Accessibility, Design, & Technology

  • Archive of Our Own Newsletter - July 2012

    By .Lucy Pearson on Tuesday, 31 July 2012 - 3:54pm
    Message type:
    Archive Update
    Tags:
    Accessibility, Design, & Technology

    *coughs* *taps microphone* Is this thing on?

    Ahem, after something of a pause, this is (hopefully) the return of our regular AO3 newsletter! Your friendly AO3 news poster (that's me, Lucy!) started off the year with good intentions and a shiny new format. However, between writing various other special edition posts, co-chairing the Communications committee, and dealing with real life, somehow the newsletter kept slipping down the to-do list. The good news is that new Communications staffer Camden has volunteered to take the baton, so hopefully these newsletters will be making a more frequent appearance in the future. So, without further ado, a few updates on the major happenings in recent times.

    Major doings: performance, performance, performance

    For the last few months, all the AO3 teams have been working really hard dealing with the various performance issues on the Archive. These started to appear in around May and got really acute in June, before we got them under control with a lot of hard work and some emergency measures (which involved 5 code deploys in the space of a few weeks). There's been some heroic work from Coders, Testers and Systems to get the situation under control quickly: we're really grateful to everyone who pitched in and helped out. We're continuing to work on performance, most recently with a RAM upgrade and upgrades to our server software, and we'll keep users posted as new developments arise.

    Fanstravaganza!

    Our performance crunch was largely down to a gigantic increase in traffic: we had over 1.4 MILLION visitors in the month of June alone! Our invitations queue also continues to grow apace: we recently increased the number of invitations being issued each day to 300, but this is still not keeping up with demand. We're doing our best to keep expanding, but we can only increase accounts so fast while preserving site stability, so we're afraid the queue will probably remain long for a while. :(

    Tag filters are coming back - we promise!

    As an emergency performance measure, we disabled our tag filters. We know they're much missed, but their absence has enabled the site to run without 502 errors. We'd hoped to have the replacement filters finished by the end of July, but unfortunately they're taking a bit longer than we'd hoped (turns out we have to let coders leave the house now and again). Everyone is working super hard to get them coded, tested, and up on the site as soon as possible - we apologise for the inconvenience in the meantime.

    Tags and media categories

    Speaking of tags, the new Category Change workgroup recently got off the ground with their discussion of how we organise the media categories on our Fandoms page. This is an issue which we've been chewing over in-house for a really, really long time - we know lots of users find the current categories confusing and/or problematic, and we'd like to come up with a better way of handling them. However, this is a really big can of worms: for example, we know that "Anime & Manga" is problematic as a catch-all category including manhua, manhwa, etc., but we also know that lots of fans are used to looking for anime and manga and would be confused if we scrapped that terminology altogether. So, we're looking to find ways of handling the different categories which are understandable but also less problematic.

    The Category Change workgroup includes members from lots of relevant committees: Internationalization and Outreach, Tag Wranglers, Support, and Accessibility, Design and Technology. They will be discussing the various issues and a range of possible solutions.

    As part of this process they'll be seeking input from various groups inside and outside the organisation and using that feedback to help identify some possible solutions. They'll also be looking into the technical aspects – for example, improvements in searching and browsing on the Archive in general will open up more possibilities for how we handle categories specifically - so we don't wind up with a great theoretical solution that’s impossible to implement. Tag wranglers have already given some great ideas and thoughts on this issue - they've been discussing it on and off for at least two years - and the workgroup is really looking forward to moving ahead with it. Stay posted for more news on this!

    Tag wrangling - a new view!

    We've had lots of feedback from users who've said that they'd love to be able to get more information about how tags are wrangled and how they all relate to one another. This has also been one of the most frequent feature requests from tag wranglers, who put lots of work into making the tags link up in a meaningful way and would like their work to be more useful to users. Our awesome coder sarken took up the challenge and did some work to make the tags pages which are currently only visible to tag wranglers visible to any user. This will be an 'alpha' feature when it goes live - we expect we'll get lots of feedback about how it could be better - but we hope this news will be welcome to lots of people who have been wondering what's going on behind the scenes!

    For those who are really curious about tag wrangling, the Tag Wrangling Committee are also currently preparing a public version of the tag wrangling guidelines. We hope to have these posted shortly after the tags pages are made public.

    What else is up in the world of tags?

    The Archive welcomes all types of fanworks! We have plans to make it much more useful for different types of fanworks by adding some more browsing and posting features. However, right now, people use the "Additional Tags" field to make it clear what type of creative endeavour their particular work consists of. Tag Wranglers have wrangled the more common tags like podfic, fanart, fanvids and AMV, and even things like knitting and crochet patterns, and we're always excited to see people tagging for a diverse range of fanworks.

    But you might not be aware that the tags we've wrangled go further than just describing the media type and content. Once the filters are reenabled, you'll be able to use the additional tags we've made canonical to further filter those media types by format or length - click on one of the fanwork types linked above, and browse the list, or use the advanced search.

    For Fanart, there are tags that describe medium, such as Crayons, or Digital Art. For podfic and video, there are tags which describe the audio and video formats that it is available in, such as Video Format: AVI or Audio Format: MP3. For podfic specifically, there are tags which indicate the length of the recorded work, such as Podfic Length: 0-10 Minutes, through to Podfic Length: 15-20 hours.

    Wranglers will add more to the canonical tag lists as we find them, but if there's a media related tag that you'd find useful to be filterable, let us know through a support request or by tweeting us at @ao3_wranglers!

    Streaming podfic

    We hit a snag recently with our podfic provision when Google disabled their Audio Player, which we were using to enable people to stream podfic. The good news is that we've snagged a copy of the audio player code to host on our own servers, so this will return in our next code deploy. When the deploy has taken place, you'll once more be able to embed podfic, using the following embed code:

    <embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" flashvars="audioUrl=MP3_FILE_URL" src="http://archiveofourown.org/static/audio-player.swf" width="400" height="270" quality="best" > </embed>

    (Essentially, if you were previously using the Google player, you'll just be replacing the Google url with http://archiveofourown.org/static/audio-player.swf.) Apologies for the inconvenience in the meantime!

    Support superstars

    The recent increase in users on the site has resulted in a corresponding increase in Support tickets. The fantastic Support team have been amazing at keeping up with all the tickets and giving users the help they need. Their turnaround is really quick and we know that people appreciate their hard work - thanks Support!

    Support staffer Yshyn wrote a great post on Support ticket stats which gives an insight into what kinds of questions people ask and how many tickets we receive. One of the things which has been particularly nice for Support recently is the number of tickets which have included some positive feedback for the site, even when it's been experiencing problems. They always pass this onto the other teams and it makes everyone's day brighter - thank you lovely users!

    Roadmap, feature requests, and plans

    We try to keep users informed on what's going on with the site, although it can be lots of hard work! You can see the details of all our code updates to date in our release notes. Awesome AD&T staffer mumble is currently working really hard to update our very, very outdated Roadmap: this is important as a way of helping us focus our work, and a useful way of giving users an idea of what we have planned. We've also recently started using a new tool, Trello, to manage feature requests from users. Like our codebase on Github and our issues list on Google Code, this is open to the public, so you can now see what's already been requested and vote for the things you'd like! You can also see proposals that were rejected, and why. Support staffer Sam wrote up a handy introduction to our internal tools, and there's also a new AO3 Internal Tools FAQ.

    We have limited resources, so we can't always introduce requested features as fast as we'd like (right now, we're focusing on site stability and trying to avoid too many new things). However, we hope that these tools will help people see what's in the works, and we're excited to have found a tool (Trello) which makes it easier for people to let us know which features they're most interested in.

    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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  • Update on AO3 performance issues

    By .Lucy Pearson on Monday, 11 June 2012 - 12:10pm
    Message type:
    Archive Update
    Tags:
    Accessibility, Design, & Technology

    Since last month, we've been experiencing frequent and worsening performance problems on the Archive of Our Own as the site has expanded suddenly and dramatically. The number of new users joining the site doubled between April and May, and we currently have over 17,000 users waiting for an invitation. We've been working hard to deal with the 502 errors and site slowdowns, and we've implemented a number of emergency fixes which have slightly alleviated the issues, but these haven't been as effective as we'd hoped. We're confident that we will be able to fix the problems, but unfortunately we expect the next round of fixes to take at least two weeks to implement.

    We know that it's really frustrating for users when the site is inaccessible, and we're sorry that we're not able to fix the problems more quickly. We wanted to give you an update on what's going on and what we're doing to fix it: see below for some more details on the problems. While we work on these issues, you should get better performance (and alleviate the load on the servers) by browsing logged-out where possible (more details below).

    Why so many problems?

    As we mentioned in our previous post on performance issues, the biggest reason for the site slowdowns is that site usage has increased dramatically! We've almost doubled our traffic since January, and since the beginning of May the pace of expansion has accelerated rapidly. In the last month, more than 8,000 new user accounts were created, and more than 31,000 new works were posted. This is a massive increase: April saw just 4,000 new users and 19,000 new works. In addition to the growing number of registered users, we know we've had a LOT more people visiting the site: between 10 May and 9 June we had over 3,498.622 GB of traffic. In the past week, there were over 12.2 million page views - this number only includes the ones where the page loaded successfully, so it represents a lot of site usage!

    This sudden and dramatic expansion has come about largely as a result of changes on Fanfiction.net, who have recently introduced more stringent enforcement of their policies relating to explicit fanworks which have resulted in some fans no longer being able to host their works there. One of the primary reasons the AO3 was created was in order to provide a home for fanworks which were at risk of deletion elsewhere, so we're very keen to welcome these new users, but in the short term this does present us with some challenges!

    We'd already been preparing for site expansion and identifying areas of the site which needed work in order to ensure that we could grow. This means some important performance work has been ongoing; however, we weren't expecting quite such a rapid increase, so we've had to implement some changes on an emergency basis. This has sometimes meant a few additional unexpected problems: we're sorry if you ran into bugs while our maintenance was in progress.

    What we've done so far

    Our sys-admins and coders have implemented a number of things designed to reduce the load on the site over the last week:

    • Implemented Squid caching for a number of the most performance intensive places on the site, including work index pages. For the biggest impact, we focused on caching the pages which are delivered to logged-out users. This is because all logged-out users usually see the same things, whereas logged in users might have set preferences (e.g. to hide warnings) which can't be respected by the cache. We initially implemented Squid caching for individual works, but this caused quite a few bugs, so we've suspended that for now while we figure out ways of making it work right. (You can read more about what Squid is and what it does in Release Notes 0.8.17.
    • Redistributed and recalibrated our unicorns (which deliver requests to the server and retrieve the data) to make sure they're focused on the areas where we need them most. This included setting priorities on posting actions (so that you're less likely to lose data when posting or commenting), increasing the numbers of unicorns, and adjusting the time they wait for an answer.
    • Simplified bookmark listings, which were using lots of processing power. We'll be looking into revamping these in the future, but right now we've stripped them back to the basics to try to reduce the load on the site.
    • Cached the listing of guest kudos so the number doesn't have to be fetched from the database every time there are new kudos (which caused a big strain on the servers)

    Implementing these changes has involved sustained work on the part of our sys-admins, coders and testers; in particular, the Squid caching involved a great deal of hard work in order to set up and test. Several members of the team worked through the night in the days leading up to the weekend (when we knew we would have lots of visitors) in order to implement the performance fixes. So, we're disappointed that the changes so far haven't done as much as we'd hoped to get rid of the performance problems - we were hoping to be able to restore site functionality quickly for our users, but that hasn't been possible.

    What we're going to do next

    Although the emergency fixes we've implemented haven't had as much impact as we'd hoped, we're confident that there are lots of things we can do to address the performance problems. We're now working on the following:

    • New search and browse code. As we announced in our previous post on performance issues, we've been working for some time on refactoring our search and browse code, which is used on some of the most popular pages and needs to be more efficient. This is almost ready to go -- in fact, we delayed putting it onto our test archive in order to test and implement some of the emergency fixes -- so as soon as we have been able to test it and verify that it's working as it should, then we will deploy this code.
    • More Squid caching. We weren't able to cache as many things as we'd initially hoped because the Squid caching threw up some really tricky bugs. We're continuing to work on that and we'll implement more caching across the site once we've tested it more thoroughly.
    • More servers. We're currently looking at purchasing a more robust database server and moving our old database server (aka 'the Beast') into an application slot, giving us three app servers. We'll also be upgrading the database software we use so that we can make the most of this server power.

    When we'll be able to implement the fixes

    We're working as fast as we can to address the problems -- we poured all our resources into the emergency fixes this week to try to get things up and running again quickly. Now that we've implemented those emergency fixes, we think that we need to focus on making some really substantive changes. This means we will have to slow down a little bit in order to make the bigger changes and test them thoroughly (to minimise the chances of introducing new bugs while we fix the existing problems). Buying servers will also take us some time because we need to identify the right machines, order them and install them. For this reason, we expect it to take at least two weeks for us to implement the next round of major fixes.

    We're sorry that we're not able to promise that we'll fix these problems right away. We're working as hard as we can, but we think it's better to take the time to fix the problems properly rather than experimenting with lots of emergency fixes that may not help. Since the AO3 is run entirely by volunteers, we also need to make sure we don't burn out our staff, who have been working many hours while also managing their day jobs. So, for the long term health of the site as a whole, we need to ensure we're spending time and resources on really effective fixes.

    Invitations and the queue

    As a result of the increasing demand for the site, we're experiencing a massive increase in requests for invitations: our invitations queue now stands at over 17,000. We know that people are very disappointed at having to wait a long time for an invitation, and we'd love to be able to issue them faster. However, the main reason we have an invitations system for creating accounts is to help manage the growth of the site -- if the 16,000 people currently waiting for an invitation all signed up and started posting works on the same day the site would definitely collapse. So, we're not able to speed up issuing invitations at this time: right now we're continuing to issue 100 invitations to the queue each day, but we'll be monitoring this closely and we may consider temporarily suspending issuing invitations if we need to.

    Until recently, we were releasing some invitations to existing users who requested them. However, we've taken the decision to suspend issuing invitations this way for the present, to enable us to better monitor site usage. We know that this will be a disappointment to many users who want to be able to invite friends to the site, but we feel that the fairest and most manageable way to manage account creation at present is via the queue alone.

    What can users do?

    We've been really moved by the amount of support our users have given us while we've been working on these issues. We know that it's incredibly annoying when you arrive at the Archive full of excitement about the latest work in your fandom, only to be greeted by the 502 error. We appreciate the way our users have reached out to ask if they can help. We've had lots of questions about whether we need donations to pay for our servers. We always appreciate donations to our parent Organization for Transformative Works, but thanks to the enormous generosity fandom showed in the last OTW membership drive, we aren't in immediate need of donations for new servers. In fact, thanks to your kindness in donating during the last drive, we're in good financial shape and we're able to buy the new server we need just as soon as we've done all the necessary work.

    As we've mentioned a few times over the weekend, we can always use additional volunteers who are willing to code and test. If this is you or anyone you know, stop by Github or our IRC chat room #otw-dev!

    There are a few things users can do when browsing which will make the most of the performance fixes we've implemented so far. Doing the following should ease the pressure on the site and also get you to the works you want to see faster:

    • Browse while logged out, and only log in when you need to (e.g. to leave comments, subscribe to a work, etc). Most of our caching is currently working for logged-out users, as those pages are easier to cache, so this will mean you get the saved copies which come up faster.
    • Go direct to works when you can - for example, follow the feeds for your favourite fandoms to keep up with new works without browsing the AO3 directly, so you can click straight into the works you like the sound of.

    Support form

    Our server problems have caused some problems accessing our support form. If you have an urgent query, you can reach our Support team via the backup Support form. It's a little more difficult to manage queries coming through this route, so we'd appreciate it if you'd avoid submitting feature requests through this form, to enable us to keep on top of bug reports. Thanks!

    Thank you

    We'd like to say a big, big thank you to all our staff who have been working really hard to address these problems. A particular shoutout to James, Elz, Naomi and Arrow, who have been doing most of the high level work and have barely slept in the last few days! We're also incredibly grateful to all our coders and testers who have been working on fixing issues and testing them, to our Support team, who have done an amazing job of keeping up with the many support tickets, and to our Communications folk who've done their best to keep our users updated on what's going on.

    We'd also like to say a massive thank you to all our users for your incredible patience and support. It means so much to us to hear people sending us kind words while we work on these issues, and we hope we can repay you by restoring the site to full health soon.

    A note on comments: We've crossposted this notice to multiple OTW news sites in order to ensure that as many people see it as possible. We'll do our best to keep up with comments and questions; however, it may be difficult for us to answer quickly (and on the AO3, the performance issues may also inhibit our responses). We're also getting lots of traffic on our AO3_Status Twitter! Thanks for your patience if we don't respond immediately.

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  • AO3 performance issues

    By .Lucy Pearson on Sunday, 3 June 2012 - 3:38pm
    Message type:
    Archive Update
    Tags:
    Accessibility, Design, & Technology

    As pretty much all users of the Archive of Our Own have no doubt noticed, we've been experiencing some problems with Archive loads: slowdowns and the appearance of the dreaded 502 page have become a regular occurrence. We're working on addressing these issues, but it's taking longer than we'd like, so we wanted to update you on what's going on.

    Why the slowdowns?

    Mostly because there's so much demand! The number of people reading and posting now is overwhelming - we're glad so many people want to be here, but sorry that the rapid expansion of the site is making it less functional than it should be.

    We now get over a million and a half pageviews on an average day, often clustered at peak times in the evening (particularly when folks in the Western Hemisphere are home from work and school) - we were using a self-hosted analytics system to monitor site traffic, and we had to disable it because it was too overloaded to keep up. The traffic places high demands on our servers, and you see the 502 errors when the systems are getting more requests than they can handle. Ultimately we'll need to buy more servers to cope with rising demand, but there's ongoing work that we've done and need to continue to do to make our code more efficient. We've been working on long-term plans to improve our work and bookmark searching and browsing, since those are the pages that get the most traffic; right now, they present some challenges because they were designed and built when the site was much smaller. We've learned a lot about scaling over the years, but rewriting different areas of the code takes some time!

    What are you doing to fix it?

    Our Systems team are making some adjustments to our server setup and databases. Their first action was to increase the amount of tmp space for our MySQL database on the server - this has alleviated some of the worst problems, but doesn't really get at the underlying issues. They're continuing to investigate to see if there are additional adjustments we can make to the servers to help with the problems.

    We're also actively working on the searching and browsing code: that's been a big project, and it will hopefully make a significant impact. Because it affects a lot of crucial areas of the site, we want to make sure we get everything right and do as much testing as we can to ensure that performance is where it needs to be before we release it. We're switching from the Sphinx search engine to elasticsearch, which can index new records more rapidly, allowing us to use that for filtering. That will offer us more flexibility, get rid of some of our slower SQL queries, and take some pressure off our main database, and it also has some nice sharding/scaling capabilities built in.

    We also try to cache as much data as we can, and that's something we're always looking to improve on. Systems and AD&T have discussed different options there, and we'll be continuing to work on small improvements and see what larger ones we may be able to incorporate.

    When will it be fixed?

    It's going to take us a few weeks to get through all the changes that we need to make. Our next code deploy will probably be within the next week - that will include email bundling of subscription and kudos notifications, so that we can scale our sending of emails better as well. After that, we'll be able to dedicate our resources to testing the search and browsing changes, and we're hoping to have that out to everyone by the end of June. We rely on volunteer time for coding and testing, so we need to schedule our work for evenings and weekends for the most part, but we're highly motivated to resolve the current problems, and we'll do our best to get the changes out to you as soon as we can.

    Improving the Archive is an ongoing task, and after we’ve made the changes to search and browse we’ll be continuing to work on other areas of the site to enable better scalability. We’re currently investigating the best options for developing the site going forward, including the possibility of paying for some training and/or expert advice to cover areas our existing volunteers don’t have much experience with. (If you have experience in these areas and time to work closely with our teams, we’d also welcome more volunteers!)

    Thanks for your patience!

    We know it's really annoying and frustrating when the site isn't working properly. We are working hard to fix it! We really appreciate the support of all our users. ♥

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

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  • New OTW Chat Channel!

    By Claudia Rebaza on Sunday, 6 May 2012 - 5:02pm
    Message type:
    Announcement
    Tags:
    Systems Committee, Accessibility, Design, & Technology

    For everyone who uses IRC and has been looking for ways to join in conversations with OTW volunteers, look no further! The OTW is now registered on Freenode at #otw-dev.

    This channel is a new option for OTW volunteers, particularly those who work in our Systems and AD&T committees, to keep in touch with each other. It will also allow interested people outside the org to meet us! We don't guarantee that there will always be someone in there, but we hope people will find the additional contact point useful.

    Many people who are coders and work in site development use IRC to communicate with other coders and systems folk. We hope that the increased visibility of those volunteers who serve in these areas of the OTW will allow for more collaboration and discussion with those working in similar areas outside of our organization.

    To sign in, visit this link:
    http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#otw-dev

    Type in your name, fill in the captcha and you should be able to log on.

    For those wanting more information, rules are posted at:
    http://transformativeworks.org/volunteer/otw-irc-channel

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  • Archive of Our Own Newsletter - February 2012

    By .Lucy Pearson on Saturday, 3 March 2012 - 9:30pm
    Message type:
    Newsletter
    Tags:
    Accessibility, Design, & Technology

    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.)

    New code and bug fixes

    We just deployed some new code to the Archive: Release 0.8.11 is a small(ish) release which includes lots and lots of front-end fixes, enhancements to our 'edit multiple works' feature, and some tweaks to the email queue. Our next deploy is scheduled for sometime around the end of March.

    What's up in the world of tags?

    One of the things about wrangling is that there are more than 250,000 tags on the Archive. Even with our team of more than 100 volunteers and staffers, sometimes a tag gets wrangled incorrectly, or something is wrangled quickly without due consideration, or due to the fact we're human beings we simply overlook something important.

    One of the more recent examples of this would be the tag “Near Eastern Mythology”. A user brought this tag to the attention of the Tag Wrangling Committee, pointing out that the tag was flawed in several ways. Foremost, it was unclear as to which countries and cultures should be linked within this tag - the definition has shifted historically a number of times. More importantly, it was felt that the term “Near East” projected a specific Eurocentric-exclusive worldview. One of the Archive’s goals is inclusion of all who want to join, so this tag was problematic.

    After an extended conversation with several users and the Internationalization & Outreach committee chair, we decided there was no single term for the category that would be both accurate and inclusive. As such, we re-wrangled the character and relationship tags out of “Near Eastern Mythology” and into specific mythologies, including Babylonian Mythology, Mesopotamian Mythology, Persian Mythology, Semitic Mythology, and Sumerian Mythology. We’ve unmarked “Near Eastern Mythology” so it won’t appear in the auto-complete or fandom list (though, as always, we haven’t changed the tags on the actual works). The old tag itself is now a synonym of Mythology, so you can still find the works tagged by it.

    We always value user input on our tagging system - if you see a tag you feel is problematic in some way, please let us know by submitting a support ticket or send a tweet to @ao3_wranglers! Thank you to the user who drew our attention to this tag.

    Supporting our users

    Support has been hard at work throughout the hiatus. In January we saw almost 330 tickets sent in; so far in February we've seen 172. At the moment we only have 12 tickets open. *\o/*

    One of our big projects for the Archive this year is developing our internal and external documentation. We're jazzed that Support are so on top of tickets, but we want to make it even easier for our users to find stuff out by improving our FAQ and tutorials. We also want to make it easier for our staff to do their work by developing our internal knowledge base. Support are working with AD&T and the Volunteers and Recruitment Committee to create a documentation workgroup which will specialise in this area. If this is something you're interested in helping out with, please let our Volunteer committee know by filling out our volunteer form.

    Speaking of tutorials, Support staffer Sam has just completed a great one on Embedding Media. We have more coding plans to make this easier and better in the future, but this great resource takes you through all the tips and tricks you need to know with our current setup.

    Cool stuff on the Archive!

    We celebrated Valentine's Day on the Archive with our Seven Days of Love challenge encouraging more commenting, kudosing, reccing, and creating of works, and with a big Valentine's Day thank you to all the people who make the AO3 awesome.

    We're planning to repeat the April Showers Challenge which we ran last year to celebrate under-represented fandoms on the AO3. This year we're hoping to make it more exciting and wide-ranging by getting our users involved with suggesting fandoms to celebrate - stay tuned for more news on this soon.

    The coming weekend, we're excited to welcome the Smallville Slash Archive, which is making a new home here on the AO3 as the test case for our Open Doors project. *\0/*

    AD&T Committee business of note

    AD&T has gone back to a weekly meeting format, with the goal of getting together every Saturday for about an hour. So far we're doing well with the weekly part - keeping discussion to an hour is a lot more challenging!

    Last year's chairs Elz & Amelia are continuing their work into this year, Naomi is our new Board liaison, and we're happy to welcome a few new and returning staffers: Maia, who was on staff in 2008 and chaired the committee in 2009, is back on board, Sarken is taking up the mantle as our new front-end lead, and Jenn Calaelen has joined us from testers! We spent our first couple of meetings making plans for the new term and brainstorming about ways we can improve our processes in different areas. Now we're off and running on various projects and looking forward to a great term!

    Support Committee business of note

    Support is still in the process of forming its committee for the coming term. We hope to have our first meeting soon; until then we are discussing several issues via email. Matty is returning as chair, and Jenny S-T will be serving as our new Board liaison.

    Tag Wrangling Committee business of note

    We had our first meetings of the term on the 20th and 25th of February. Returning chair Alison Watson is joined by Emilie Karr as co-chair, with Sanders our new Board liaison. Our committee has increased in size this year, and we've been working hard training up some new wranglers while we get started on our plans for the term.

    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, or in whatever medium you feel comfortable with. Everyone is welcome to this party!

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

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  • Accessibility, Design and Technology Meeting - 19 November 2011

    By .Lucy Pearson on Friday, 25 November 2011 - 8:16pm
    Message type:
    Archive Update
    Tags:
    Accessibility, Design, & Technology

    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.

    Meeting highlights!

    Goals for the rest of the year

    We're drawing close to the end of the 2011 term, so we started to think about what our priorities are for the rest of this year. On December 16th all the OTW committees officially dissolve and we take a break before reforming in January (although in practice many members of AD&T tend to do quite a bit of work during the hiatus, heh). So, we talked about a few things we'd like to get done before then:

    • Coding! Several people have code in-progress which they'd like to do some serious work on and hopefully finish by the end of the year. Site navigation, bookmarks improvements and a refactoring of our works code (important for tons of other improvements) are high on this list!
    • Revising our roadmap. We have a longterm plan for what features we'd like to implement on the Archive and when. However, we don't always implement things in exactly the order they are in on the roadmap: we have to be flexible and adapt according to a range of things including the pressing needs of the Archive at a given time, the coding expertise available, the level of difficulty involved in a specific project (this is not always as anticipated), and a bunch of other things. We also add new things to out to-do list based on feedback from other fans. So, we have to review our roadmap regularly to ensure it reflects our capabilities at any given time: right now it's out of date, so we'd like to get it updated to help shape plans for the coming year.
    • Completing our archive import code and rescuing some at-risk archives! Coder Naomi is currently putting the final touches to the code which will allow us to rescue archives which are no longer able to exist independently. Our immediate priority is the Smallville Slash Archive, which was hosted by the late, great Minotaur: several fans have worked hard to preserve this bit of fannish history, but it can't hold out much longer, so we want to help them out by the end of the year. We talked about the various things we need to do to make that a reality - stay posted for more news on this soon.
    • Reviewing our testing procedures: One area we'd like to improve and develop more support is in our testing team, where a very small number of people do very dedicated work. Our testing lead Kylie will be hosting a meeting for current testers to think about what works well and what can be improved, to make sure they can continue to work well into the future.
    • Exploring our tag wrangling options. The Tag Wrangling Committee and the big team of wranglers they manage do an amazing job at keeping the many, many user-generated tags on the Archive in order. However, we're growing at a massive rate and their job has become significantly bigger over a very short space of time. So, we want to talk to the TW Committee now to see if there are technical improvements that could make their lives easier, if the current system is still right for us, and whether there is anything else to think about from a tech point-of-view.

    Issues for love!

    As part of our recent drive to address features requests and feedback via support more quickly, we had a big drive in this meeting to burn through some of the 'issues for love' which are awaiting committee discussion before they can move on to the next step. A few of the things we discussed:

    • Improving bookmarks: We get lots of support requests asking for more sorting and filtering of bookmarks, and our Support team wanted to know how our plans on this were progressing. We're happy to say this is being actively worked on and we hope to have it out by the beginning of next year.
    • Donate to the Archive: We also get quite a few Support requests asking how to donate time or money to the Archive. We've long been meaning to make this much clearer on the site itself, and we're happy to say that the code for a page with this information has now been submitted by our new intern, Firewolf. If you're wondering in the meantime, both these things are handled via our parent Organization for Transformative Works: get in touch with our Volunteers and Recruitment Committee if you're interested in helping out with the Archive, or make a donation to the OTW to help fund the site. Since the committee term for this year is coming to an end and we'll be taking a break, we won't be welcoming any new people to our teams until we reconvene in January, but we still welcome expressions of interest now!
    • Adding more than one related work: A couple of users had contacted Support to say they had works inspired by more than one other work and couldn't figure out how to show this. It is actually possible to add more than one related work - however, due to an oversight you have to add one, post the work, and then edit the second one in. This is clearly not very intuitive, so we're fixing it - and in the meantime we're adding some help text so people can find the workaround while we look at the more complex bit of the code.

    Next deploy

    The next deploy is scheduled for some time in the next week (depending on the availability of our team, several of whom have holiday celebrations this week). It will include a fix for the rich text editor (currently completely broken for some people), some fixes for oddities in skins, and a fix for index pages on subcollections (currently not showing up!).

    News from our sub-committees

    • Coders worked crazy hard to get our last deploy up and running, and then to fix some bugs arising afterwards. They did an awesome job of coming up with quick solutions to some of the bugs that showed up once we were on the real Archive - thanks to everyone for their hard work! More generally, they have been focusing on getting lots more projects out of the door before the end of the year. They are cooking up some exciting stuff, including navigation improvements and importing, so we're looking forward to having these see the light of day.
    • Testers have been super active lately! They tested the latest deploy in all sorts of situations and configurations, and then did more urgent testing to help fix the things that slipped through the cracks. The testing team is small and they do amazing work - thanks lovely people!

    News from our sister committees

    • Support have also been working very, very hard dealing with all the tickets arising from our recent deploy. Every new deploy produces an uptick in tickets, because new code inevitably means some new bugs (this is why whenever big companies release a new OS, it's usually followed shortly after by a bunch of updates!). This deploy produced more tickets than usual - a lot more! - but Support have been doing a sterling job keeping up. If you do find they are a little slower than usual, then rest assured they will get to you as soon as possible.
    • Tag wranglers have been awesome helping Support deal with tag-related tickets. The Tag Wrangling Committee gave AD&T some initial feedback on where tag wrangling stands at the moment, pending a meeting when we'll talk in more detail about tech needs for wrangling.

    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, 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.

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  • Accessibility, Design and Technology Meeting - 1 October 2011

    By .Lucy Pearson on Wednesday, 5 October 2011 - 9:28pm
    Message type:
    Archive Update
    Tags:
    Accessibility, Design, & Technology

    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 a nice busy meeting - 11 of our 14 staffers were able to attend! Managing different timezones and meeting times, as well as other commitments, means that it can be challenging for everyone to attend every meeting, so it's nice when lots of us make it (although some of us were off celebrating birthdays *looks about shiftily*).

    Meeting highlights!

    Improving our code commits and deploy process

    This is an important subject to us, although one that isn't immediately apparent to our users! When a coder writes some new code, they 'push' it to our code repository and then submit a 'pull request' to ask for it to be included in the main project. Another coder then looks at the code and (if they don't spot any problems) merges it into the main project; when we have a few changes to that, we put all the code on our Test archive for testers to work on. Ideally, this whole process should be pretty quick - it's nice for coders to have their code accepted quickly (or sent back for changes) and it's nice for users if we get new code tested quickly and thus out onto the live site!

    Right now, this process isn't as fast as we'd like it to be. Unfortunately, our automated tests currently take a significant amount of time to run, and that causes a bit of a chain reaction: coders run the tests as they work, run all the tests before they push their code out, run all the tests before they approve somebody else's code, and have a job set up on our development server to run all the tests every day and email the whole team with any failures. While we work on making the tests faster, we're hoping to do some reshuffling, where we reduce some of the duplication and the time required to merge in code, while doing more manual review. We'll be aiming to get code merged in and out to our testers on a quicker and more regular basis, so that ultimately users will have faster access to fixes and new features.

    Mentoring

    Ana and Jenny have been working on some ideas for improving mentoring for coders. We have lots of informal mentoring - one of the great things about coding with the OTW is that people on the project are so generous with their time, and are happy to answer questions and support new people. However, sometimes people feel awkward about asking for help at busy times, or they want some more intensive one-to-one mentoring to help work out a big project or get over a specific learning 'hump'. It can be challenging for us to provide this kind of mentoring, because we have such a small number of developers, all of whom are volunteers and many of whom are also learning this stuff as they go! The new plans are designed to make it a bit easier, and to make people more comfortable about asking for a specific mentor if that's what suits their style.

    Front-end changes

    We're continuing to work on changes to the HTML and CSS of the site. lim has been radically reworking the CSS to make it more flexible and much much easier to skin. Meanwhile, we have been working through front-end issues logged in our Google code issues project to identify old issues which still need attention, and close the ones which are now obsolete. Thanks to everyone who has been working on this!

    Latest deploy

    We deployed Release 0.8.8 this weekend, which included performance fixes, lots of JavaScript changes, and a fix for the annoying '500 error on download' issue. You can see the full list of changes in our release notes.

    As most of you will have noticed, this deploy did not go as smoothly as we'd have liked! One of the problems with performance enhancements in particular is that they are very hard to test, since there's no way of reproducing the exact conditions of the live site. So, we were alarmed when after our big deploy (full of performance enhancements) the load on the site went UP instead of down. A whole lot of investigation and work later, our wonderful Systems team were able to get everything under control. The site went up and down quite a few times while all this work was going on, but the good news is that the server load is now lower than it has been for the past six months! The site is running correspondingly faster. We have a list of additional changes to make - one of the useful side-effects of the problems was that they highlighted some things we could improve - but we're really happy to see the 502s banished at last! A million thanks to Sidra and james_ who did a LOT of work to fix everything!

    News from our sub-committees

    • Coders did lots of last-minute work to get everything ready for the deploy, then the senior coders and Systems staff worked like CHAMPIONS to resolve the issues that showed up during the deploy.
    • Testers also worked like champions getting this deploy ready for primetime. Jenn, Kylie, Seph, Tai, Weimar, xparrotx and Zebra, you all deserve a special shout-out after the hard work you put into sorting out this monster deploy!

    News from our sister committees

    • Support continue to keep up with tickets after their amazing work overcoming the backlog. They are happy to answer all kinds of questions about the Archive, whether you think you've found a bug or you just want clarification on something - please don't feel shy about asking if there's something you'd like to know!
    • Tag wranglers will be holding an open house on Saturday 15th of October at 22:00 UTC. This will be a drop in session where you can find out about volunteering as a wrangler, ask about tags, help out with fandoms we don’t have wranglers for yet, or just have a chat about what we do. It will be held in the OTW Public Discussion Room - if you've ever been curious, drop by and find out more!

    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, 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.

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  • Accessibility, Design & Technology Meeting - 3 September 2011

    By .Lucy Pearson on Thursday, 8 September 2011 - 4:16pm
    Message type:
    Archive Update
    Tags:
    Accessibility, Design, & Technology

    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 meeting was the last on the current timetable. We've been alternating between two times on a Saturday and Sunday, but as new members join the committee and the schedules of the existing members change, we have to review from time-to-time, and we're switching to some new slots that suit our current membership better. With committee members from Argentina, Germany, New Zealand, Romania, the UK and the USA, it can be tricky to find a time that suits everyone! Kudos to the members who stay up insanely late or get up super early in order to make the meetings!

    Meeting highlights

    Collections and Challenges

    Our taskforce met up to discuss the ongoing development of collections and challenges. Coder astolat is almost finished with the new tag sets functionality, which will allow users to create sets of tags for use in challenges - this will mean that nominations for multifandom challenges can take place on the Archive. Once this work is done we'll be reviewing the collections and challenges code to make it faster, prettier and simpler. We already have some major functionality - gift exchanges and prompt memes - but we want to refactor the code so it works better and make it easier for us to add other challenge types in the future (Big Bangs are definitely on our to-do list)!

    FAQ improvements

    The Archive FAQ is long and detailed - but it's not very easy to find what you want in it! We're planning some improvements to go along with our new Support Board so that our users can get the information they need.

    CSS revamp

    Front-end coder lim is currently working on a massive overhaul of the way CSS works on the site. The new structure will make it much easier for people to write skins (skins creators, you'll be able to bid a not-so-fond farewell to all those !importants). We're planning some very intensive testing to be sure the new design works in most browsers.

    JavaScript revamp and testing

    Our awesome coder Enigel has worked hard replacing the JavaScript library Prototype with JQuery. This should make our JavaScript less buggy and will help make it easier to design more accessible JavaScript which degrades nicely for people who don't use it. Now her work is done, we're faced with the massive job of testing it all. The changes affect most areas of the site, so our intrepid testing team have a big job on their hands!

    Open Video Conference

    AD&T chairs Amelia and Elz will be attending the Open Video Conference in New York this coming weekend. They're hoping to pick up some ideas for how we might progress with our plans for hosting videos on the AO3 - this functionality is still some way off, but we're really excited about the possibilties.

    Fanart is coming!

    In preparation for hosting fanart on our servers, our Content Policy team are revising our Terms of Service and FAQ to cover images. They are currently inviting feedback on the draft policy - our aim is to make our Terms of Service as clear and fan-friendly as possible, so please do raise any questions or concerns.

    Technical preparations for fanart are also continuing. Our plans for a revamped 'post new work' form include more features for multimedia, and we'll be introducing ways of tagging different media so they can be easily filtered for.

    Site performance and the invitations queue

    The number of people waiting for an invitation now stands at over a thousand - we seem to have arrived! Many users will have noticed a corresponding increase in site slowness, especially at peak times when a large number of our 21793 users are trying to use the site all at once! The good news is that we have some performance enhancements in our forthcoming deploy which should help ease the site slowdowns so that you no longer run into the sad 502 page. The bad news is that the high demand means that we still need to manage the number of users signing up to the site at any given time, so we'll continue to use the invitations system for sign-up for the forseeable future. We're sorry that we can't give excited fans accounts immediately, but everyone who requests an account is given one. If you have added your email address to our invitations queue you can check that page to see when your invitation will arrive - if the date passes with no invitation, please get in touch with our Support team and let them know, as sometimes they do get caught in spam filters.

    Tag tutorial

    Ever wondered about how tags work on the Archive, or what the best way is to tag your work? Our awesome Tag Wrangling Committee have put together a Tags Tutorial explaining how everything works and what goes on behind the scenes! Thanks to the wrangling volunteers who gave feedback on the draft tutorial (and for all their hard work wrangling). If you have a specific question or comment about tags, you can contact the Tag Wrangling Committee directly via Twitter @ao3_wranglers or send a message via our Support team.

    Next deploy

    We're working hard to get the next deploy out as soon as possible. This deploy is a big one, and needs some heavy duty testing - because we've changed the JavaScript across the site, we need to do a full regression test to check everything is still working as it should. As soon as we're sure nothing is broken, we'll be putting the new code on the site - this deploy includes important performance enhancements as well as lots of other lovely stuff, so we're keen to get it out in the world as soon as possible!

    News from our sub-committees

    • Coders are continuing to tackle our issues list and working hard fixing bugs identified in the new code.
    • Testers are working hard on the regression test for the new deploy - testing ALL the things. We always need new testers, so if you're someone who likes banging on the site and finding out how things work, please do get in touch with our Volunteers Committee and let them know you're interested in testing. No special skills required, just a spirit of enquiry and a certain tenacity!

    News from our sister committees

    • Support welcomed two more new staffers to the team - Oaktree and lionpyh! They are planning a ticket party later in the week to tackle ALL the tickets (or at least quite a few of them!). They've also been updating the FAQs - thanks to Cybel for adding the new Kudos FAQ.
    • Tag Wranglers are reviewing their membership to make sure that everyone on the list of volunteers still wants to wrangle. New volunteers are always welcome - check out the list of fandoms currently in need of a wrangler to see if there is an area you could help. The Tag Wrangling Committee has also recently revised some tag-related FAQs, and they have just posted their brand new Tag Tutorial! \o/

    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, or in whatever medium you feel comfortable with. Everyone is welcome to this party!

    This meeting round-up by Zooey.

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

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  • Accessibility, Design & Technology Meeting - 21 August 2011

    By .Lucy Pearson on Friday, 26 August 2011 - 9:58pm
    Message type:
    Archive Update
    Tags:
    Accessibility, Design, & Technology

    This was a well-attended meeting - after a few meetings where real life took various members of the committee away, most of us were back together this week.

    Meeting highlights!

    Upcoming design changes

    We've got various sections of the site queued up for design work - navigation, the home page, fandom landing pages and news posts, among others. Some of these have been on the back burner for a while, but we're making progress and some of the designs are almost ready for the committee to review. We're pretty excited about the new designs, which should make the site a lot more usable as well as prettier!

    Challenges and Collections

    Our Collections and Challenges task force recently met up to work on plans to improve all the stuff we learnt from Yuletide 2009, Remix, Yuletide 2010, Final Fantasy Exchange and other challenges. Maybe this year will finally be the year there won't be any panic in the run-up to a big challenge? (We can dream!) Work on tag sets for challenges is progressing - this will make it possible to run nominations for multifandom challenges on the Archive.

    Site security

    Our security task force gained a new member and is reviewing ways of improving site security. One area where we're planning improvements is site login - we've asked our Systems team to get us an https certificate so we can introduce https secure logins.

    Coding Open House!

    Have you ever fancied coding for the OTW or wondered what it is we do? AD&T member Jenny will be hosting a public chat on coding, introducing Ruby on Rails and the setup for our coders. All are welcome! The chat will be held on Saturday, 27 August at 04:00 UTC (what time is it in my timezone?) in OTW's public chatroom on Campfire. The chatroom can be accessed at https://fanarchive.campfirenow.com/e79cc.

    Next deploy

    We're working towards another deploy, which will take place as soon as we can get it ready. It will include more accessible Javascript (yay for jQuery) and several performance improvements that should reduce the number of 502 errors, as well as the usual list of minor bug-fixes.

    News from our sub-committees

    • Coders have been working like crazy! Enigel has done awesome work updating all the JavaScript on the site and replacing uses of the Prototype library with another library, JQuery. This work will help fix some niggling problems, and lays the foundations for some accessibility improvements - soon, users without JavaScript will be able to delete!
    • Testers: There's tons to test in this deploy - particular thanks to Kylie for organising parties, and X-Parrot for testing so much.

    News from our sister committees

    • Support are still working hard at keeping up with tickets, and providing feedback on the new Support Board as coder Sidra works on it. They are pleased to welcome new staffer Yshyn to the team!
    • Tag Wranglers keep a-wrangling! They are always pleased to welcome new wranglers - fandoms currently in need of love include Weiß Kreuz, Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter – Laurell K. Hamilton and Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger.

    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, or in whatever medium you feel comfortable with. Everyone is welcome to this party!

    This meeting round-up by Jenny S-T & Zooey

    Mirrored from an original post on the Archive of Our Own

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  • Accessibility, Design & Technology meeting - 7 August 2011

    By .Lucy Pearson on Thursday, 18 August 2011 - 6:23pm
    Message type:
    Archive Update
    Tags:
    Accessibility, Design, & Technology

    AD&T had a quiet meeting, as quite a few of our members were off on holiday (yeay!) or dealing with various other commitments. This meant that we made it through our agenda in record time, i.e. within the two hours actually scheduled for the meeting. (This is probably only exciting to us, but take our word for it it's a red letter day.)

    Meeting highlights!

    Site expansion - hello to our new members!

    We've seen another increase in new members recently - welcome to all our new members! We know that the recent DDoS attacks on Livejournal have made many fans eager to back up their fanworks with us (as well as bringing lots and lots of readers!), and we're very glad that we're able to provide fans of all varieties a home! We like to think that groovy site features such as downloads and reading history have also played their part in increasing our popularity - our coding team is constantly working on site improvements.

    Performance improvements

    One of the key areas our coding team is focusing on at the moment is site performance. As the site expands and we welcome more and more users, optimum code performance becomes ever more important. You may have noticed some site slowdowns and occasional 502 errors recently; in addition to tweaking our server setup as particular issues arose, our coders have been working on longer-term improvements. The forthcoming deploy will include a number of things designed to improve site performance and reduce the number of 502s you encounter.

    Shoutout to vidders!

    As we enjoy the vids which premiered at Vividcon, this seems like a great time to give AO3 vidders a shoutout! At the moment, we can't host vids (although we will introduce this option in the longer term), but you can embed vids hosted on other sites. Currently, video embeds are supported from Youtube, Vimeo, blip.tv, Dailymotion, Viddler, Metacafe, 4shared CreativeCommons, ning and vidders.net. If you use a site which is not currently supported, then drop our support team a line and let us know you'd like it added. You should also feel free to include download links in your vid posts. We're working on a new interface which will allow you to say what medium your fanwork is in, but right now you can just add a tag in the 'Additional tags' field to let people know your work is a vid (or fanart, or a filk, or whatever else you'd like to post!).Vividcon vidders, you may wish to add this year's vids to the Vividcon 2011 collection, or archive your older vids in Vividcon 2010 and Vividcon 2009.

    Farewell to Eylul and Ira

    We bid a sad farewell to two committee members, Eylul and Ira, who are stepping down to devote more time to other things. We're really grateful for all the hard work and energy they've devoted to the project.

    Next deploy

    The next deploy is scheduled for the end of August. It will include a bunch of performance enhancements, improvements to our prompt meme feature, many JavaScript enhancements, and a fix for the very annoying issue causing downloads to fail on the first try!

    News from our sub-committees

    • Coders launched Code Issue Bingo! Courtesy of coder Rebecca, coders can generate a custom bingo card linking to our Google code issues - the cards help us blitz some older issues, and also bring a strange sense of personal satisfaction. :D
    • Testers waved goodbye to former test lead Eylul - we're really grateful to her for all her work. They're gearing up to test our forthcoming deploy.

    News from our sister committees

    • Support recently welcomed a couple of new members: mumble and Sam Johnsson have both dived in and are proving a great addition to the team. Support requests remain high, but the extra staff are making a big difference!
    • Tag wranglers have been reviewing the wrangling rosters to confirm how many wranglers are still active, and gathering wrangler feedback on the new tag autocomplete so coders can improve it. They also have plans for a wrangling open house - more news coming soon!

    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, or in whatever medium you feel comfortable with. Everyone is welcome to this party!

    This meeting round-up by Zooey.

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

    Read more

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