to make it easier for people in different timezones to attend.

The Tag Wrangling Committee and their team of volunteer “Tag Wranglers” maintain and administer the tags on the Archive of Our Own, curating the folksonomy system that links related tags together for better filtering and searching, while allowing users to tag their works however they prefer.

Mirrored from an original post on the Archive of Our Own.

It's party time! This April, we've been catching up on some fannish history with our April Showers promotion! For the month of April, we're highlighting fandoms past and present which are underrepresented on the Archive of Our Own and Fanlore - preserve your fannish history by uploading your old fanworks to the AO3 and documenting key fannish tropes and events on Fanlore.

We'd like to celebrate some more. So, it's party time!

AO3 importing party!

Saturday 14 April, 17:00 UTC to Saturday 15 April, 2:00 UTC (see the time in your timezone)

Got any works on other sites that you've been meaning to import or copy over to the AO3? Have questions about how to format or tag any of your works? Feel like cheering other people on as they do some posting? Join the AO3 staff in the OTW Public Discussion chatroom (click the link to access) to ask questions about posting, reminisce about old fandoms, and celebrate as more works are added to the AO3. We'll have a few invitations to share with people who don't yet have AO3 accounts, and we welcome everyone!

Fanlore editing party!

Saturday 14 April, 20:00 UTC (see the time in your timezone)

Keen to add your fannish memories to Fanlore but not sure where to start? Need your hand holding as you make your first wiki edits? Or keen to share your skillz as an experienced Fanlore editor? Join Fanlore staff in the Fanlore chatroom for an editing party! You'll be able to get help making your first forays into editing Fanlore, toss around ideas for new pages, and ask questions. Everyone welcome!

Get wet in the April showers!

Mirrored from an original post on the Archive of Our Own.

Here at the OTW, preserving fannish history is a central part of our mission! We're proud to be able to offer fans a place to host their works on the Archive of Our Own, and tell their own fannish histories on Fanlore. As of March 4, 2012, Fanlore has 18,481 articles which have undergone 351,020 edits by 6,151 registered users, while the Archive of Our Own recently passed 40,000 users, and more than 332,300 works have been posted on the AO3, across over 8,800 fandoms!

We're really pleased and proud to see so much fannish representation. However, we know that there are many, many wonderful fanworks out in the world which haven't found their way to the AO3 - for example Portal and the Alien movies have only 85 fanworks apiece on the AO3! There are even more fannish stories left untold on Fanlore - we'd love to see the fannish activity over The Hunger Games documented as it unfolds! Last year, we welcomed in lots more edits to Fanlore and works to the AO3 with our April Showers promotion. This year, we're hoping to do the same! This month, bring us fannish April showers by digging out those old zines, memories of past cons, archived personal webpages, tales of shipwars and fannish events, works on slowly-decaying archives, and more! Upload your old works to the AO3 and tell your tales on Fanlore.

Welcome to the first of our new format Archive news posts! Until now, the regular news posts on what's going on with the site have been appearing under the heading of 'Accessibility, Design and Technology Meeting News'. This is because when we first went into open Beta, AD&T were the only committee working directly on the Archive. However, as the site has grown and changed, so have our committees! So, we're changing to a new AO3 news format which will give more space to showcasing all the different kinds of AO3 work and happenings!

Who are our committees?

The Archive of Our Own is a project of the Organization for Transformative Works. There are a bunch of OTW committees who work on the Archive: Systems are responsible for our servers, the Communications Committee helps to support the committees with news and other communications, Abuse and Content Policy deal with policies and user conflicts, and lots of other committees help and advise on specific issues. However, there are three committees who you'll be hearing about a lot in these news posts, as they do much of the day-to-day work on the AO3:

Accessibility, Design and Technology

AD&T are responsible for the design and building of the AO3. They manage the coders, designers and testers who work together to develop the site, are responsible for the overall planning on the project, and liaise with the Systems committee to keep the servers happy.

Support

Support are responsible for helping users with questions, problems and suggestions. They receive all the messages submitted through the Support form and make sure that users receive the help they need, working with other committees to get the answers to specific questions.

Tag Wrangling

The Tag Wrangling Committee are responsible for the tags on the Archive. They figure out policies to guide the wrangling of tags and manage the big team of tag wranglers who organise things behind the scenes. (If you'd like more detail on how tags are dealt with, check out our guide to tags on the AO3.)

As many of you will have noticed, we had some site slowdowns and 502 errors on the Archive of Our Own over the first couple of days of the year. Apologies for the inconvenience! If you've run into this problem and been wondering what was going on, you might be interested in this:

Yes, it looks like lots of fans decided to celebrate the New Year with some delicious fanworks. On Monday 2nd January we had 182,958 visits, and over 1,066,216 pageviews! Furthermore, an octopus swam off with our servers - volta_arovet's Texts From Cephalopods has had 46,301 hits at the time of writing! So, our servers had plenty of work to do!

Over 2000 new users have joined the Archive in the last couple of weeks, and we have hosted several great challenges, including Yuletide (2598 works!), Due South Secret Santa (a more modest 34 works), and Homestuck Ladyfest Exchange (124 works). So, while we're sorry to have had some slowdowns, overall we are super pleased with how well our shiny new servers have held up - those of you who were with us during the holiday season in previous years will remember that the high traffic of holiday challenges made our old servers very sad.

Looking forward, we're not too worried about performance in the immediate future - there are some code improvements we know we need to make which will improve matters a lot, so those will be high priority. If the AO3 continues to expand at the same rate as this year, we will be looking at more servers sooner rather than later. But in light of the graph above, we're pleased that while we certainly slowed down, we didn't grind to a halt! Thanks to all the coders and sysadmins who did the work to make this possible, and thank you to all the OTW members whose donations helped us buy those hardworking servers (we are always grateful for volunteers or donations)! And, of course, thanks to everyone who reads and posts on the AO3 - we're excited to welcome so many of you!

Once again, apologies to those of you who have been affected by the slowdowns - but hurray for so much beautiful fannish activity!

Mirrored from an original post on the Archive of Our Own.

2011 was an amazing year for the Archive of Our Own, and we wanted to take a moment to look back and to thank everyone involved, including all of our users and volunteers! AO3 started its open beta about two years ago, towards the end of 2009. That year, we were really still putting the pieces together, building out the core functionality. In 2010, we started to pick up more momentum with people posting their works and archiving their older fic and art. We added gift exchange challenge hosting, kudos, downloads and skins. This year, we've done a lot of work on site performance and infrastructure, usability improvements, and new features like subscriptions and prompt meme challenges. We're looking forward to expanding on that next year and continuing to build a great, stable home for all kinds of fanworks!

The Accessibility, Design and Technology committee oversees technology-related projects within the OTW. Currently we are responsible for designing and building the Archive of Our Own. Our regular meeting updates keep you informed about developments on the AO3!

This was our final meeting of the year: the OTW takes an end-of-year break during which committees dissolve and are reformed, and committee members take a well-earned rest! We've had an action-packed year, so we're all ready for a break (from meetings at least - a lot of our work goes on as usual). We'll resume in January - we don't take on any new volunteers during our hiatus, so if you volunteer between now and then (and we hope you will - as you can see below, there are several areas we're really keen to build up), you'll have to wait a little while to get started.

Meeting highlights!

Fandom landing pad!

AD&T co-chair and senior coder Elz has been working for a while on improvements to browsing on the Archive. One thing she's been working on is a new 'fandom landing pad' so that browsing to a fandom will give you the option to browse to some important areas relating to that fandom. In this meeting we previewed her new design - going to a fandom landing page will give you a list of pairings and relationships in the fandom, and a list of authors and artists who have created work in that fandom, along with some basic information about the canon source. It's not quite ready for primetime yet, but it's looking very nifty!

Issues for Love!

Issues for love are the requests submitted by users via Support. We try to work through a few of these each meeting: we're working on ways of making it easier for people to see what has been suggested and what has been decided about the suggestions, but for now we'll include a round-up of our discussions in our meeting updates. Note that a decision to implement something does not necessarily mean it will be implemented soon - we have many issues to work on and a limited number of coders! If you want to see the full (and lengthy!) list of things logged for coders to work on you can check out our Google Code Issues. If you'd like to adopt an issue, we welcome new coders!

• Request to add a setting to prompt-meme challenges to disallow anonymous prompts. This seemed like a handy extra feature without too much coding complexity, so we have logged it as an issue for a coder to work on.
• Request to add an option to hide 'Share' buttons on works to reclaim screen real estate. It's already possible to disallow use of the share button on your own works, but you still see the button. We sympathise with the desire to reclaim the screen real estate, but we decided that added a user preference to hide the buttons would add too much complexity (the more user preferences there are, the more complicated it becomes for people to figure out what they can set in preferences, so we try to limit the options to things where there is a lot of demand for a setting). Instead, we added some extra code to our buttons so that they can be selected with CSS, so that people can build skins which hide the 'Share' button (or indeed any other button).
• Suggestion for a 'challenge calendar' listing opening and closing dates for challenge sign-ups, and dates for assignments due, works revealed, authors revealed, etc, which can be opted in when a mod creates the challenge. We loved this idea, but it is fairly complex to implement. Our lovely co-chair Amelia has volunteered to put together a design, so this is something we'll introduce in the future - but probably not for a while.
• Request for a way to mark WIPs as abandoned, and a way to offer abandoned WIPs up for 'adoption' so that someone can finish them. We all agreed it would be really nice to have a quick way to flag that a WIP would never be finished, so we've logged that as an issue for a coder to implement. The idea of offering works up for adoption seems like it might have more limited appeal, so we agreed that for now, it would be better to leave this as something which people can simply indicate in the tags they use, if so desired (you can add 'Adopt this story' or indeed any other tag you wish as an additional tag to your work).

Reflecting on Release 0.8.9

As most of you reading this will know, we had a big release of new code at the beginning of November. This release included a lot of exciting new stuff; unfortunately, it didn't go as smoothly as we had hoped. In this meeting we reflected on problematic areas and ways that we can improve in future:

• We combined two big new features: the redesign of our front-end code and the new tag sets code for challenges and collections. We had decided to combine the two because the tag sets needed some front-end work anyway, and at the time we made the decision it made sense to roll the two things into one. However, the tag sets code was time sensitive: because it offers a new system of challenge nominations which significantly reduces the pressure on tag wranglers, we wanted to implement it in time for the big holiday challenges such as Yuletide. This meant that when we combined the two features, we had a lot more stuff to get ready within a set amount of time, which made everything more difficult. When we decided to merge the two, it didn't seem as if this was going to be a problem - but one thing we've learnt is that any deploy can bring unexpected hitches, so in the future if there's a time-sensitive feature we'll be trying to keep that as separate from other code as possible.
• This was a big visual change, which meant that it had an impact on a large number of users: visual bugs tend to be encountered by lots of users, and even if there are no bugs, people still have lots of feedback about visual changes. We were aware of this; however, given the scale of the response to this deploy we realise we weren't prepared enough. We'll be doing more testing of interface changes in future, and exploring ways of beta-testing them with more users.
• Since one thing about visual changes is that lots of people just prefer the design they are used to, one thing we could have improved on was providing a way of going back to the old default design. We tried to provide for this with the One Point Faux option, but it had quite a few problems. So, in future this is something we'll be paying more attention to: if we introduce a big change, we'll try to provide ways of opting out. The good news is that going forward, this will actually be easier, because the new skins system is much more lightweight and it should be easier to provide some backwards compatibility (one reason this was problematic this time is because the underlying code for the old system was less than ideal, so everything had been completely rewritten).
• We didn't have as much support documentation and information as we really needed for this deploy. In particular, we needed much fuller documentation on the new skins features so that people could try them out more easily and our Support team could point to useful information when helping people. There were several factors which led to a lack of documentation: crucially, several of the team who would normally take care of this were dealing with RL issues which limited the amount of time they could spend on it. In order to help avoid problems like this in future, we're building a deploy checklist which includes documentation, to make sure that we've considered whether we need additional documentation regardless of who is available to work on any given deploy. We're also aiming to build up a proper documentation team so that this work is less likely to fall through the cracks: if you're interested in being involved in this team, get in touch with our Volunteers and Recruitment Committee and let them know. We'd love to welcome new people to the team!
• We also needed more documentation on the new features for testers, so that it was clearer what people needed to test and what they should expect it to do. This is an ongoing aim - we're working to improve our documentation across the board. Improving documentation for testers will also help us to address another issue, which was that feedback from testers got a bit scattered - having clear docs to start with would have helped us make it clearer what feedback needed to go where. Again, we're working on building up our testing procedures generally - if you're interested in getting involved with testing, let us know!

While the problems we had with this deploy did highlight a number of areas where we need to work to improve, it's not all doom and gloom! There were also a number of things that went right with this deploy - we were able to fix critical bugs within 48 hours of the deploy, the Support team did a wonderful job keeping up with the many Support requests, and there was a huge amount of awesome code in the deploy itself. One reason the site is still in beta is that we're still learning the best processes for development (as well as because our code is new and rapidly changing): in the last four years we've gone from being a tiny group working on coding a 'closed' site (i.e. for the first two years we were just writing the code and testing, we didn't have any real users) to being a much larger group catering for a site of over 28800 users! So, we're still figuring things out - objects may still shift in transit! We're pleased that we've been able to keep the site up and running, and everything largely functional, even though we've had the odd bump along the way. Thanks to everyone who has worked hard to make this true!

Next deploy

We're hoping to get one last deploy in before the end of 2011! It will include some updates to our HTML parser, some improvements to our static pages for collections and challenges, and Atom feeds for fandom tags! (YEAY!)

News from our sub-committees

• Coders have been working on polishing off the issues to go in the next deploy. We're particularly excited about the forthcoming addition of Atom feeds for fandom tags - having tested this out for a good while now on the F/F tag, we think we can implement feeds without too much additional strain on the servers, and since this is a very popular request we're excited about launching it!
• Testers have been testing the issues for next deploy, and discussing how they'd like to see the subcommittee develop next year. There have been some great discussions on what worked and what didn't this year, how we can build a stronger testing community, and how we can support our testers.

News from our sister committees

• Support have continued to work amazingly hard keeping up with a high number of tickets. Looking forward, they're also thinking about our documentation needs and places we need more information for users.
• Tag wranglers have been discussing needs for next year with AD&T - the two committees will be meeting in the new term to talk over technical needs for tag wrangling. They've also been surveying all tag wrangling volunteers about their experiences this year, with a view to figuring out what works well and what can be improved on.

If there are things you'd like to do or say, please share them in comments, via the AO3 support and feedback form, by volunteering (we won't be taking on new volunteers until the new term, but you can get in touch now to let us know you're interested), or in whatever medium you feel comfortable with. Everyone is welcome to this party!

This meeting round-up by Lucy

Mirrored from an original post on the Archive of Our Own.

The Accessibility, Design and Technology committee oversees technology-related projects within the OTW. Currently we are responsible for designing and building the Archive of Our Own. Our regular meeting updates keep you informed about developments on the AO3!

AD&T and our associated committees and subcommittees have been very busy recently working towards our latest deploy and then working on issues arising from that. This one didn't go as smoothly as we had hoped (understatement!); we knew that there would be bugs revealed by practical use that didn't appear in testing, though there were more than we had anticipated and we have been working hard to fix the immediate issues. We're happy to say that we were able to fix the most pressing problems within 48 hours; a week on from the deploy we've been able to address quite a few more, so those fixes will be deployed soon. We're really grateful to everyone who worked hard on this deploy and on addressing the issues subsequent to it. We are planning to do a thorough review of the deploy and think about the lessons learned and ways we can improve. This week, however, we focused on working through some outstanding business and outlining the tasks we need to complete before the end of the year.

The Board would like to issue a public apology to our Support and AD&T staff and volunteers, our members, and the users of the AO3.

It is the Board's responsibility -- including the responsibility of the position I, Hele Braunstein, hold as Board liaison to both AD&T and Support -- to keep an eye on any organizational issues that would affect both the quality of the product put forward to our beta install and the amount of work and responsibility of our volunteers. It is, in addition, our particular responsibility to ensure that they are not blamed and held accountable in public for what are, at their heart, organizational failings.

It was the Board's responsibility to act on these failings, and avoid their having the impact that they, regrettably, have had.

As apologies are nothing if they are not followed by action, we can promise to take measures to avoid this happening in the future. The AD&T committee will work to figure out where we went wrong and what measures to take and guidelines to set to avoid it happening in the future. They will work with their current Board liaison, the Board as a whole, and their future Board liaison.

I especially apologize for being only able to set things in motion, as I'll not be returning to Board next term. However, I promise to be available to the people working on it next term as well, if needed.

Finally, and most importantly, we want to thank each and every volunteer and staff member who has worked on this, both before and after the deploy. Your work was not at fault, and it's deeply appreciated. Without you, and your efforts, OTW and its many projects would not exist.

Edited to add: This post was made in response to a number of conversations that were, and are, happening both inside and outside the OTW in reaction to the AO3 deploy; we find ourselves in the position of offering another apology as a result, as this post, in practice, proved to be opaque to the larger OTW community, which includes diverse interests in all our projects. To clarify, there were issues with the latest deploy to the AO3 -- the deploy was somewhat hurried, limiting the ability of our testers, coders, support team, and other staff to do their jobs, and making the process harder than necessary, both for our volunteers as well as for our users.

As a result, many volunteers were put in a position where they felt personally liable for larger organizational or group-level errors; this is why we, as a Board, felt it was necessary to acknowledge their distress and to respect their very hard work. They addressed many of the problems and corrected them within 48 hours -- we are grateful for their efforts, and wish to apologize for the necessity. (edits made 14 November 2011 5:00 UTC)