Accessibility, Design, & Technology

  • Announcing the Archive of Our Own Diversity Statement

    By Curtis Jefferson on Saturday, 29 June 2013 - 7:48pm
    Message type:
    Announcement
    Tags:
    Accessibility, Design, & Technology, Internationalization & Outreach

    The OTW is delighted to announce the implementation of the Archive of Our Own Diversity Statement.

    The AO3 Diversity Statement is intended to codify the Archive's pre-existing commitment to open expression and inclusive participation in the Archive project. We, the staff and volunteers of the OTW, have written this statement to express our principles, and to give you, our users, friends, and fellow fans, an explicit set of standards to which to hold us as we continue to develop the Archive. We hope that going forward the Diversity Statement will form a vital part of the Archive experience.

    The Diversity Statement has been years in the making, and was spearheaded by the Internationalization & Outreach committee in collaboration with multiple other OTW committees. A big thank-you goes to those committees, especially the Accessibility, Design & Technology committee and the Archive team, and to I&O's chairs and staffers past and present who put time, thought, and energy into seeing the statement go live.

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

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  • Volunteer Recruiting: Testing Volunteers & Web Developer Staff

    By Curtis Jefferson on Monday, 20 May 2013 - 6:56pm
    Message type:
    Volunteering
    Tags:
    Accessibility, Design, & Technology, Volunteers & Recruiting, Web Strategy, Design & Development Committee

    We would like to thank everyone who responded to our previous call for Support Staff. The chairs are reviewing applications and should be contacting people within the next two weeks.

    Today, we're excited to announce the opening of applications for:

    • Testing Volunteer - Closes May 27th
    • Web Developer Staff - Closes May 27th

    We have included more information on each role below. Open roles and applications will always be available at the volunteering page. If you don't see a role that fits with your skills and interests now, keep an eye on the listings. We plan to put up new applications every few weeks, and we will also publicize new roles as they become available.

    All applications generate a confirmation page and an auto-reply to your e-mail address. We encourage you to read the confirmation page and to whitelist volunteers (at) transformativeworks.org in your e-mail client. If you do not receive the auto-reply within 24 hours, please check your spam filters and then contact us.

    Note: We are continuing to work on a set of Volunteering Frequently Asked Questions that we hope to have posted within the next few weeks. If you have any questions about volunteering for the OTW, please let us know.

    Testing Volunteer
    The Accessibility, Design, & Technology committee (AD&T) is the guiding body that coordinates software design and development on behalf of the Organization for Transformative Works. AD&T is committed to developing high quality, accessible products that support the goals of the OTW while providing opportunities for professional and personal growth for its members. The main project concerning AD&T right now is the Archive of Our Own.

    Quality Assurance & Testing (QA&T) is a subcommittee of AD&T responsible for testing bug fixes and new features before they go live, overseeing release and issue management tasks, and maintaining relevant documentation.

    We are currently looking for motivated testers to join our team of volunteers and help us test new code before deploys. More information is available at the Testing Volunteer application. Applications are due May 27th.

    Web Developer Staff
    Do you have experience with Drupal and website management? Join our team of Web Developers! Web Developers are responsible for improvements to and maintenance of the primary OTW web properties. You will participate in an on-call rotation with other Web Developers, design and implement new features and fixes for the websites, and help to determine priorities for future web development efforts. More information is available at the Web Developer application. Applications are due May 27th.

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  • Archive of Our Own Newsletter - March/April 2013

    By Camden on Tuesday, 30 April 2013 - 1:34am
    Message type:
    Archive Update
    Tags:
    Accessibility, Design, & Technology, Support Committee, Tag Wrangling Committee

    March and April were busy busy busy months for the Archive. Our output included, among other things, a new header, an updated roadmap, and our annual April Showers promotion, a joint effort between Fanlore and the AO3 to highlight the fandoms you love!

    All the Archive news that's fit to print!

    As part of the continuing discussion about the OTW's decision to include meta, or fandom nonfiction, on the Archive, the OTW's Board released a statement. This statement outlined the history of the decision as well as the Board's reasons for including fandom nonfiction on the Archive. Another post, which was the culmination of a discussion between several committees, further clarified the position of the Archive's thoughts on fandom nonfiction and tentatively outlined the steps that would be necessary in introducing fandom nonfiction into the Archive.

    The OTW Board released an updated Archive Roadmap. The Roadmap outlines future improvements and changes of the Archive. It is maintained by the Accessibility, Design & Technology committee, though it was created with the input of several other committees including Abuse, Internationalization & Outreach, Open Doors, Support, Systems, Tag Wranglers, and Translation. If you're interested in the future of the Archive, go check it out!

    Although the event was not run by Archive committees (big props to the Development & Membership committee for all their hard work!), AO3 was happy to host a banner for the OTW's annual April Membership Drive as well as contributing a post sharing how much it costs to run the Archive. This year's drive was the most successful drive in OTW history. Thank you to everyone who donated!

    Release 0.9.6 went live and what a release it was! It presented us with, most notably, a new header and new notification emails. Other new features included the ability to disable guest comments, and a new and improved front page. This release fixed several bugs, updated Tag Wrangling and Admin features, and gave us several other goodies. Unfortunately, this release also presented some unanticipated problems for several users. Our known issues posts describes these issues and we encourage any users who are encountering problems with Release 0.9.6 to look at the above post or contact Support.

    Fanlore and AO3 ran their annual April Showers promotion, showcasing fandoms on AO3 and on Fanlore. The Archive's tumblr ao3org with the Fanlore twitter highlighted a fandom a day for the month of April.

    Adventures with Support

    In the months of March and April so far, we've managed 798 unique tickets so far - and we still have a couple days to go!

    AD&T Committee business of note

    In addition to releases, we've been working on documentation to start recruitment for selected positions soon.

    Support Committee business of note

    We will be holding another Open Chat session with the Support Staff in our public chat room (the link will be made available on the day of the chat) 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 users one-on-one in live chat. See what time that is where you live. (Real Life Monsters ate the April chat.)

    Tag Wrangling Committee business of note

    Tag Wrangling opened for volunteers and had such an overwhelming response that we had to hit the pause button long enough to catch up! We've now inducted the over 50 (\o/) new volunteers, and should be re-opening recruitment soon. In concert with that, staff have been hard at work putting together a comprehensive training plan; our basic tutorials are already completed and in use, and more advanced instruction is on the way. Meanwhile our new wranglers have enthusiastically been helping all our experienced hands in cleaning up tags in fandoms across the Archive; we're looking in better shape than ever!

    And finally...

    We are floored by the generosity of the participants in AO3 Auction. From the bottom of our squeeing hearts: THANK YOU!

    Questions? Comments?

    We welcome feedback from users! If you have questions or comments, feel free to leave them in the comments of the latest news post, or send in a Support request (if you're reporting a bug, please send that to Support, as they're super efficient - comments on our news posts sometimes get overlooked).

    Mirrored from an original post on AO3 News.

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  • April Showers at the AO3 and Fanlore!

    By Curtis Jefferson on Monday, 1 April 2013 - 3:45pm
    Message type:
    Announcement
    Tags:
    Accessibility, Design, & Technology, Wiki Committee

    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 archive their works on the Archive of Our Own, and tell their own fannish histories on Fanlore. As of March 29, 2013, Fanlore has 24,423 articles which have undergone 439,529 edits, while the Archive of Our Own recently passed 143,000 users, and more than 640,100 works have been posted on the AO3, across over 11,600 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 the classic television show M*A*S*H has only 264 works on the AO3 while Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman sits at 83. There are even more fannish stories left untold on Fanlore - we'd love to see the fannish activity over the Veronica Mars movie 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, new works you've been putting off creating, and more! Upload your old (and new) works to the AO3 and tell your tales on Fanlore.

    We'll be highlighting a different fandom for each day of the month on our Tumblr ao3org, to help jog your memories about fannish loves of the past and highlight some currently active fandom activity. When uploading to the AO3, you can tag your uploaded works April Showers 2013 - at the end of the month we'll round up all the works with this tag and post stats on how many were uploaded for each fandom. However, don't feel you have to stick to these fandoms - we hope people will reach into their personal fannish histories to preserve what's important to them!

    We kick off today by hearing the people sing with the 2012 film version of Les Misérables. Bring your works beyond the barricade into the AO3 and share all of the dreams you dreamed on Fanlore!

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  • OTW Fannews: Do it yourself edition

    By Claudia Rebaza on Sunday, 24 February 2013 - 7:26pm
    Message type:
    News of Note
    Tags:
    Gender and Sexuality, Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality, DMCA, Takedowns, Accessibility, Design, & Technology, Open Doors Committee, OTW Sightings, Technology
    • TechDirt discussed the new site DMCAInjury.com, which was set up to keep track of bogus DMCA takedown requests. Those who file such claims could face punishment for those actions under section 512(f) of the DMCAbut so far it's happened rarely and with difficulty. Keeping track of accidental or malicious takedown requests might spur more cases against those filing them, or "at the very least, perhaps it will create a useful dataset to explore the nature and frequency of bogus DMCA takedowns."
    • The Daily Dot discussed the controversy over racist, homophobic, and sexist commentary found at GitHub, an open source code-sharing site used by many projects (including the AO3). "GitHub is a platform geeks and techies love because it not only lets you manage projects but allows you to share your code and your projects with the outside world." However, the sharing mentality doesn't mean all users are welcome. "GitHub sits in the center of an Open Source community that has been dealing with heated ongoing controversy over its lack of diversity. In November, BritRuby, a Manchester conference of Ruby on Rails coders, was canceled after outrage broke out online at its all-male lineup of panelists."
    • A post at TeleRead offered fans tips on formatting downloaded fanfic from Fanfiction.net and the AO3, noting that MOBI downloads from AO3 can create wide margins and non-functional tables of content. Flavorwire tips readers off to the availability of Giphy, a search engine for animated GIFs. "Even in the age of relatively mainstream blogs like What Should We Call Me, though, a glance at Giphy’s front page reveals that the site caters to the kind of dedicated fandoms that popularized the .GIF in the first place."
    • Lastly, former Board member Francesca Coppa will be speaking at the Midwest Archives Conference on April 18 about the OTW's work on the Fan Culture Preservation Project and the AO3. Her talk will discuss how fan works are "an alternative, subterranean literature and arts culture, and describe the many ways fans have worked over the years to distribute and preserve that culture through zine libraries, hand-coded on-line archives,[and] songtape circles."

    What tools do you think help keep fandom running? Tell us about it in Fanlore. Contributions are welcome from all fans.

    We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent OTW Fannews post. Links are welcome in all languages! Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.

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  • Archive Of Our Own Newsletter - January/February 2013

    By Camden on Sunday, 17 February 2013 - 7:40pm
    Message type:
    Archive Update
    Tags:
    Support Committee, Accessibility, Design, & Technology, Tag Wrangling Committee

    Welcome to the January-February Newsletter! We hope you had a good holiday season and are having a happy new year! Despite the term break in December, January was busy busy busy with upgrades and releases for all. February is also turning out to be a big month with releases, spotlights, tag wrangling fixes, and header posts galore! Here's what we've been up to:

    All the Archive news that's fit to print!

    2012 was full of Archive milestones. In November we passed the 500,000 work mark in 10,000 fandoms. In December, the Archive passed 100,000 users. Check out this post for further milestones that we passed in 2012.

    Tag Wrangling shared their process for wrangling Additional Tags and why Additional Tags are not as un-wranglable as one might think.

    Mini-Release 0.9.4 went live with a small number of bug fixes. We were also very happy to bring back invitation requests in December. Release 0.9.5 and its redux went off without a hitch.

    Fandom Tags are now alphabetized regardless of articles. Wranglers now have the ability to assign a sort name different from a display name, making it easier for us to wrangle and browse fandoms!

    We recently posted a Spotlight on Systems Committee. If you've ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes to support the technical systems of the Archive, read all about it here.

    AD&T are hard at work on a redesign of the site header. Check out our little preview and tell us what you think.

    And finally, the Board approved meta hosting on the Archive. Please see this post for details on how this decision affects you, the Archive, and the Archive staffers.

    Adventures with Support

    Things are keeping busy in the Support world. We've got a new co-chair, and the training is letting us solidify all of our training. We're looking forward to a solid year with proactive communication with both our fellow committees and our users!

    Open Doors Update

    Open Doors is still working toward an automated import for the 852 Prospect Archive and recently held two open house chats (read more here). In the meantime, we've opened up manual importing by inviting all 852 Prospect authors to the Archive. Check out Open Doors' post for further instructions on manually importing works from that particular Archive.

    AD&T Committee business of note

    We're excited about the upcoming year and are looking forward to everything we'll be sharing with you. On a more serious note, we recently reviewed our emergency plan in the event that our site is compromised and requires an emergency shutdown.

    Support Committee business of note

    Support will be hosting a Live Chat February 23rd-24th, from 4pm to 4am UTC (What time is that for you?) As Support, our function is to help users with bugs and issues, and pass reports on to our Coders and Systems team, who actually keep the place running. So, if you have questions or comments about AO3 or OTW policies, good or bad, Support Chat isn't the right place for them. If you do want to talk to someone about policy issues (meta on the Archive, philosophical issues with the tagging system, category change, etc.) we can direct you to the appropriate admin post or contact address so you can leave feedback directly for the people dealing with the area of your concern.

    Tag Wrangling Committee business of note

    We've clarified some major weirdness in our guidelines regarding AU tags and inconsistencies regarding the canonicals for Original Characters in Relationship tags.

    Apologies

    We've had some scheduled downtime during the past couple of weeks. Each time was for two upgrades and some site maintenance to build a better Archive. Apologies to anyone who was inconvenienced by this! We also received reports from some users that Avast was sending out malware warnings when users tried to access the Archive. The cause of this malware warning was external and no cause for alarm.

    Questions? Comments?

    We welcome feedback from users! If you have questions or comments, feel free to leave them in the comments of the latest news post, or send in a Support request (if you're reporting a bug, please send that to Support, as they're super efficient - comments on our news posts sometimes get overlooked).

    Mirrored from an original post on AO3 News.

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  • 2012 AO3 Milestones

    By Claudia Rebaza on Tuesday, 1 January 2013 - 6:59pm
    Message type:
    Report
    Tags:
    Accessibility, Design, & Technology

    Happy New Year everyone! The OTW is looking forward to new developments this term and one thing we want to celebrate are some milestones that have been passed at the Archive of Our Own in the last few weeks.

    Back in 2010, we wrote a post heralding our first major milestone when we reached 100,000 works less than a year into our beta. (We should point out that another OTW project, Fanlore, also hit the 100,000 edit mark that same year!)

    As of November 25 we passed 500,000 works archived at AO3. We passed the 10,000 fandoms mark a week later, and on December 17, our Support team answered the AO3's 10,000th support ticket! Then by December 25 we passed the 100,000th user account. As many users discovered in June, the AO3 invite system was put in place to avoid having the site crash during a surge in enrollment. This practice paid off in 2012 when a large number of users migrated to the site in May and began adding works. During the following months new code was written for the site, primarily to redesign the way filters functioned, and new servers have been added. The site remained stable despite continued high demand for accounts, so the invite queue kept being increased every few months to get new users into the site more quickly. As of December 18 we also restored account users' ability to request invitations.

    While we still have a large body of users awaiting accounts, currently around 10,000, this is down significantly from the 30,000+ that we saw through the latter half of 2012, and we hope to decrease the wait further in 2013. It seems likely that Archive use will continue growing strongly this year, possibly even repeating 2012's feat of more than doubling its user base.

    Engagement With the AO3

    As the following graph shows, there has been a distinct jump in various activities on the AO3 during the past eighteen months. User growth appears almost steady compared to reader activity, which can be seen clearly in the increase of bookmarking, commenting, and subscriptions.

    However as this second graph shows, all of these numbers are eclipsed by the enormous jump in kudos activity. While the early years of the AO3 saw use primarily as a storage site for authors' writing history, current use is clearly favoring active searching, reccing and participation from readers.

    Growth of the Site

    While the Archive had to discontinue unique visitor counts in the spring due to the load on the site, we are averaging 80 million page views per month. Another way to look at the growth of the site is with the following statistics, comparing items from AO3's launch in September 2008 to September 2012.

    • Comments per Work 2008: .0075
    • Comments per Work 2012: 6.44
    • Bookmarks per Work 2008: .0382
    • Bookmarks per Work 2012: 7.17

    Collections weren’t added until 2009. Their creation statistics are as follows:

    2009: 93 new collections
    2010: 478 new collections
    2011: 771 new collections
    2012: 1300 new collections

    There are now over 1400 top level collections. Many of these have subcollections for yearly challenges/events, giving us over 2600 collections in total. Yuletide, for example, has 10 subcollections, but only the main Yuletide collection appears in that top-level listing.

    We're looking forward to seeing what fan creators and AO3 users bring to the archive in 2013 and we'll keep working to improve your experience on the site!

    Mirrored from an original post on the AO3 News blog. Find related news by viewing our tag cloud.

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  • Archive of Our Own Newsletter - November-December 2012

    By Camden on Thursday, 13 December 2012 - 8:00pm
    Message type:
    Archive Update
    Tags:
    Support Committee, Accessibility, Design, & Technology, Tag Wrangling Committee

    Hello and Happy Holidays from the AO3! This newsletter contains all sorts of fun facts and news from the past two months - read on for updates in the world of the Archive in November and December.

    Cool stuff on the Archive

    Filters are back and our Advanced Search form has been updated! Look at this post for details on how to use our new filters and Advanced Search form. Release 0.9.2 went live and included more than just tag filters; we were also able to deploy bookmark filtering, a new search form for works and bookmarks, and new index pages for works and bookmarks. Releases 0.9.3 and 0.9.3 Redux also went live and included a lot of bug squashing and fixes as well as the ability to anonymously comment on your own anonymous work.

    We're now issuing 750 user invites per day. Our queue is slowly but steadily decreasing. To those of you still on the waiting list, thank you for your continued patience!

    Your Archive needs you!

    The Content Policy Committee is working on changes to the AO3's Terms of Service and would like your feedback on the proposed changes. The content change files are available at the above news post for your consideration. We welcome all feedback!

    Bugs we’ve squashed

    We've been keeping a close eye on performance after the release of the new search engine and filters, and we're pleased with how it's holding up: it's a big improvement over the old system. We quickly located a bug causing tag wrangling changes not to propagate through to works and bookmarks properly, so tag wrangling was disabled while that was being fixed, and it's up and running again now.

    We also tackled a number of collection and challenge-related bugs - 36 of them in Release 0.9.3 alone! Special thanks to Scott in particular for doing a ton of work on those.

    What’s up in the world of tags?

    There's been a few changes in the Marvel Avengers fandoms (some of the Archive's most popular!) To prepare for the coming sequels, the Thor and Captain America movie fandom names have changed, to Thor (Movies) and Captain America (Movies).

    Also, following the official material, the main metatag for The Avengers (2012) and the related movies is now Marvel Cinematic Universe.

    Note that if you tag for any of the subfandoms (e.g. if you tag your work The Avengers (2012) or Iron Man (Movies) that the work will automatically appear under Marvel Cinematic Universe. You can also tag a work with MCU if you like, but it will filter the exact same way as a work tagged with only the subfandoms.

    You may also notice a tag The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom. This ambiguous tag is necessary due to the existence of two unrelated "Avengers" fandoms, the Marvel superhero team and the British superspy series, and includes all works from both these series. As with MCU, using this tag in conjunction with more specific tags won't change where your work appears (and tagging with only this tag will make your Avengers movie-verse fic less likely for other users to find.) Generally, to make your works easier to find, tag with the most specific fandom (or fandoms) that apply.

    For more information on the wild and wacky world of Marvel Avengers tags, please check out this informative post by one of our brave Avengers wranglers!

    Adventures with Support

    We're still keeping up with support tickets, even in spite of the start of holiday absences. In fact, we're about to hit our 10,000th ticket in our tracking program - that's just about 3,300 tickets a year! Every ticket sent in with an email address gets an individual response, and even the ones without email are still documented as appropriate with other committees. We're incredibly proud of our Support teams over the years and all they've done for the Archive!

    AD&T Committee business of note

    Thank you to all the coders, testers, and volunteers who helped us with Release 0.9.2 and 0.9.3! There's been a ton of work going on behind the scenes, and we're enormously grateful to everyone who's been helping out, and to the tag wranglers for their patience while we've sorted out some bugs.

    We've been cautiously optimistic about performance over the last month, and we've ordered three new servers that we're hoping will help us to keep things running smoothly as we head into 2013. That's enabled us to increase the number of invitations that we send out each day, which is helping to cut down the wait times significantly.

    We're working on one last release for 2012, which will be a small one, focused on bug fixes. There's already code in the pipeline for the first release of 2013, and we're looking forward to adding some long-awaited improvements and new features in the new year!

    Tag Wrangling Committee business of note

    Due to changes in the search engine with the main new filters deploy, tag wrangling was turned off for most of November. With the latest deploy, wrangling is working again and our wranglers have been busy getting all the new tags of the last month in order (our amazing volunteers managed to wrangle over 300 uncategorized fandoms down to less than 5 in a single weekend!)

    Questions? Comments?

    We welcome feedback from users! If you have questions or comments, feel free to leave them in the comments of the latest news post, or send in a Support request (if you're reporting a bug, please send that to Support, as they're super efficient - comments on our news posts sometimes get overlooked).

    Mirrored from an original post on AO3 News. Find related news by viewing our tag cloud.

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  • Archive of Our Own Newsletter - October 2012

    By Camden on Thursday, 25 October 2012 - 2:25am
    Message type:
    Archive Update
    Tags:
    Support Committee, Accessibility, Design, & Technology, Tag Wrangling Committee

    Happy October, Archivers! Welcome to this month's newsletter.

    Cool stuff on the Archive!

    This month, we took a look at tag stats and growth over the past two years!

    What’s up in the world of tags?

    Often in wrangling, we change tag names in response to feedback either from archive users, or other tag wranglers (or both!). Our most recent change involves the canonical fandom tags for Jewish and Christian religious scripture. Prior to our changes, "Hebrew Bible" was a single fandom, with "Old Testament" as a synonym. You can view the current tag structure under Abrahamic Religions, which includes a tag for Tanakh separate from the Christian Bible (Old Testament). The old tag "Hebrew Bible" is now a synonym of Tanakh. Thank you to those users and wranglers who provided feedback in this discussion.

    Support issues

    We're seeing some really wonky behavior emerging with Tag Sets pulling characters into multiple fandoms or occasionally a tag vanishing from the list. We're having a hard time tracking this down, so if you see aberrant behavior in the Tag Set feature, please send Support a note so we can document it for the Coders!

    AD&T Committee business of note

    We continue to work on a header redesign and we have also started working on a brand new front page. Our updated roadmap is in the final stages of editing and should be available soon. The reinstatement of tag filtering comes closer and closer as we put the finishing touches on new code and sent it off to our testers. We still can't guarantee a firm date but they're coming - we promise! And finally, this month we celebrated Ada Lovelace Day by honoring our awesome chair Elz!

    Support Committee business of note

    As noted below with the Tag Wranglers, we are eagerly testing the return of the filters.

    Tag Wrangling Committee business of note

    We've been adding to our collection of public wrangling guidelines, and we're excitedly preparing (and testing!) for the upcoming return of tag filters.

    Questions? Comments?

    We welcome feedback from users! If you have questions or comments, feel free to leave them in the comments of the latest news post, or send in a Support request (if you're reporting a bug, please send that to Support, as they're super efficient - comments on our news posts sometimes get overlooked).

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  • Archive Of Our Own Newsletter - September 2012

    By Camden on Sunday, 30 September 2012 - 7:57pm
    Message type:
    Archive Update
    Tags:
    Accessibility, Design, & Technology, Tag Wrangling Committee

    Hello Archive creators, users, and lovers! The days have gone by quickly, haven't they? We've got a short--but sweet--newsletter for you this month.

    Cool stuff on the archive!

    Releases 0.9.0 and 0.9.1 were deployed -- check out what's new and what's been fixed! Tag hierarchies are now visible. We're also able to support podfic embeds again.

    What’s up in the world of tags?

    With the new public tag display pages, users on the Archive can now get a wranglers-eye view of tags. So if you're curious, you can check out all the Marvel comics fandoms or all the different adaptations of Hana Yori Dango on the Archive, see how many different characters Stiles Stilinski has been paired with, and hop between a variety of Alternate Universes!

    Support issues

    We're starting to see, due to the dedicated and diligent work of our Coding volunteers, a large number of bugs being squashed. Even so, we still have a number of bugs that we know about, along with common workarounds, at the Archive's Known Issues page. If you want to check to see if something has been reported, that's a good place to start. (There's even a link at the top of the Support form.)

    We're excited about the upcoming changes and want to extend a hearty greeting to all our incoming holiday exchanges, especially the number of exchanges who are choosing to run entirely on the site for the first time! If you as a user or a mod have any questions, drop us a line!

    As a general warning to users posting HTML, both Firefox and Chrome seem to have resumed their trick of converting straight (") double quotes into angled 'smart' quotes, which our HTML Sanitizer does not like. If you're having issues embedding multimedia or adjusting CSS, that would be the first place we recommend checking.

    AD&T Committee business of note

    We're also working hard on bringing back tag filtering and we hope to have it back soon!. Please take a look at this post for more information on tag filtering if you haven't already. We're also discontinuing support for IE6&7. See this post for details and how you can help us with this transition. Release 0.9.0 and 0.9.1 went well and we're very pleased with how they are working out. And finally, we continue to work on an updated AO3 roadmap and its development is going well!

    Support Committee business of note

    We've made notable steps over the last year to maintain a sustainable system for ticket responses, and, having figured out what works, are starting to collect documented guidelines for the fateful day in the distant future of complete staff turnover.

    Tag Wrangling Committee business of note

    We're really excited that everyone can now see some of the insides of the wrangulator, an alpha feature which you may have read about in A New Look at AO3 Tags. We're currently working hard on converting our wrangling guidelines for posting to the archive FAQs section, starting here.

    Apologies

    We've been getting reports from people who have been missing account activation emails -- please do not hesitate to let us know if this is the case with you. We're working on the issue and hope to have it resolved soon but in the meantime please contact Support if you are missing an activation email. The Archive also experienced about 40 minutes of downtime earlier this month when we installed new batteries in old machines and another 40 minutes during a deploy. We apologize if this inconvenienced you in any way.

    Questions? Comments?

    We welcome feedback from users! If you have questions or comments, feel free to leave them in the comments of the latest news post, or send in a Support request (if you're reporting a bug, please send that to Support, as they're super efficient - comments on our news posts sometimes get overlooked).

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