Archive of Our Own

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

Traffic and performance

At the beginning of the year, we moved to a new and bigger set of servers, which gave the site some much-needed room to grow. Our systems team made some tweaks along the way, ensuring that we were getting the best performance out of the new setup. We started using Redis, which is super-fast, for email queues, autocompletes and other background tasks, which took some of the load off our main database. And even with all the work we were doing, it was tough to keep up with how fast the site was growing! 2/3rds of our current registered users signed up this year, and we kept giving out more and more invitations through our invite queue, but the numbers kept climbing - there were over 2,000 people on the waiting list for several months. (We've finally gotten that down now, just by sending out even more as the system could handle it.) And many more site visitors aren't registered users - we now get well over half a million unique visitors each month and there have been 24+ million pageviews in December. We now get as much traffic on an average day as we did last year during Yuletide, which at the time was a huge traffic spike. The period around Christmas, with Yuletide and other holiday exchanges going live, still represents a noticeable jump in traffic, but the difference isn't as great which means more stable site performance. (\o/ We were standing by with fingers crossed just in case, but we were thrilled that no last-minute work was required this year!)

Fun with charts!

AO3 is currently home to over 8,100 fandoms, 31,000 users and 275,000 works! Here's a graph of work, chapter, bookmark and comment posting over the last three years:

You can see that work posting is up this year, but what's much more dramatic is the increase in reading, bookmarking and commenting. There have also been more multi-chapter works and works-in-progress posted this year, which is exciting. And one of the neat features the archive has is the ability to go back and see what you've read or viewed, for registered users who have it enabled. Here's how that looks year-to-year:

Lots of people viewing lots of stuff! There have also been almost 1.5 million kudos left since last year, so there's been no shortage of love to go around. <3

What's on deck for 2012

In the short term, we have a new release coming out hopefully early this month, and that will include improvements to our HTML parser (yay!), some exciting new subscription options and a variety of bugfixes. There are also a ton of other features and improvements that we've been developing this year that we hope to have ready for you in 2012, including the ability to view the site in other languages, art hosting, an on-site support area and a wealth of browsing, filtering and email improvements for both works and bookmarks. We also hope to start a series of international fandom spotlights in January and solicit more input from users about upcoming features.

Kudos!

And finally: thank you! Thanks to all of the authors, artists, and vidders who have posted their works, to the mods who organize challenges and collections, to those who have shared skins for customizing the site, to everyone who creates bookmarks and leaves comments and kudos, encouraging authors and artists and making it easier for other fans to find awesome works. Thanks to everyone for bearing with our growing pains earlier in the year and for supporting AO3 financially, enabling it to continue operating and improving. And many thanks, as always, to everyone who volunteers their time wrangling tags, writing code, testing the site, handling support requests, and maintaining our systems, and also to everyone who's left comments and written in to our support team with feedback, suggestions, and bug reports, all of which are incredibly valuable! The archive is very much a community effort, and it couldn't exist without all of us working together and supporting one another.

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

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

Meeting highlights!

Fandom landing pad!

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

Issues for Love!

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

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

Reflecting on Release 0.8.9

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

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

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

Next deploy

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

News from our sub-committees

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

News from our sister committees

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

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

This meeting round-up by Lucy

As a number of users have already noticed, imports from Fanfiction.net are not working at present. Our coders have investigated, and it seems that FF.net is blocking requests from our servers. We're not sure at this stage whether this is specifically directed at us or whether it's a side effect of some other action; either way, it's not an issue that we can fix on our end. We're currently reaching out to the folks at Fanfiction.net to see whether we can resolve the problem; however, at present we don't have any ETA for a fix.

We apologise for the inconvenience - thanks for your patience while we figure out this issue!

ETA: This problem also affects bookmarking of works hosted on FF.net, since making an external bookmark involves pinging the site to check it's a valid url. We'll keep you updated as we figure out ways forward with this problem.

Welcome to Release 0.8.9.2. Elz, Enigel, Firewolf, Jenny, Naomi and sarken contributed code to this release. We're especially excited to welcome a first commit from Firewolf, who recently joined us for a coding internship \0/. The release was tested by Jenn_Calaelen, Tai , XParrot and Zebra. This is a small release, mostly fixing a few urgent bugs.

Highlights!

Rich text editor (mostly) fixed

A number of users have experienced problems with the rich text editor failing to load. We have now fixed this issue; however, we're still working on another bug with the rich text editor. So, most users should be able to use it without problems now, but if you're using Opera 11 or Internet Explorer 9, it will load but not let you actually edit. :( We're sorry about this - we're working to fix the bug completely.

Temporary authentication problem

A user alerted us to an authentication bug! We're happy to say that we were able to fix the issue within a few hours of it being reported and as far as we are aware no users were affected. Thanks to the user who let us know about the problem!

Fixes for collections and challenges

This deploy includes a bunch of fixes for problems which were making life difficult for challenge owners and participants. Thanks to those affected for their patience - we know that bugs in challenges are particularly annoying since most challenges are time sensitive, and we do our best to fix them speedily.

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page.

Release Details

Features

• Added a page letting people know how they can support the Archive! :D
• Comments are now paginated, 20 to a page, so if you're reading a work with a lot of comments they won't take forever to load.
• User inboxes are now paginated, 20 items to a page, so they won't take forever to load.

Bug fixes

• The rich text editor now works again for most browsers (sadly we are still dealing with issues in certain browsers).
• Fixed a bug with user authentication which would have made it possible for people to edit tags on works they didn't own.
• Chapter navigation is now styled in the same way whether you're viewing a full work or chapter-by-chapter.
• Fixed a bug causing lots of excess white space on wrangling pages.
• Collections and challenges
  • When a challenge allowed category, rating or warning tags in signups, trying to edit your signup gave a 500 error. This is now fixed
  • Going to the index page for a collection with subcollections gave a 500 error. Fixed!
  • The 'pinch hits' and 'open' sections of challenge assigment pages will now load.
  • Pinch hits now show up on challenge assignments lists (so mods can tell whether pinch hitters have posted or not).
  • Pinch hits which have been fulfilled (or formally defaulted) now no longer show up as an option when you post a new work.
• Inbox, comments, kudos
  • After you comment on a chaptered work, you will be redirected to your new comment and (if you are viewing chapter-by-chapter) to the chapter you were on, instead of being bumped back to the beginning of the work.
  • After you leave kudos, you will be redirected back to the page you were on instead of being bumped back to the beginning of the work.
  • You can now reply to comments on a chaptered work with javascript off (before, clicking reply redirected you back to the first chapter).
  • If you filter your inbox and then reply to a comment, when you're redirected back your filters will be preserved.

Tests

• The test for kudos has been refactored.

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.

As most people have noticed, we have had some problems with our latest deploy. We'll address some of the larger concerns in a later post (right now, most of our staff are busy dealing with the immediate issues), but we just wanted to do a quick update to let people know that we're aware of some specific issues and we're working on them:

• Mobile display: We had a big problem when we deployed with mobile displays, because the new mobile skins were not kicking in at all. We've fixed the main part of this issue, so the site is now much more usable on a lot of mobile devices; however, we're still experiencing some bugs with mobile displays, causing button overlays, too much white space, and other oddities. We think that the problem is still related to some parts of the mobile stylesheets not being activated properly: we're looking into it.


• Some problems in Internet Explorer:
  • the commas separating tags are not showing up (some versions of IE) or they are showing up too aggressively, giving a comma at the end of every tag even if it's the last tag in the list.
  • Some people are reporting problems replying to comments in IE.


• The skins wizard is behaving erratically and inserting code which messes up other things.

If you're experiencing one of the above issues, rest assured we're looking into it. We've already fixed some issues with mobile display, a problem stopping people from bookmarking, the missing OpenID login, and a few other bugs, so if you were seeing something not mentioned on this list, it's worth checking that the problem is still occurring before you get in touch with us.

If you see a problem that's not on this list, do get in touch with Support via our Support and feedback form.

We'd like to say a huge thank you to Support, who have received more tickets in the last 48 hours than they did in the previous 48 days! Despite this massive amount of work they have kept up with replies and right now there are only ten tickets not assigned to someone to be dealt with - GO TEAM! Thanks also to the coders and testers who have worked like crazy to do urgent bugfixes.

Once again, sorry for the problems this deploy threw up: we're working on the immediate issues right now and thinking about future solutions.

ETA: We've received several reports from people who are unable to use the rich text editor. We're having difficulty pinning down this bug since it seems to manifest inconsistently, but we are looking into it. Apologies for the inconvenience.

The new skins on the Archive have lots of spiffy features. We'll be building up documentation on them as we go along, but we wanted to start you off with a few key bits of information!

What public skins are there for me to use?

There's a masterlist of all the new public skins with some brief descriptions of what they do. Many of these skins are designed to affect very specific bits of the Archive - you can chain them together to get the effect you want.

What's chaining skins? How do I do it?

Basically, chaining skins means joining more than one skin together so that you can reuse rules from existing skins and then write your own CSS for the things you want. Some of the skins already on the Archive are built up from more than one skin; for example, if you take a look at Zebra Mono you can see a Parent Skins listing with "Snow". This means that the Zebra Mono skin is using all the code from the Snow skin, which turns all the backgrounds white.

To create a chained skin:

1. Go to http://archiveofourown.org/skins/new (accessible from your user dashboard).


2. Scroll down and expand 'Advanced'.


3. Select 'Add parent skin'


4. Type in the name of the skin you'd like to use as a parent (for example, if you'd like to base your skin on For the trees type that in). An autocomplete will trigger to help you make sure you get the name of a real skin.


5. Your parent skin will be loaded first, and anything you put in the CSS box will override the things in the parent skin.


6. If you want to use more than one parent skin, you can do so, so you could combine, e.g. Don't Care a Button and Wide margins to get a skin which had plain text buttons and wide margins on work pages.


7. Give your new skin a name and a description (and a preview image if you want to submit it as a public skin, or just for your reference).


8. Hit 'Create'. You'll be taken to a page which lets you preview or use your skin.


9. One known issue which will be fixed very shortly, but so it doesn't trip you up right now: if all you change in your skin is the parents, the display won't update, so try just sticking a comment in your css and editing it when you make other changes!
   

   How can I create spiffy new skins using the new system?

   The skins added with the new code are a good place to start - check out the masterlist of all the new public skins and follow the links to view the code for each skin. For basic skin customisation, simply copying the code of a skin you'd like to use and editing it is often effective.

   If you want to get more complicated, you might find the Archive front end documentation useful for digging into the details of the site CSS.

   If you're working on developing skins, the Firefox add-on Web Developer is a nifty tool which lets you live-edit CSS so you can try out different changes without repeatedly saving and editing a skin.

   Can I see skin creation in action?

   For the visual learners among you, you might like to check out lim's screencast showing the creation of a new skin.

This reference list of new skins was compiled by front-end coder lim. Lots of modular skins have been created to modify different aspects of the Archive. You can combine different skins to get exactly the look you want. More info coming soon on how to get the most out of the new skins!

Reference and Teaching List of Completed Skins

I've tried to comment quite extensively inside the skins.

1. Blurblings

   Shows, hides, and rearranges the blurb. You can chain these together to perfect your metadata display.

   1. Hide warnings
   2. Hide stats
   3. Hide summaries
   4. Hide tags
   5. Hide fandom
   6. Hide datetime
   7. Hide freeform tags
   8. Hide relationships
   9. Hide characters
   10. Hide nearly everything (except the title, author, fandom)
   11. Hide everything except the header
   12. Show the landmarks (landmark headings on tags, summary, etc)>
   13. Blurb drop drops the blurb group entirely (makes a plain text blurb)
   14. Shipper emphasises the relationship tags
   15. Faint Warning de-emphasises the warnings
   16. Chain Example demonstrates chaining.
   17. Byline Breaks the tags out into blocks by type (updated version of a skin by Branch so doesn't use the blurblings nomenclature).

2. Workings

   Similar to blurblings, but modding the work view

   1. Hide meta
   2. Hide author notes
   3. Hide author summary
   4. Big margin
   5. Max Width restricts the work width to 39em
   6. Fix Actions Right fixes the bookmark/save etc buttons to the right of the page as you scroll
   7. Fix Actions Left fixes those left
   8. Hide feedback
   9. Hide kudos

3. Typeset In My Ways

   This series is tarted up code from our very first Accessibility, Design and Technology meetings in 2007. Very stark, very simple text styles.

   1. Typeset In My Ways Uses the Archive typography and layout, with plain text blurb and a limited width work view.
   2. Typeset In My Ways Erasure drops all archive parents except core and loads a simple typographical style.
   3. Typeset In My Ways Sans simple sans serif text.
   4. Typeset In My Ways Serif simple serif text.
   5. Typeset In My Ways Negativity light on dark
   6. Typeset In My Ways Terminal simple console/terminal style
   7. Typeset In My Ways Scully simple Word Perfect style
   8. Typeset In My Ways 2.0 uses Archive 2.0 style but plain text blurb and big margins.
   9. Typeset In My Ways Landmarks shows the landmarks and lays them out
   10. Typeset In My Ways Textura adds a (subtle) textured background

4. The Screeny

   various screenreader optimisations

   1. Screeny Exposure! exposes all landmark headings to the readers that can't read them.
   2. Screeny Oppression! suppresses all landmark text.
   3. Screeny Drop It drops all archive parents except core
   4. Screeny She's Got Form drops all archive parents except core and interactions.
   5. Screeny Shut It Any component you don't care to read, add to the beginning of this code, or remove ones you do want. Remember to separate with a comma!

5. Parental Guidance

   1. Colour Flip Combos a reference skin grouping the archive into a 5 level colour and contrast palette.
   2. Key Colour Reference this lists everything that is red.
   3. Exploded Worker this is an advanced parenting reference parent. *g* It explodes the archive 2.0 cascade into all its component parents, so you can live edit the CSS in tabs with a plugin like Firefox Web Developer. Only use this for reference, because it will slow down your page load.
   4. Trouble O'Head zeroes out the default background, borders, and shadows on the header navigation. This is useful to just parent in when you don't want to drop the whole AO3 header region style.
   5. Region Drop this is an advanced parenting parent for replacer layouts. It drops header, dash, footer, and main from AO3 default. In most cases you're better off overriding instead. Check out Trouble O'Head for fast header overrides and the Tile Puzzle series to move the dashboard around with overrides.

6. Graphical

   I've uploaded a ton of tiling textures you can call to decorate your layouts. There are loads more graphical styles to come but this is what I could do with two days notice!

   1. Simply Twilling introducing textures - this is a simple override CSS3 skin that demonstrates how you can leverage region and group transparency to build dramatically different styles quickly.
   2. Threw Twill Out an introduction to parenting.
   3. Desk Job a template "desk top" layout you can adapt to your own design. [needs a bit of testing so have not preloaded sorry]
   4. Panda Madness this is like, pink and round and it has pandas on it
   5. The Hustings a stripped down version of a more complex theme made ready quickly for deploy

   Chained Melody

   Here I'm demonstrating breaking a css3 theme apart into components so each piece can be used in other skins. There are brill free fonts to download linked in. CSS3.

   1. Chained Buttons
   2. Chained Head hover the icon
   3. Chained Groups
   4. Chained Quotes
   5. Chained Icons
   6. Chained Key (colours, fonts, background)
   7. Chained Melody the whole lot chained together

   Fixie

   A fixed region layout, again with components you can use in other skins pretty easily, but this one drops components of the site style: it doesn't just override them, it replaces them. Free fonts to download linked . IE7 and up

   1. Fixie Fix explodes the site layout and takes out portions of it, then fixes the regions: header, dashboard, footer, and scrolls the main region. This is "parent only" meaning you have to chain it in to a style - it doesn't work on its own as a layout.
   2. Fixie Buttons makes scribbly buttons with Mido font
   3. Fixie Icons make scribbly backed icons
   4. Fixie Groups this makes some swooshy CSS3 rounded boxes
   5. Fixie this chains everything together to make a layout!
   6. Fixie Free Wheel (coming soon) this spoofs the basic look of Fixie, but as an override skin, and with normal scrolling regions.

7. Palettes

   Colour changes, some based on the most popular colour changes in the old skins system

   1. Mono black and white where red all over
   2. Zebra Mono black and white where red all over, with zebra fur detail
   3. Reversi light on dark, with blue key
   4. Dusted off based on Dusty Rose by sistabro
   5. For the trees based on Sunny Forest by enigel
   6. The Blues based on Medium Blues by Arduinna
   7. Snow makes everything that is very light lavender pure white. Useful to chain in.
   8. Snow Blue
   9. Get the Backers makes all the group backgrounds white.

8. Tile Puzzle

   1. Wide Horizon Horizontal dash in blocks
   2. Dash Line Horizontal dash, inline
   3. Eyes to the right Right side dash
   4. 100% width filters
   5. Stick It sticks the secondary (page specific) navigation to the left and fixes it there
   6. Mark My Words Shows all landmarks and gives some minimal visual style
   7. Slim Shaded makes a slimmer, texty header, with a shaded strip, snow body, and lowercase buttons
   8. One Point Faux spoofs the old style on top of the new style. Might look slightly different to the original old style, but broadly the same.
   9. 2 Point No takes off all the box shadows, text-shadows, and rounded corners
   10. Look and Read swaps the logo for a text title: "Archive Of Our Own
   11. Imago swaps your header icon for a text greeting: "Hi, username!"
   12. Incommodious takes off the commas we add into long lists of inline tags, if you find them odious!

9. Wiggle It

   Some pure CSS3 mods. Modern browsers only.

   1. Head Buoy slides the header up out of sight and slides down on hover.
   2. Sliders slides the meta header off a work and slides out on hover.
   3. The Bubbler probably the most useful skin here. Bubbles everything. No animation.

10. Mash Up

    So you can just stick on different buttons.

    1. Aqua Buttons You can just swap the buttons, or use them in a more complicated layout.
    2. Gel Buttons showing how you can change the colours for a different effect.
    3. Scribble Buttons pencil scribble buttons good for paper styles.
    4. Massive Buttons they're really big and bold.
    5. Don't Care A Button makes the buttons just plain text.
    6. Dusted Buttons chain in Dusted Rose

Welcome to Release 0.8.9. Elz, Enigel, erda, Jenny S-T, lim, Lucy P, Naomi, Phoenix, Pixel, Rebecca, Sidra and sarken contributed code to this release, which was tested by our awesome testing team: sarken, via_ostiense, Jenny S-T, Rebecca, Enigel, phoenix, Kylie, Irene, Jenn_Calaelen, Bridget, Zebra, Tai, linbot, mumble, XParrot, alasen, Naomi

Highlights!

Site Design Overhaul

The Archive's look has changed a lot, whoa! The amazing lim has completely overhauled our CSS and HTML.

A big reason for this change is to make it much easier to write skins for the Archive. This is important not just for people who want to use skins, but because it will enable us to make a variety of skins ourselves for different uses (even for users who aren't logged in!) and also allow us to keep developing and improving the Archive's interface in future without breaking skins all over the place.

If you want to update your existing skin or are interested in making new skins, you may want to start by browsing the new Archive default skin (it's broken down into lots of different modular parents, making it easier to see what each bit does). We'll shortly be posting a list of the new skins with some info on what they all do!

Accessibility

Another crucial reason for the change has been to improve the accessibility of the Archive. Among the changes we have put in:

• Autocomplete now using ARIA managed focus, making it accessible to more screenreaders.
• ARIA roles have been expanded throughout.
• Lots of forms have been chunked up into fieldsets, making it easier to do a task at a time.
• The dashboard has been reorganised and chunked into different sets of tasks.
• Tables have been ruthlessly eradicated where inappropriate and remaining ones have been made accessible.
• Lots of instructions have been rewritten using simpler, shorter sentences.
• Labels have been made more consistent.
• Extensive landmarks have been written throughout
• All form elements should now be labeled and/or titled for screenreader access.
• Buttons should be easier to mouse to for people with lower mobility.
• A user icon is now in the header which you can always click to to get home, for more visual/spatial users.
• All navigation jumpable to with headings and roles.
• A bunch of other small tweaks have been made to make the Archive more customisable and more amenable to being viewed with unusual browser settings.

We continue to actively seek input from readers and users with any accessibility problems! If you are browsing with assistive devices and something doesn't work for you or is frustrating, please let us know. We know you probably hear this a lot, but we hope the work we've already done will demonstrate that accessibility is a genuine concern for us. We might not always get it 100% right, but we'll keep working to improve.

Skin Parents

You can now chain together multiple skins by making one skin the parent of another. This is particularly useful if you want to replace instead of override the archive site skin, because you can use parts of the default skin as parents of your own skin, and only replace the parts you need to change.

IE-Only Skins and Media Type Skins

You can now create skins that just have overrides for Internet Explorer, which will be loaded up using conditional comments. So if you're making a public skin that you would like IE users to be able to enjoy also, you don't have to put in hacks -- just put the IE fixes in their own skin, and put it into your list of parents.

You can also now make custom skins for different media types -- for instance, for "speech" to be loaded up only by screenreaders, or "print" to be loaded up only for printing, or "handheld" to be loaded up for small-screen mobile devices.

Tag Sets

Before this release, if you were running a challenge and wanted to restrict your participants to picking from a particular set of tags, you would put those tags into your challenge settings. No longer! You will now put the tags into a tag set instead.

Tag Set Features:

• Reusable across multiple challenges.
• Shared with other users.
• Take nominations which you can then review.
• Let users see your tag set in progress during nominations or not as you choose.
• Can include tags that haven't been wrangled (this means you can use brand-new tags, or tags which suit your own challenge's preferred terminology).
• Let you specify which fandom character and relationship tags belong to (which will make those options get loaded automatically in the signup form for your participants).

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page.

Release Details

Features

• Design overhaul
• Tag sets
• News posts can now be tagged and filtered by tags & language
• Comments on multi-chaptered words now include information which chapter the comments was left on, to avoid confusion in "view full work" mode
• Added security measures to the login process: after 50 failed login attempts, the account will be locked down for 5 minutes

Bug fixes

• you can now delete a work without Javascript enabled, huzzah!
• fixed a bug that would display works as incomplete even after the last chapter was added
• there was a bug where deleting a work with a lot of chapters would take too long or time out, this has been fixed
• fixed broken links in the sitemap
• fixed several bugs and workflow isses with the new autocomplete functionality after feedback from tag wranglers
• when posting a work, tabbing into the fandom field would enter the first autocomplete suggestion that would come up, this has been changed to leave the field blank when tabbing further
• added author information to the body of feed items for tag subscriptions (so they wouldn't only show up in a byline like the author of a blog post)
• fixed the character counter for the Notes fields on the "post new" form
• bad class names in work skins (e.g. names containing special characters like $) would be stripped from the skin but left intact in the work body, this has been fixed
• added a link to the FAQ item about importing from the "import new" page
• after a failed import, the error message would stick around when going to another page, this has been fixed
• more automated tests

• Admin:
  • notice banners for admin announcements can now include links and basic formatting tags
  • made the links to translations of news posts visually clearer
  • fixed an issue with notifications for comments on news posts being sent out twice
  • made sure that comments marked as spam by an admin are not visible to users anymore

• Bookmarks:
  • fixed the display of "most recent bookmarks" for a work on the bookmarks index
  • fixed a bug that would lead to unexpected behavior when trying to bookmark a work in IE 9
  • the help popup for the bookmark symbols didn't work on the main bookmark index, this has been fixed

• Challenges:
  • the list of open challenges now exludes moderated and closed collections
  • brought some misleading timeframe information (such as, "SIGNUP PERIOD IS OVER") in line with actual start and end dates
  • you can now sign up to a challenge with multiple requests without Javascript
  • fixed a bug where drafts of an assignment would show up as the title of a posted work for the challenge mods
  • pinch-hitters now receive an email notification of their assignment
  • fixed a bug that would allow you to create subcollections in a subcollection (potentially breaking things) and made the error message clearer
  • added a link to the "Manage Items" page from challenge options to make it more obvious that you can reveal stories one by one
  • tweaked collection settings into a more logical order (compulsory items first)
  • deleting a signup from the My Signups would redirects to the Collection profile, it now redirects to the /signups page for gift exchanges or the prompt overview for memes

• Prompt Memes:
  • added an option to give prompts a title; this can be turned on by the prompt meme owner by allowing/requiring a title in the request settings and affects the prompts overview and the list of assignments when posting a new work
  • you can now see the number of total prompts in a meme on the Collections index and
  • fixed a bug where posting to fill a prompt would persistently try and fill all prompts by that user (if you claimed more than one), leading to wonky results

• Downloads:
  • ampersands in work titles and work content would lead to missing characters in .epub files, this has been fixed
  • fixed a problem with .epub files for works with very long chapters; made sure that they're split into small enough chunks to work with all e-readers

• Lots and lots of display fixes:
  • made the site, especially the posting interface, more usable in IE 6 and up
  • fixed several alignment and spacing issues across browsers
  • fixed some bugs where HTML code would show up as text
  • generally prettied things up

The day is finally here - after much hard work from our coders and testers, we are ready to roll out our exciting new code on the Archive of Our Own! We will be deploying shortly, and the AO3 will go down for a while while we do so. When we come back, there will be some big changes which you need to know about:

New site scheme

Front-end coder lim, working with back-end coder Naomi, has reworked our site HTML and CSS to make it more accessible, more functional, and all-round nicer. So, you'll see some visual changes across the site (and if you're using assistive technology or special browser settings you should find it behaves better - if not, please tell us). Don't be alarmed if things don't look how you're used to!

New skins

The new CSS has allowed us to massively overhaul our skins functionality to make it way more flexible - check out our post about the new skins for a bit more background. This will allow for a lot more cool site mods in the future! The unfortunate side-effect is that old skins will break. To make the transition smoother, we'll be doing the following:

• Disabling all old skins and setting all accounts to use the Archive default, so that noone gets stuck on a broken skin.
• Loading up a whole bunch of new skins, including new versions based on the most popular public skins in use at the moment. So, many of you will be able to switch immediately to a new skin which replicates the one you were using before. We'll post a list of the new skins right after the deploy.
• Holding an open house for skins support in the next week or so (time tba).

We'll be posting more docs and help over the coming hours and days! There may be the odd bit of unexpected behaviour along the way (with skins especially, the diversity of user-created skins means we can't prepare for every possible scenario) but we think the new functionality will give you much much more awesome! Cinderella is getting her ballgown on and the good news is that for the shiny new skins, midnight will never come!

We'll tweet to AO3_status when we start the deploy, so you'll have a heads-up before the site goes down. Download your long works now to tide you over while our fairy deploymother is working her magic!

As part of our series giving an insight into what goes on behind the scenes at the Archive of Our Own, Support staffer Sam has written up a day in the life of an AO3 Support staffer! Sam started out volunteering with the AO3 as a tag wrangler, and joined the Support team at the beginning of the July Ticket Blitz. He has degrees in journalism, English literature, and cognitive and discourse linguistics. He's taught skills-based computer classes for near a decade, so Support was a natural fit. Sam tends to jump on tickets involving CSS code and the skins; downloads, especially ePUBs; and all things Tag, as he's currently the liaison (read: troublemaker) between Support and Tag Wrangling.

By and large, Support is all about answering all the tickets that come in. To do this involves a whole lot of trying to break the Archive in new and creative ways, keeping a light eye on what the Coders are up to under the hood, and generally trying to divine what the users need and want.

There are a whole bunch of resources we use to do so (some of these resources are only accessible to staffers - we've linked the public ones):

• 16bugs - This is our main ticket tracker where we keep information on each ticket that comes in, and any communication with the user or other committees. This will soon (hopefully) be replaced with the Support Board.


• Campfire - The chat interface all AO3 committees use. Support has its own room where we'll request betas and comment on tickets, life, and fic; and we're often lurking in the Coders room, checking for surprise!bugs and fixes.
• Both the "Beta" Archive (the real one) and the Test Archive (where we test new code) - Sometimes we have to track down to see what a reported bug is doing and possibly see if it's already been fixed on the next release.
• The wiki "Knowledge Base" - One of our Support reps has been collating the answers to commonly answered questions into a massive internal reference source. This is awesome, because it helps ensure that knowledge gets passed on and we don't have to duplicate work.
• Google code otwarchive issues - The list of things-to-do for the Coders, to see if a bug is known or a feature planned (and occasionally provide all the information).
• Squee! - This internal squee page is where we keep all records that we're doing something right (700+ and counting). It helps us track what's working and also provides a nice place for people to go when they need a boost!

I pop open my email to see if anyone sent beta requests to the list or if any tickets have come in. (Most responses to users are beta-read by a second support member, for accuracy, clarity, and something resembling UK/US/CA/AU English.) I'll also log into Campfire and check the Support room, since several staff will leave their beta requests in there.

Both 16bugs and the Support form send an email to each Support staff when a ticket comes in. I tend to not read the emails themselves, but use them as a sign to go check 16bugs and see what new tickets are there.

Certain tickets we immediately assign to another committee (Legal, Abuse, Tag Wranglers) and wait for a response from that committee before contacting the user. Some committees will contact the user directly, some don't.

Since every ticket is different, I'm going to give examples of two recent tickets. (All confidential details are removed, but hi, users, if you recognize your questions!)

A ticket comes in from a user asking about a problem logging in with hir OpenID. I open the ticket in 16Bugs, and in the ticket set my name for "Assigned to" and "Status" to "Solving".

I've heard some talk about the discontinuance of OpenID, so I poke my head into the Coders chatroom in Campfire and ask if anyone has more specific information. I luck out and one of our Coders knows of two open code tickets regarding OpenID, which saves me the time. I open the tickets in GCode and skim them, seeing the current development status for OpenID (we're planning to phase it out).

To make sure the code is still working as intended, I use my own account as a guinea pig, setting up my own OpenID login, logging out and testing it. It all works, so I assume that the problem comes from improper configuration. I step back through the process involved and make detailed notes to set up OpenID. I add those to our Knowledge Base on the wiki so next time we have a question like this, the info is easy to find.

I then compose a reply to the user as a comment to the ticket in 16bugs. I also copy in the links to the GCode tickets into 16bugs for reference. After coming up with the response, I poke my head into Support chat in Campfire. Fortunately, one of the other Support staffers is on, so I ask hir to beta my response. Sie reads it over, we discuss and revise a few lines, and sie comments in the thread that it looks good. I copy the response from 16bugs.

In my email, already set to forward through the official email, I search and find the ticket email that came in and reply to it, using the copied text from 16bugs.

After sending the email, in 16bugs I set the status to "Solved". If the user responds, I can find the ticket in 16Bugs and reopen it as needed. When the user responds that sie doesn't actually have an account, I send back a betaed response on how to get an invite, either through the queue or through a friend.

Another ticket has come in regarding a tag that's misfiled - in this case, a fictional football team that has somehow been wrangled into the "Football RPF" fandom. Since this relates to wrangling policy, I'll mark the ticket to watch it and assign it to the "Tag Wranglers" and wait for a response from one of the Wrangling committee members before I send a response to the user. In this case, it's an easy fix by the wranglers, and I'm able to quickly notify the user that the tag has been re-wrangled.

There. My two tickets for the day - with the new influx of staff we've had, and a fairly slow inflow of tickets lately, sometimes I don't even get the option to do that many! (However, different times of year or new lots of code can produce a sudden uptick, so we take the rest while we can!)

Sometimes tickets aren't nearly as straightforward. Sometimes it takes time to track down the bug - while I'm doing so, I'll set the status to "Testing". If the response requests additional information from the user, I'll leave it as "Solving" until I can get a response from the user. If I find other bugs in 16Bugs or code issues in GCode, I'll leave links in the comment leading to them, as well as leave links to the active ticket elsewhere. If the ticket contains a feature request, I'll make a note on our wiki's Feature Requests page and if it continues praise, I make a note on the Squee page.

Let it be said: us Support minions are human. There are tickets that have us staring at our monitors in awe, wondering "how did they do that?" There are tickets where we realize we've answered the same thing frequently, and therefore need better documentation and/or to prioritize a bug fix. There are times that we look at a ticket and mentally draw straws about who gets to tell the Coders that the recently-fixed feature isn't so fixed.

All that said? It's all worth it. It's worth it, helping the users better interact with the Archive. It's worth it, seeing the feature requests and ideas. It's worth it, feeling like I'm contributing to the development of the Archive. It's worth it.

I've now knocked out a couple tickets, updated a page on the wiki, updated a bug on GCode, and tripped over a work I want to read. Never let it be said I can't take a sign! Off to read!

The good news!

Shed your skin! We're about to have a massive deploy of new code that will bring us - among other things - radically new skins! The underlying code for the Archive has been streamlined and modified to make it more accessible and maintainable, and much easier to override. This is going to allow for fantastically beautiful and awesome customizable looks for the archive; fanartists, prepare to go wild! As a bonus, we've also added some skins options for logged-out users (you'll find these in the footer)!

The bad news :(

Since we had to radically retool the underlying code to make this all work well, existing skins are not going to work right out of the box. (We did mention that this was an archive in beta, right?) We're really sorry for the inconvenience, but we had to sacrifice consistency in the short term to make the skins feature more awesome and ensure our code remains maintainable in the long term.

To make sure that no one comes to the archive and finds a broken skin, we'll be temporarily turning off the existing skins when we deploy the new code - don't be alarmed if you come to the Archive to find it looks different! You'll be able to preview your old skins to see how they'll look with the new code, so you can fix the private ones before turning them back on if necessary. We've also already upgraded a bunch of the existing public skins and added some new ones-- for instance a new light-on-dark skin, and a new plain text skin. We'll be posting a list of these skins as soon as the code deploys.

What's so great about the new skins?

LOTS OF STUFF! \0/ One major improvement is that you'll no longer have to use the dreaded !important for most of your overrides to the default skin. In fact, if you want to you can strip away our default skin altogether and write your styles without using any of our CSS at all. But that's only the beginning! There are a whole bunch of new features:

• Modular system so you can make your skin a 'child' of another skin. This means that when you find that skin which has a perfect layout but a color you hate, you can apply that skin for your layout, then add another one on top which just changes the color. (And that's just the beginning of what you can do with the modular skins - we'll have more in a future post explaining the cool possibilities.)


• Make different skins for different devices (this is courtesy of the modular skins) - you'll be able to make a custom skin for when you're browsing on your computer, and another one for when you're browsing on your phone, and have them kick in automatically when you're logged in to your account (providing your phone respects mobile stylesheets). Customization wherever you are!


• An array of images you can use to customize your skins! You can already use images hosted offsite in your own skins (but not in public ones because we need to be sure the images won't change or break). Now you'll be able to pull from a bunch of stock images on the Archive to make your skins even prettier.

Essentially, the new system is aimed at giving you control of ALL THE THINGS! We'll be posting a list of pre-loaded skins as well as loads of shiny new skins over the coming days. We'll also post tutorials and examples so you can get to grips with the new shiny!

O NOES MAH SKINS ARE BROKEN

All may not be lost! If your skins are broken or you think they're likely to be, you can do some things to prepare. We'll be holding a Skins Open House in a week or two where we'll go over how to make new skins and fix old ones - watch this space for news on that.

Accessible skins

One last note - one reason it was important to us to make this change is that it makes it MUCH easier to customize skins to meet specific accessibility needs. If you are using one of the public skins geared towards particular accessibility needs (e.g. low contrast, plain text, etc), then we have either fixed this to work right out of the box under the new system or (where that wasn't feasible) added a new skin to do the same job. We're adding new accessible skins for logged-out users too - you'll be able to access a Low Vision skin and a Light on dark Small Text skin in the footer even when you are logged out. If you need a customized skin for accessibility reasons and our existing skins don't meet that need, please get in touch with support and let us know what you need - we'll do our best to help! (Also, if you run up against an accessibility issue anywhere on the Archive, please let us know - we're committed to keeping the site as accessible as possible, but inevitably there's stuff we miss!)

Stay tuned for more info about skins!

Are you interested in volunteering as a coder or tester for the Archive of Our Own? Do you have questions about our development process, or would you like to learn more about how archive features go from idea to reality? The Accessibility, Design and Technology Committee will be holding an open house to talk about our work and answer any questions you may have!

All are welcome! The chat will be held on Sunday, October 30th at 20:00 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.

Accessibility, Design, & Technology is the guiding body that coordinates software design, development and testing on behalf of the Organization for Transformative Works. Currently we are responsible for designing and building the Archive of Our Own.

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

This is a busy time for AD&T, because we're coming closer to our big deploy! We've been working on some major changes and they are almost ready to go onto the main Archive - this means lots of testing and bugfixing and general activity!

OTW October Drive!

Everyone has been working so hard that this already feels like a long time in the past, but we can't post without mentioning the great success of the OTW October Membership Drive! It was the most successful drive ever, raising a whopping US$21,456! This money will help to support the Archive as it grows, along with the rest of the OTW's projects. We're totally awed at the generosity of fandom (you can read more about the details of the drive at DevMem's October Drive Wrap-up.) We'd also like to give a big shout-out to Megan and the rest of the DevMem team, who worked really hard to make this drive the success it was. Kudos to everyone involved!

Meeting highlights!

Site redesign

We will soon be rolling out a redesign for the site. Visually, it won't be changing dramatically, but the front-end code underneath is changing a lot. It's now more flexible, easier to understand, and - crucially - more accessible. This has been a big job, but we think it will make the Archive much more usable and maintainable going forward.

Skins changes!

The overhaul of the site CSS and HTML has allowed us to make some major changes to our skins features. When we launched skins, users were super happy - but we know that they were not quite as flexible as you might like. With the new site CSS, you will no longer have to use the dreaded !important all the time. Even cooler, the new design allows you to have multilayer skins, so that you can combine several skins to get the site exactly how you want it. Most importantly, this means that if we change the site design again in future, you can make the old design a 'parent' for the skin you're using so that it doesn't break (similar to the way you can use S1 and S2 styles on Livejournal.)

The only downside of the new skins system is that your existing skins may break - we're doing our best to make sure this doesn't happen, but as there are a lot of user-designed skins we can't be 100% certain. We're currently testing the new system and figuring out exactly what the implications are for existing skins - we'll keep you posted on what to expect and how best you can prepare for the change.

Our Feature Requests process

We spent some time discussing our process for dealing with feature requests from users. Our lovely Support team receive lots of requests for new features or enhancements from users, and until recently these were logged on our internal wiki to await review by AD&T, who decide whether we can make a change and how it fits into our overall plans for the Archive. However, things were not getting off that page and onto the AD&T agenda as fast as we'd like, so we've been looking for a new process for a while now. Support have come up with a new proposed process which will involve putting new requests directly onto the AD&T agenda, so we don't overlook anything and deal with it more swiftly. Anything AD&T approve will be put into the pool for coders to work on; we'll also be keeping a clearer list of things which we decide we won't implement, with the reasons why. We're hoping this will help us be much more efficient and more responsive to users (it will certainly make Support's life a whole lot easier!). We're also thinking about ways of making the whole feature request process more visible to users, so you can see a bit more of the decision-making that goes into building the Archive.

Next deploy

The next deploy is scheduled for as soon as we can get it all working and tested. It includes some big changes, including the new site design, new skins features, tag sets for challenges, and much more - this is awesome but it means we want to be EXTRA sure we have picked up any problems (although no doubt some will sneak through the net).

News from our sub-committees

Coders

Coders are working away like busy busy bees, fixing things and writing new code. Rebecca ran some awesome training on automated testing tool RSpec, which will help us write some nice speedy tests so we don't fall asleep while we're waiting for tests to run - thanks, Rebecca! We are working on building up more and more coder training sessions, to share our skills and help people develop.

Testers

Testers are also busy, getting the new code tested and making sure it is all up-to-scratch. They work quietly in the background, but they are all absolutely awesome and without their hard work the Archive couldn't exist - thanks, testers! Longtime tester hill has also been working on automated testing using Watir - this replicates testing in different browsers, cutting down on the amount of manual testing needed and thus saving the testing team to work on the things that really need the human touch. Thanks, hill! We always welcome volunteers, and our awesome testers are particularly in need of backup - if you're interested in joining the team, get in touch via Volunteers and Recruiting.

News from our sister committees

Support

The Support team have maintained their great work keeping up with tickets - right now there is not one single unassigned ticket! We're pleased to welcome Anna and arithilim to the team - it's great to see them already getting stuck in with tickets! We'd also like to give a big shout-out to Yshyn, who has been doing awesome work developing Support's documentation and building up a knowledge base, and to Sam, who has ventured into the thorny wilds of the old Feature Requests page to carve out overlooked ideas!

If you're interested in what Support do, check out the recent Spotlight on Support - and remember, Support are always happy to answer your questions on all aspects of the Archive - just get in touch via the Support & Feedback form.

Tag wrangling

The Tag Wrangling Committee ran a very successful Open House in which we talked a bit about how wrangling works and walked through some wrangling. If you missed it, a transcript should be up on the OTW website soon! We are planning more sessions like this in future \0/ - keep an eye out for future news posts.

Wranglers also provided information for a number of support requests. In response to one of them, we have added the metatag Anthropomorphism above Anthropomorfic, with them both being canonicals (canonicals can be used to filter search results). This lets users who consider their works part of the “-fic” tradition to use this tag, while encouraging works of different types of media. We've left the subtags of Anthropomorfic as they are for the moment, with the exception of Fandom (Anthropomorfic)- since some of the works under this tag were not related to anthromorphism, but rather inspired by fandom itself, Fandom – Fandom was canonized as well under Other Media, and Fandom (Anthropomorfic) was subtagged under it as well as Anthropomorphism. We’ll be keeping an eye on fandom usage and adapt if necessary. If you’ve got further input to this, or other wrangling issues, please let us know by filing a Support request or tweeting us @ao3_wranglers.

Finally, we're pleased to welcome lots of new wranglers, including welfycat, Niko, Sossity, melodiousb, Pax, foxinthestars and Rodo! If you're interested in wrangling, check out the list of fandoms without wranglers - the Marvel Universe is particularly in need of love right now, and could use several co-wranglers who can work together on the various different parts! Please note that wrangler signup will close for the year on 1st November, so visit the volunteers page now to join the team!

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.

When you fill in the AO3 support form and press 'Send feedback', your message wends its way to our trusty Support team, who answer questions from users of the Archive of Our Own. They provide help and support on all aspects of using the Archive, and provide a bridge between Archive users and our coders so that bugs get fixed and new features get coded! They are an awesome and dedicated team who love making sure that users have a good experience on the AO3.

What questions do Support answer?

All kinds of things relating to the AO3! If users discover that something is broken, or they want help figuring out how something works, or they'd like to ask for a new feature, all those questions come to Support. Sometimes users will send in broader questions about the OTW as a whole, or about fannish issues in general, and Support will also answer those or pass them on to someone who can (if you have questions that are not AO3-specific, you can also ask those via the OTW Communications webform).

What do Support do when they get a ticket?

The first thing a Support member does when a ticket arrives is to take a look and figure out what kind of question it is. Some kinds of questions are common - for example, we are often asked why they can only view 1000 works in a fandom (answer: to save our servers, but we're working on a better solution that will make it unnecessary) - and in these cases Support can quickly send out a reply. If it's not such a common question, the Support member might do a bit of testing to see if they can reproduce a bug, or consult with other teams: for example, they work with Coders and Accessibility, Design and Technology for technical bugs and feature requests, Tag Wrangling for tag questions, Content for issues about what kind of things can be posted on the Archive, and Legal for questions relating to the legality of fanworks.

This sounds like a lot! Do Support members have some kind of special skills?

They have the skill of beng awesome! But other than that, there are not too many specific qualifications for being a Support staffer. Most importantly, Support need to enjoy problem-solving and be able to communicate clearly and effectively. At present, we only do Support in English (this is something we hope to expand as the Archive grows), but you don't need to be a native English speaker, as long as you are fluent in English - one of our most longstanding and dedicated staffers, Anne-Li, is a native Swedish speaker. Support staffers also need to know the Archive pretty well, although they tend to pick up some of the nitty-gritty as they gain experience. Several Support staffers also serve on other committees, so they can contribute additional knowledge to the team, and thanks to the efforts of staffer Yshyn, Support are also building up an awesome knowledge base on our internal wiki.

What does the future hold for Support?

This is an exciting time for Support - they've just taken on some new staff members and are now working and planning for the transition to a Support Board integrated into the Archive. This will be a public-facing board where users as well as staffers can offer advice (along the lines of LJ or DW) - we think this will be great for transparency and for helping more people get involved in a more informal manner. However, it will be quite a radical change, so Support are now beginning work on some of the policies and strategies which will be needed to make that a success.

This all sounds awesome - can I join?!

Yes! If you're interested please fill out our Volunteers Form.

Today is the last day of the OTW's membership drive! Donate now to ensure you have voting rights in the forthcoming Board election!

Donations to the OTW help to support the Archive of Our Own - and given the rapid expansion of the site, we certainly need support! We bought our first set of servers in September 2009, expecting these two servers to last us for three years. By the middle of 2010, however, it was evident that the site was expanding much faster than we had ever dared to hope - on 20 August 2010 we hit 100,000 works on the Archive - and we started planning for more servers. We bought four new servers and a switch in January 2011, massively improving our site capacity. However, fandom seemed to take this as a challenge, and at the time of writing the AO3 has:

• 23,528 users


• 232,357 works


• 7,449 fandoms

We add approximately 300 new users every week, and the fact that our invitations queue now stands at over 1800 shows that there's a lot more demand beyond that! We're already thinking about what we need to do for futher site expansion - more servers are definitely going to be needed, as well as some structural/database changes which need some careful thought.

We have added a bunch of great new features this year, including subscriptions, prompt memes, tag sets (coming in our next deploy), and a whole host of enhancements across the site. We're still working on more subscriptons, improved bookmarking features, fanart hosting and support for vids (in collaboration with the OTW's Vidding committee).

All of this amazing stuff is only possible because of YOUR support! Donate to the OTW now and help ensure the AO3 continues to thrive!

<a href="http://transformativeworks.org/how-you-can-help/support"><img src="http://transformativeworks.org/sites/default/files/2011-fund-drive.PNG" alt="OTW logo: red circle with an arrow. Text reads: Organization for Transformative Works Membership Drive October 9-16, 2011" /></a>

Have you ever wondered about what it is tag wranglers do? Are you thinking about volunteering as a wrangler? Do you have a question about tags on the Archive of Our Own? Is your fandom in need of some temporary assistance? The Tag Wrangling Committee is hosting an open house! This is a drop-in session where you can ask us what's on your mind, or just have a chat about tags. We'll also have some AO3 invites to give away.

All are welcome! The chat will be held on Saturday, 15 October at 22:00 UTC (what time is that where I live?) in OTW's public chatroom on Campfire. The chatroom can be accessed at: https://fanarchive.campfirenow.com/e79cc

The Tag Wrangling Committee maintains and administers the curated folksonomy system within the Archive of Our Own, assuring accessibility, diversity of fannish expression, descriptive practices, and a high level of user ease.

The AO3's parent org, the Organization for Transformative Works, is running its biannual membership drive!

Once again we've reached that point in the year where we ask for your help! We appreciate the ways in which you help us day after day, year after year, since the Organization for Transformative Works would be nothing without its volunteers, staff, and members. Our projects exist because you've dreamed them, asked for them, and built them. And now we're hoping you can help us build the OTW's membership.

Membership ensure voting privileges in the November Board election, so now is a great time to renew your membership or become a member for the first time. We think OTW Membership is pretty nifty but if you have questions, we have answers -- and feel free to contact us about anything not answered in the FAQ.

Between now and October 16th we ask you renew your membership and tell a friend or two about the OTW. Use the image and link below and spread the word!

<a href="http://transformativeworks.org/how-you-can-help/support"><img src="http://transformativeworks.org/sites/default/files/2011-fund-drive.PNG" alt="OTW logo: red circle with an arrow. Text reads: Organization for Transformative Works Membership Drive October 9-16, 2011" /></a>

Happy Ada Lovelace Day from everyone at the Organization for Transformative Works!

Celebrating women in technology is a subject close to our hearts: when the OTW came into existence in 2007, one of our major motivations was the desire to give fans control of the tools and infrastructure which support fannish creativity. The predominately female fannish communities from which the OTW emerged have a long history of mastering new skills and sharing expertise for fannish pursuits — the vidders of the 1970s were pioneering mashup techniques decades before they became trendy! — and we want to extend that skill-sharing to the creation of a fan-owned home that welcomes all fans.

The vast majority of OTW volunteers identify as female, and the amazing things our teams have achieved demonstrate that they all deserve to be considered tech heroines! Below, we highlight the work of our tech-focused teams and the individual voices of some of our staff and volunteers.

Archive of Our Own

The AO3 is the major tech project for the OTW, and is supported by several committees and volunteer groups: Accessibility, Design, & Technology; Systems; Support; Tag Wranglers; Coders; and Testers. We're one of the largest female-majority open source projects in existence, and we're proud that in less than four years we've developed from nothing more than a cool idea to become a thriving site with more than 23,000 users.

Last Ada Lovelace Day we polled AO3 volunteers to find out a bit more about them, and we thought we'd repeat the experiment this year. The charts below give a summary of their answers:

We're still very definitely a female-dominated project; however, we're interested to note that since last year the number of volunteers who identify as male has increased by 10%. We think this reflects the fact that we are focused on making a welcoming and supportive environment for people to gain new skills. As Skud pointed out in hir 2009 Oscon keynote, making a project welcoming for newbies is particularly beneficial to women — who are often excluded from traditional tech contexts — but that doesn't mean it becomes less welcoming to people who aren't women!

Not all the contributors to the project are coders or sysadmins; the AO3 also relies on the work of testers, tag wranglers, support staff, designers, and docs writers. We value their contributions just as much: a tech project is about more than lines of code, and without them the AO3 wouldn't exist.

A key part of our goal is giving fans (whatever their gender identity) the skills to build the tools they want to use. We were super-proud to see some of the fruits of this mission during the recent Delicious debacle, when fannish talk quickly turned to "We should build our own bookmarking service — if the AO3 could do it, so can we!" Our volunteers have achieved so much — they're all tech heroines (and heroes)!

The AO3 team would like to give special thanks to one particular tech heroine — Sidra, Systems co-chair and primary guardian of the servers for the AO3. The Accessibility, Design, & Technology Committee have posted a separate post celebrating Sidra's awesome work.

Fanlore

Another major technical undertaking for the OTW is Fanlore, our fannish history wiki. Since Fanlore is built on existing MediaWiki software rather than a custom-built application like the AO3, the tech aspects of this project are not as immediately obvious, but they are just as important. Our Wiki staff have learnt to maintain and use the MediaWiki software, creating custom templates, investigating new software modules, and getting to grips with wiki maintenance. They are awesomely assisted by our Systems team, who installed the software on our servers and keep everything running smoothly (we love you, Systems ♥).

Fanlore is celebrating Ada Lovelace Day with a new challenge on Women Characters, Science Edition! Why not create a Fanlore article about your favorite female character who is a scientist, engineer, or mathematician? Tell us about your fannish experiences with these characters — the women themselves, the relationships they’re in (het, lesbian, canonical, fannish, etc.), the fanworks they star in — whatever you can think of! You can stub out a new page, or add a sprinkle of information on an existing page.

Systems

If you've read this far, you've probably realized that Systems is involved in every OTW project. They tend the AO3 servers; install software for Fanlore, Transformative Works and Cultures, Open Doors, and the main OTW website, plus the software that helps us process donations and manage volunteers; and set up the mailing lists that help all the committees and volunteer groups do their daily work. The heroines and heroes of the Systems committee work largely behind the scenes to keep our technical infrastructure running smoothly, and the entire OTW benefits enormously from their dedication and expertise.

Webmasters

The Webmasters are another committee whose work is spread among a wide variety of projects. They maintain the OTW's main website, the Open Doors site, and the Elections site, manage our donation processing software, serve as layout coders for Transformative Works and Cultures, design styles for the OTW's social media accounts, and manage media hosting for various internal projects. To date, the Webmasters have all been women, and have been largely self- or peer-taught in the technical skills they use.

Some thoughts from our volunteers

In a post that celebrates women doing it for themselves, it seems appropriate to close with some thoughts from our volunteers, as they reflect both on their own work and on that of other women they admire. We'll be adding links to individuals' blog posts at the end of this post throughout the day.

It's exciting to work in teams that are overwhelmingly female. I really like the testing parties, as it's a little confusing and intimidating to try to work from written descriptions. I joined to support an organization I trust and approve of, and to get some practical tech experience. I just started volunteering a few weeks ago, so not much to say yet!

Sometimes I have conversations about servers, code, etc and I realise that former!me wouldn't have understand ANY of it. I've only learnt enough to contribute a tiny amount of code, but I am able to be a fully functioning member of AD&T because I have absorbed enough to be able to take part in these conversations as a useful laywoman.

I like finding interesting bugs and feel good whenever I find one before it hits Beta.

I like that the archive tries to accommodate a variety of people and systems instead of saying: get browser x with y settings or we don't care about your problems.

I love wrangling big fandoms with lots of problems and characters-shared-between-fandoms, it's a big undertaking but it's nice to see everything all neat once you're done!

Since I come from a background of relatively no coding, it has been really exciting to submit my bug fixes and see my changes on the archive! The whole experience has been really rewarding!

Since beginning my work with the Archive, I have improved my computing skills dramatically. I have learned a great deal about linux and switched to a more complex, text-based distro. I have gained an exceptional amount of skill and confidence with unix commands and bash. I now have an understanding of how the Archive is put together via Ruby on Rails, and that understanding deepens and develops with every issue I work on. This has been an amazing experience and I am excited to keep learning and growing as a coder!

I've never been part of a mainly women-identified group before, and it's really been rewarding for me in so many different ways. I'm so proud to be part of the OTW!

It combines two of my dearest hobbies: Coding and fandom. Both Open Source people and fandom people build great, communicative communities with lots of collaboration, and if you put those two together you get fun squared. :D It's really great to share more than the passion for coding with my fellow coders, so when I'm in a phase where I code less in favour of writing or squeeing over a new shiny fandom, it's never really off-topic, thus making it easier to keep in touch with coding stuff.

[Something I'm proud of accomplishing.] Dragging a committee up from its bootstraps at the project's launch, in such a way that it perfectly well survived (and prospered after) my own burnout-related crash and burn.

I really love it. I quit grad school in a blaze of disillusionment and have been unemployed and completely at sea in my life since, and it's been really heartening to have something I can contribute to in small ways, especially something that's part of fandom, which has been such a wonderful aspect of my life for so many years.

It is one of the more nurturing and family-building projects/organizations I've seen.

It's a delight to work on a project where people not only don't jump to assumptions about you, but where people are supportive even if you make the smallest contributions.

ruby metaprogramming! redis! There is just nothing quite so fantastically satisfying as working with a smart and dedicated and passionate team on a project that we all actually use ourselves and value deeply as a result.

I've really enjoyed being AD&T training lead, running sessions for new people to learn how to code from scratch, and mentoring them as they advance. It's so rewarding to see people gaining new skills, and particularly when you know they've previously been excluded from opportunities because of their gender or disability, e.g. by lack of part-time courses that can fit around childcare or flare-ups.

I'm *so excited* to be part of the team that's creating the Archive that I love so much. I think fandom is amazing to have worked so hard together to create the Archive.

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW blog, where we'll be collecting links to Ada Lovelace Day blog posts from OTW members throughout the day.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day ! This year, Accessibility, Design and Technology staffers and everyone who works on the Archive of Our Own have more reason than usual to give thanks to one particular tech heroine - Sidra, keeper of the AO3 servers. Sidra is the co-chair of the Systems Committee (along with Arrow, another tech heroine ♥) and a long-serving staffer on AD&T. She's been with us since the beginning and an impressive 17% of code commits to the Archive are hers; we don't have stats on exactly how many lines of code she's committed, but it's safe to say that the answer is a lot! Even more importantly, Sidra is the member of Systems dedicated to looking after the AO3 servers - when we're deciding what servers to buy, deploying new code, or dealing with site performance Sidra is right there at the heart of the action! Sometimes this involves being woken up at ungodly hours - if the Archive goes down, it's Sidra who we call in the middle of the night! We are in awe of her ability to climb out of bed and work her magic on the servers!

This past weekend was a compelling reminder of just how awesome Sidra is, as she battled mysterious loads on the servers, tweaked settings, and managed to restore the AO3 after some alarming and unexpected overloads. We know how incredibly hard she worked (and continues to work) to ensure that we can keep serving up delicious fanworks to our users - thank you, Sidra!

Our Systems team is a fantastic group of people, both men and women, but we're particularly proud to say that the Archive has a female sys-admin, since there are relatively few women working in this area. In fact, Sidra also deserves credit for helping to pave the way for women in tech: she entered the tech industry in the 1980s and is now a senior sys-admin in her professional life. Sidra is definitely proof that women can not only work in technology, they can kick ass at it! (Arthur C. Clarke tells us that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but we're not at all convinced that Sidra's ability to vanquish recalcitrant technology isn't actually magic.)

Thanks Sidra - a fannish tech heroine! The Archive definitely wouldn't be the same without you! ♥ ♥ ♥