Support Committee

  • Volunteer to Help Users at the AO3!

    By Claudia Rebaza on Tuesday, 24 September 2013 - 12:11am
    Message type:
    Volunteering
    Tags:
    Support Committee, Volunteers & Recruiting, Web Strategy, Design & Development Committee

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

    • Support staff - (deadline: 30 September 2013)

    We also have one role still open for additional technical staff

    • Web Developer Staff

    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.

    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 -(dot)- 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.

    If you have questions regarding volunteering for the OTW, check out our Volunteering FAQ.

    Support Staff
    The Support Committee handles communication between users and the various teams involved with the Archive of Our Own. We receive questions and ideas about all aspects of the Archive from users. The Support team helps to answer questions about using the Archive, diagnosing issues, documenting bugs for the coders to address, getting the most out of features like skins or challenges, passing on questions about tags to the wranglers, documenting requests for new or improved features, or getting answers about general policy.
    Applications are due 30 September

    Web Developer Staff: Web Developers are responsible for improvements to and maintenance of the primary web properties owned by the Organization for Transformative Works. S/he will participate in an on-call rotation of three Web Developers, implement new website features, and help determine priorities for future development efforts. Applications will be accepted until the role is filled.

    Read more

  • AO3 Newsletter - May/June/July

    By Camden on Tuesday, 16 July 2013 - 7:02pm
    Message type:
    Newsletter
    Tags:
    Accessibility, Design, & Technology, Support Committee, Tag Wrangling Committee

    Hello AO3! This newsletter has been, um, a long time coming for which we sincerely apologize. Here's what we've been up to in the past three months.

    Cool stuff on the Archive!

    To our overwhelming delight, Time Magazine named us as one of the "50 Best Websites of 2013." Thank you to everyone -- from staffers to users -- who make this website what it is!

    852 Prospect moved in with us in May. This move was orchestrated by the hard work of the 852 Prospect archivists, Open Doors and AD&T. Please join us in welcoming the Archive to the Archive!

    Tag Wrangling has been hard at work with their new tools to help users search by original language titles as well as transliterated fandom titles. Check out more information about these tools here.

    There were two small deploys in early May and late June: Releases 0.9.6.1 and 0.9.7. 0.9.6.1 focused on code needed for the 852 Prospect move as well as a couple of fixes. 0.9.7 included more fixes as well as integrating Travis-CI into the testing process.

    Our Content Policy workgroup has been hard at work with our TOS and FAQ in anticipation of the inclusion of fannish nonfiction on the Archive. These proposed changes went up for public review at the end of June. We thank everyone who provided input!

    The OTW unveiled the Archive of Our Own Diversity Statement, a statement which has been years in the making. We encourage you all to read it and hold us to it as we continue to develop the Archive in the many years to come.

    What’s up in the world of tags?

    Several small changes to guidelines have clarified what freeform tags we canonize, including how we handle episode tags and fandom fusion AUs - check out the subtags of Alternate Universe - Fusion to find Jane Austen fusions and your fandom favorites with Pokemon! We've also changed guidelines for translated fandom tags, so you may notice Japanese, Cyrillic, and other non-Latin alphabets when browsing the fandoms lists.

    Adventures with Support

    We have new people! Annie, girlmarauders, and Katherine have all joined our merry little band. Bring on the tickets!

    AD&T Committee business of note

    AD&T has been busy with small fixes and releases as well as working on documentation and necessary groundwork to recruit new coders in the fall!

    Tag Wrangling Committee business of note

    We've inducted and trained almost 50 new volunteers in May, and are planning to re-open wrangling volunteering on a limited basis in July. The wrangling staff has also posted several more advanced tutorials for both our new wranglers and experienced wranglers, so all of us are wrangling "on the same page", so to speak. With over 12,000 canonical fandoms on the Archive, all the work of our wrangling volunteers is very appreciated!

    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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  • Volunteer Recruiting: AO3 Support & Tag Wrangling

    By Curtis Jefferson on Sunday, 5 May 2013 - 10:24pm
    Message type:
    Volunteering
    Tags:
    Support Committee, Tag Wrangling Committee, Volunteers & Recruiting

    We would like to thank everyone who responded to our initial call for Tag Wranglers, AO3 Documentation Volunteers, and Communications Staff. The AO3 Documentation Lead and Communications 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:

    • Support Staff - Applications due May 12
    • Tag Wrangler Volunteer (reopening) - Applications accepted on an ongoing basis (role may be temporarily closed based on level of interest)

    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 working 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.

    Support Staff
    The Support Committee handles communication between users and the various teams involved with the Archive of Our Own. We receive questions and ideas about all aspects of the Archive from users. The Support team helps to answer questions about using the Archive, diagnosing issues, documenting bugs for the coders to address, getting the most out of features like skins or challenges, passing on questions about tags to the wranglers, documenting requests for new or improved features, or getting answers about general policy.

    If you like to interact with a wide variety of people through email and answer their questions, if you're familiar with the Archive, and you like finding the answers to issues, you might enjoy working as Support staff! To come join us, fill out the Support job description and application form. Applications are due May 12

    Tag Wrangler Volunteer
    The Tag Wranglers are responsible for keeping the hundreds of thousands of tags on AO3 in some kind of order! We choose which form of a fandom title appears on the Media pages, as well as all the character, relationship, and additional tags which appear in the filters and the auto-complete. We link tags together to make all the works and bookmarks on the archive easier to browse and search (so that users can find exactly what they’re looking for, whether that’s alternate universes with Cloud Strife, Steve/Tony and tentacles, or g-rated Rose/Kanaya fluff!)

    If you like organizing, bringing order to chaos, excuses to fact-check your favorite fandom canons, or you just get a kick out of seeing all the wacky and wonderful terms fans come up with, you might enjoy tag wrangling! To join our team, click through to the Tag Wrangler job description and application form. Applications are accepted on an ongoing basis

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  • Join Support for a Chat!

    By Claudia Rebaza on Wednesday, 1 May 2013 - 5:09pm
    Message type:
    Announcement
    Tags:
    Support Committee

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

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

    If you're having a problem using the Archive, want help trying something new, or would like an explanation of one of our features, please drop in and talk to us in person!

    Some guidelines, just to keep things running smoothly

    We don't have a fancy presentation or material prepared--there are plenty of FAQs, tutorials, and admin posts for that. The point of live chat is to talk with you, not at you. We're happy for you to drop in and say "hi", but it's even better if you drop in and say, "Hi, what's up with my work that won't show as complete even though it is?!"

    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. This means that policy questions are way over our pay grade. (Just kidding--none of us get paid!) 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.

    Additionally, if a question looks like it might violate a user's privacy to answer (if it needs an email address or other personal information, for example) we may not be willing to work with it in chat. In those cases, we'll redirect a user to the Support Form so we can communicate via email.

    So, now that that's out of the way, what kind of things are we going to talk about?

    Live chat is best for questions of a "How do I...?" or "Why does it...?" nature.

    For example, you might have been wondering:

    • How do I use the new search and browse system to find a certain type of work?
    • I'd like to run a challenge, but I'm not sure how to do what I want.
    • For that matter, where did my work submitted to an anonymous challenge go?!
    • I want to post using formatting the Rich Text Editor won't give me. How do I do it using a work skin?

    We'd be happy to help you with any of these questions, and anything else you're having trouble doing or would like to try doing with the Archive.

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

    Read more

  • 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.

    Read more

  • February Support Live Chat

    By Claudia Rebaza on Monday, 18 February 2013 - 9:12pm
    Message type:
    Event
    Tags:
    Support Committee

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

    After receiving positive reviews of our last chat in November, we're going to regularly have Open Chat sessions with the Support Staff in our public chat room (the link will be made available on the day of the chat). The first of these will be this coming Saturday, February 23, 2013 at 16:00:00 UTC lasting through this Sunday, February 24, 2013 at 04:00:00 UTC. Members of Support will be available to interact with you one-on-one in live chat. See what time that is where you live. We are going to try to have future sessions at different times to make sure we eventually cover all time zones. If you can't make it to this one, keep an eye out for the next!

    If you're having a problem using the Archive, want help trying something new, or would like an explanation of one of our features, please drop in and talk to us in person!

    Some guidelines, just to keep things running smoothly

    We don't have a fancy presentation or material prepared--there are plenty of FAQs, tutorials, and admin posts for that. The point of live chat is to talk with you, not at you. We're happy for you to drop in and say "hi", but it's even better if you drop in and say, "Hi, what's up with my work that won't show as complete even though it is?!"

    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. This means that policy questions are way over our pay grade. (Just kidding--none of us get paid!) 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.

    Additionally, if a question looks like it might violate a user's privacy to answer (if it needs an email address or other personal information, for example) we may not be willing to work with it in chat. In those cases, we'll redirect a user to the Support Form so we can communicate via email.

    So, now that that's out of the way, what kind of things are we going to talk about?

    Live chat is best for questions of a "How do I...?" or "Why does it...?" nature.

    For example, you might have been wondering:

    • How do I use the new search and browse system to find a certain type of work?
    • I'd like to run a challenge, but I'm not sure how to do what I want.
    • For that matter, where did my work submitted to an anonymous challenge go?!
    • I want to post using formatting the Rich Text Editor won't give me. How do I do it using a work skin?

    We'd be happy to help you with any of these questions, and anything else you're having trouble doing or would like to try doing with the Archive.

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

    Read more

  • 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.

    Read more

  • 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.

    Read more

  • Come Chat with our Support Team!

    By Claudia Rebaza on Friday, 16 November 2012 - 6:27pm
    Message type:
    Event
    Tags:
    Support Committee

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

    Starting this coming Saturday, November 17, 2012 at 11:00:00 UTC lasting through this Sunday, November 18, 2012 at 11:00:00 UTC, members of Support will be available to interact with you one-on-one in live chat. See what time that is where you live. If you're having a problem using the Archive, want help trying something new, or would like an explanation of one of our features, please drop in and talk to us in person!

    Some guidelines, just to keep things running smoothly

    We don't have a fancy presentation or material prepared--there are plenty of FAQs, tutorials, and admin posts for that. The point of live chat is to talk with you, not at you. We're happy for you to drop in and say "hi", but it's even better if you drop in and say, "Hi, what's up with my work that won't show as complete even though it is?!"

    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. This means that policy questions are way over our pay grade. (Just kidding--none of us get paid!) 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.

    Additionally, if a question looks like it might violate a user's privacy to answer (if it needs an email address or other personal information, for example) we may not be willing to work with it in chat. In those cases, we'll redirect a user to the Support Form so we can communicate via email.

    So, now that that's out of the way, what kind of things are we going to talk about?

    Live chat is best for questions of a "How do I...?" or "Why does it...?" nature.

    For example, you might have been wondering:

    • How do I use the new search and browse system to find a certain type of work?
    • I'd like to run a challenge, but I'm not sure how to do what I want.
    • For that matter, where did my work submitted to an anonymous challenge go?!
    • I want to post using formatting the Rich Text Editor won't give me. How do I do it using a work skin?

    We'd be happy to help you with any of these questions, and anything else you're having trouble doing or would like to try doing with the Archive.

    In conclusion....

    This is a test run of this service, and while we have great hopes for it, we can't guarantee when it'll happen again. Please drop by with your questions and help make it a success!

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

    Read more

  • 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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