Archive of Our Own

While developing the Archive of Our Own, site security is one of our top priorities. In the last couple of weeks, we've been reviewing our 'emergency plan', and wanted to give users a bit more information about how we work to protect the site. In particular, we wanted to make users aware that in the event of a security concern, we may opt to shut the site down in order to protect user data.

Background

Last week we were alerted to a critical security issue in Ruby on Rails, the framework the Archive is built on. We (and the rest of the Rails community) had to work quickly to patch this hole: we did an emergency deploy to upgrade Rails and fix the issue.

As the recent security breach at Twitter demonstrated, all web frameworks are vulnerable to security breaches. As technology develops, new security weaknesses are discovered and exploited. This was a major factor in the Rails security issue we just patched, and it means that once a problem is identified, it's important to act fast.

Our security plans

If the potential for a security breach is identified on the site, and we cannot fix it immediately we will perform an emergency shutdown until we are able to address the problem. In some cases, completely shutting down the site is the only way to guarantee that site security can be maintained and user data is protected.

We have also taken steps for 'damage limitation' in the event that the site is compromised. We perform regular offsite backups of site data. These are kept isolated from the main servers and application (where any security breach could take place).

In order to ensure the site remains as secure as possible, we also adhere to the following:

• Developers are subscribed to the Rails mailing list and stay abreast of security announcements
• We regularly update Rails and the software we use on our servers, so that we don't fall behind the main development cycle and potentially fall afoul of old security problems
• All new code is reviewed before being merged into our codebase, to help prevent us introducing security holes ourselves
• All our servers are behind firewalls
• All password data is encrypted

What you can do

The main purpose of this post is to let you know that security is a priority, and to give you a heads up that we may take the site down in an emergency situation. Because security problems tend to be discovered in batches, we anticipate that there is an increased risk of us needing to do this over the next month. In this case, we'll keep users informed on our AO3_Status Twitter, the OTW website and our other news outlets.

Overall site security is our responsibility and there is no immediate cause for concern. However, we recommend that you always use a unique username / password combination on each site you use. Using the same login details across many sites increases the chance that a security breach in one will give hackers access to your details on other sites (which may have more sensitive data).

We'd like to thank all the users who contacted us about the latest Rails issue. If you ever have questions or concerns, do contact Support.

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

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

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

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

Engagement With the AO3

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

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

Growth of the Site

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's the season of giving! So, we're pleased to announce that invitation requests are back on the AO3!

Once upon a time (i.e. six months ago), users with Archive accounts could request a few invitations to give out, allowing them to share the Archive with friends and help form communities of like-minded fans.

Unfortunately, earlier this year, as many of you may remember, the Archive was having serious performance issues (we saw the sad 502 page far too often). While our coders and systems team hurried to implement emergency fixes, it was decided that we needed stricter control of the number of accounts being created to reduce the likelihood of unexpected overload. (Generally, people browsing the site without being logged in put a certain amount of stress on the servers, but it's the account perks like bookmarking, subscribing, and accessing a full reading history that contribute to server load to a larger degree.) Back then only 100 invitations were issued to people in the queue each day, so additional user requests could have a serious impact! So, in June, the difficult decision was made to stop giving invitations to existing users. You can read more about what was going on then in our post, Update on AO3 performance issues.

Over the next five months our software upgrades and code improvements caught up with the demand. The queue rate was increased several times, most recently to 750 invitations per day. Given that, we've wanted to go back to giving out invitations to existing users, but there were a few issues to be resolved before we could start.

First, the request form had to be altered to set a maximum number of invitations that a user can request at once. Second, the 1,200 user requests that were in the list when it was shut down had to be addressed. Since we had no limits on how many invitations could be requested back then, we had quite a few requests for very large numbers. Due to limitations in the software, individually lowering those numbers now would require manually editing each request, as would granting only some of the requests at once rather than the whole list.

So, two decisions were made:

1) Everyone with a pending request will receive 1 invitation, just to clear out the backlog.

2) User requests are being re-opened! You can now request a maximum number of 10 invitations at one time. Even with this hard limit in place, we ask that everyone ask for only what they need at a time. Once we've hit the figurative switch and re-enabled this feature later today you will be able to request invitations from your Invite a friend page.

We very much appreciate all of our users, and we are proud of our growth this year, even through the bumpy times. We are glad that once again we can enable you to bring more people on board!

The Archive of Our Own will be undergoing some maintenance today at approximately 18.00 UTC (what time is this in my timezone?). During the maintenance period, which will last approximately two hours, downloads will not work. You will still be able to browse and read on the Archive, but will not be able to download any works. If the work proves complicated, we may also have a period of downtime (although we hope to avoid this).

What's going on?

In the next few weeks, we'll be adding some new servers to the OTW server family. The new servers will add some extra capacity to the Archive of Our Own, and will also create extra room for Fanlore, which is growing rapidly thanks to the amazing work of thousands of fannish editors (as Fanlore users are well aware, this expansion has been putting the existing Fanlore server under increasing strain).

In preparation for these new servers, we need to first reorganise the setup of the existing servers in order to free some more physical space at our colocation host without buying more rack space (rack space costs money, so it’s nice not to use more than we need). In order to do this, we’ll have to take some of the servers offline for a little while today. Doing this now will minimize the disruption caused when the servers arrive during the holiday period, which is typically one of the busiest times of year for the Archive.

The Archive is set up so it can function without all servers running at once, so today, we will only have to take the server which hosts downloads offline. This means that attempts to download any work will fail while we reorganize our data, though the rest of the site will work as usual (pending any unexpected problems). If you prefer to read downloaded works, you may wish to stock up now! Downloads will be restored as soon as we finish our maintenance. We’ll keep you posted about further maintenance when the new servers arrive!

Thanks for your patience while we do this work. You can keep track of current site status via our Twitter account AO3_Status.

Welcome to Release 0.9.4, the last code deploy before the holidays! These notes combine fixes that were deployed this weekend in two separate batches, resulting in two brief instances of downtime. Coders ecuoln, Elz, Sarken, and Scott contributed code to this release, which was tested by the small, but not any less awesome testing team consisting of Jenn, hele, Lady Oscar, and mumble.

This marks the 15th code update this year, including a breathless flurry of small releases in June to address various performance issues, and our humongous filter rewrite deployed in October. (You can see details about all previous code updates under our Release Notes tag.)

We think that is quite a lot of new code for a site maintained entirely by unpaid volunteers in their spare time (or, in some cases, while sneaking away to the dark recesses of their workplace's server room, armed only with their laptop - not naming names here to protect the gainfully employed). From the bottom of our collective heart, the Accessibility, Design, & Technology committee thanks everyone who submitted code or helped out with testing at any point during the year. The Archive literally could not exist without you.

This release sees a small number of bug fixes that we wanted to get out before the end of the year. Unless the site breaks in a show-stopping manner between now and January, we will resume active deploy work after the New Year's Eve celebrations. We're hoping to post an updated version of our quite outdated 2010 Roadmap very soon; it will give you a rough idea of what we'd like to accomplish in the foreseeable future and beyond. Watch this space!

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page for current issues.

Release Details

Bug fixes

• Replying to comments on a news post while logged in was temporarily broken and has been fixed now!
• Bookmarking a work by a still-anonymous creator would display as a "Mystery Work", hiding all information about the work; this has been fixed!
• Marking a comment on your work as spam, even by accident, would immediately send the comment into spam purgatory and make it invisible to everyone but admins; you are now asked if you're sure first to prevent accidents.
• Trying to view bookmarks for a non-existent or misspelled tag was resulting in an error 500; it now gives the more reasonable error 404.
• The "Share" code attached to each work, for easy copy-pasting of recs or update annoucements, included a link to the site's \o/-shaped favicon in front of the creator's username; this .ico file wasn't displaying properly in Tumblr and looked quite broken, so it has been removed from the work info for the time being.
• On the admin side, we added pagination to the list of invite requests by users (for handing out to friends etc.) for easier request management
• For wranglers, trying to reply to comments left on a tag would lead to an error 500; this has been fixed!
• To prepare for work on site translation (that is, enabling usage of the Archive in languages other than English), old and unneeded translation code was removed in the background.
• The bit of Javascript that rolls out a little calendar to pick start and end dates for your challenge more easily was embedded on all pages, wasting precious resources; it's now restricted to relevant challenge pages only.
• The Rich Text Editor plugin we use (TinyMCE) was trying to load a CSS file that didn't actually exist, resulting in numerous invisible errors; this line has now been removed.

The following is a post created by the Tag Wrangling Committee to address some ongoing questions and discussions involving tag wrangling on the Archive of Our Own.

The question has been raised in various places of how sustainable the Archive of Our Own’s tag wrangling system is, and whether it will continue to be viable as AO3 continues to grow and the number of fandoms and tags increases. The AO3 wrangling committee would like to address some of the concerns we’ve heard, from AO3 users as well as wranglers (including the staff).

In all honesty, it’s a fair question, and one without a clear or simple answer. The AO3 tag wrangling system is a special beastie, and because of its uniqueness, it is difficult to judge questions of long-term sustainability, since there is no real precedent to look to. But we have high hopes for it, which so far have been met or exceeded by our amazing team of wrangling volunteers.

To better understand our position, it may help to understand what makes the wrangling system special, and why it was implemented this way in the first place.

Why do AO3 tags work like they do?

The AO3 tag wrangling system was specifically designed as a compromise between the two standard tagging/organization models for online archives: a regulated taxonomy, versus a 'folksonomy'.

A regulated taxonomy – such as what's currently used on fanfiction.net – allows creators to tag their work with a limited number of pre-determined options (such as genre or characters). This system is very good for keeping things ordered and preventing misspellings and otherwise inconsistent labeling. However, it also requires constant maintenance to add new tags as new fandoms arise, and greatly restricts what users can label or sort by. The latter condition can be especially problematic if data is not kept up-to-date. (For instance, on ff.net many fandoms have no character lists, and other fandoms don't include all characters, especially those recently introduced.)

A "folksonomy" - the tagging system used on most social bookmarking sites and Tumblr - allows users to tag their content with any tag of their choosing, and users can see all works using any given tag. This system has the advantage of flexibility and currentness - its tags are always up-to-date with user preferences - but can make browsing difficult. (For example: on Tumblr, if you want to see most posts about kid!Loki, you also have to look up "kid loki" and "bb!Loki" and will still miss the posts tagged "bbloki.)

When designing the tag system on AO3, both of these systems were considered. But both have significant drawbacks in meeting the demands of both creators and browsers of a growing multi-fandom archive.

Options & drawbacks

User tagging could be limited to only approved tags. This then puts the burden on the users to specifically request new tags to be added; it also requires wranglers to work quickly to make tags available as needed. For active fandoms like Homestuck that see on order of five new relationships a day, these requests could quickly become overwhelming. To keep up with such demand, we would need a ridiculous number of volunteers, and/or a way to prioritize requests, limiting new tag creation to the most popular fandoms/most requested tags. Assuming users could post works without tags, many people wouldn't bother tagging their works at all if the tag they wanted wasn't available and they didn't have time to submit it. Works would also be left without tags if a user did submit the request, but failed to go back to add it to their old works when the tag was finally entered in the system.

To get around this last issue, we could regulate the tags – a user could enter any tag they like, but it must be approved before appearing on AO3. In that case, wranglers become the inadvertent gatekeepers of fandom, deciding what tags are or are not shown to users. Is "Feels" worthy of being displayed? What about "Wingfic"? Maybe we don't want to allow "Incest" or "BDSM" - we're not that kind of archive (obviously we totally are, but you get the idea!) And there would still be a period of time when the tags wouldn't be visible or useful, so an enormous team of volunteers would still be required to overview the tags in a timely fashion.

Another option is to let users enter whatever they like and display all those tags, but moderate them by telling people how we want them to tag, and removing all the tags that don't fit, or requiring users to change them. Again, the burden on the moderators would be considerable, having to monitor the over half-million works on the AO3. It would also be difficult to justify regulating tags when the spelling, grammar, and format of posted works are not likewise moderated (and to do so would require modifying AO3's Terms of Service).

Otherwise we could take the opposite tack and not organize tags at all: allow users to enter any tags they like, display and filter by all these tags, and let people who want to read John Watson/Sherlock Holmes search for "John/Sherlock" and "sh/jw" and "Johnlock" and any other permutations they can think of. But this method becomes frustrating for browsing users who don't know or don't remember all the permutations. It's also a burden on creators who want their work to be found by as many people as possible, but have the same issue of not knowing or remembering the many variant names for the same concept. (It's worth noting that this is not an unviable system - Tumblr, Pinboard, Pixiv, and many other sites use similar systems; and AO3 could switch over to it with relatively little tweaking, if necessary.)

Or we could let users enter whatever tags they like, and display all those tags however the creator or bookmarker wants to display them. Then, behind the scenes, volunteers can organize and link tags together so the most commonly used and useful-for-browsing concepts are more readily available to the largest number of people – both creators and audience – with the smallest amount of required effort. This is how the AO3 tag wrangling system works.

But is this system sustainable?

It's impossible to be sure, but after observing wrangling on the beta archive over the last four years, the tag wrangling committee believes that yes, the AO3 tag wrangling system is sustainable in the long-term. To begin with, our volunteer pool is currently as large as it’s ever been (at close to 160 wranglers), and keeping more than level. When recruiting is open, we average more people volunteering than retiring, and get a surge with most donation drives as well. The AO3's expansion this year does mean there are more tags than ever, but it also means there are more fans willing to offer their time to keep those tags in order. And the fandoms with the most activity are also those with the most fans, so it's more likely for us to be able to find wranglers for them.

Additionally, archive growth doesn't correspond directly to an increase in tag wrangling work. The vast majority of new works posted on AO3 fall into two categories: very small fandoms – under 20 works – that require occasional wrangling rather than ongoing maintenance; or very large fandoms, which often are the best-wrangled, because we have lots of wrangling volunteers familiar with them! Looking at fanfiction.net, half the available fandoms there are under the 20-work threshold; and on the Archive, while there are currently close to 5000 fandoms without an assigned wrangler, fewer than 300 of these have more than 20 works.

Even large fandoms may not produce many new tags. A popular fandom with a small core cast of characters may get 100 new works posted a day, but only one new relationship tag, because all the other works used existing tags. Fandoms from 'closed' canons (canceled shows, etc.) tend not to get many new tags because they aren’t introducing new characters. And many fandoms share tags – see the X-men metatag, which has 13 different sub-fandoms, but a number of the characters and relationships among these overlap and only need to be wrangled once for all the fandoms.

What if wrangling isn't viable in the long-term?

It is undeniable that as AO3 grows, wrangling becomes an increasingly greater task. We don’t believe it’s insurmountable, however. Nor do we believe that there is any real danger of the tag system collapsing entirely.

AO3 tag wrangling is designed to assist and facilitate users in labeling and finding works, but for the most part it is not crucial for these purposes. Many aspects of AO3 tags are still functional without any wrangling at all. An unwrangled AO3 tag acts like a Tumblr or Pinboard tag, showing all works and bookmarks using that tag. AO3 search brings up results both for wrangled tags and the text of unwrangled tags, and unwrangled tags can likewise be used in the new filters.

In other words, if all wranglers quit and all wrangling on AO3 stopped this instant, existing tags would continue to work as they do now, preserving the work wranglers had done up until this point; and all new tags on AO3 would still be as useful as tags on Tumblr or LiveJournal or any other service with flat tags. The filters of older but growing fandoms would be sparse, new fandoms would lack filters and only appear in the "Uncategorized" section, and a user would have to look for "Fullmetal Alchemist", "Full Metal Alchemist", and "Hagaren" separately to find all works; but the basic functionality of calling up all works with a tag would remain.

Obviously an end to all wrangling is the worst-case scenario and not one we expect to pass. The greater concern is that the wrangling committee and volunteers will keep working, but the bulk of the work will become too great for us to keep up with. The current wrangling system is definitely not perfect, and one of the wrangling committee’s primary goals is to look for ways to improve it and make it more sustainable.

So what does the future of AO3 tags look like?

The wrangling committee is working to improve the tag and wrangling experience both on the front-end (for users) and the back-end (for wranglers). On both sides, the two aspects of tags we're most concerned with at the moment are internationality and additional tags.

Currently, AO3 wrangling primarily deals with English-language/Roman alphabet tags. To be a more useful archive for fans around the world, we are developing better methods of sorting and linking tags across languages. We want to display tags of all languages in the appropriate filters and the auto-complete, while preserving the links between tags with the same meanings. We also need to develop better guidelines for non-English-language tags.

Our second focus is on the issue of Additional Tags (or "Freeforms", as wranglers know them). Presently we are seeing several hundred new additional tags on works and bookmarks added to AO3 daily.

It's important to note that these tags do not interfere with the wrangling of non-freeform tags. AO3 is designed to handle tags of different categories such that wranglers can view fandom, character, and relationship tags separately from freeforms; and the former get priority. Wranglers can also sort tags by number of uses, to easily see which freeforms are popular enough to warrant making them canonical. The majority of new freeforms are not made canonical and never will be; they are single-use, notes-style tags that only require being checked off a list by a single wrangler. This process is not as streamlined as it could be, and one of our top priorities for the back-end is features to simplify it.

On the front-end, we're looking into ways for users to limit the display of freeforms, such as by making the view of single-use freeforms optional. At this point we have no plans to limit what tags users are allowed to put on their works, beyond what is mandated by the AO3 Terms of Service; but we want to give users better ways to view the particular tags they're interested in. (If you are looking for ways to limit them now, you may find the skins linked in this post helpful.)

Users & wranglers unite!

As well as improving the efficiency of the wrangling interface to make it easier for wranglers to do our job, we believe that a major way to keep wrangling sustainable is to employ the help of all users to keep tags in line. To that end, we’re seeking to open up aspects of the wrangler interface to regular users. We've already made wrangling connections visible to all users on AO3, and publicly posted our wrangling guidelines to explain what tags we make canonical. We also would like to find better ways for users to contact us – any message sent to Support concerning tags or wrangling is already forwarded to us, and we respond to messages on our Wrangler Twitter as well, but we hope to have more direct lines of communication. This might include allowing users to leave notes on individual tags, or other methods to call attention to specific problems.

Now that bookmarks are filterable, it's possible for users to filter for tags other than those the creators put on their works, allowing users to label and categorize works even if the creators don't opt to. We’re also considering giving all users limited wrangling capabilities, such as sorting tags into fandoms, making synonyms to existing canonical tags, or suggesting new canonical tags following the guidelines for wranglers to approve. Such features would require moderation from wranglers, but would take some of the burden off us (as well as potentially encouraging more users to volunteer for wrangling.)

So when will this happen?

Most of these improvements require new features to be coded. This requires the attention of the AD&T committee’s diligent coding and testing volunteers, and must be prioritized against the hundreds of other features and bug-fixes also in demand. It is also contingent on having available coders and testers - the wrangling code is some of the more complex on AO3, so relatively few coders have the skills and experience to make significant changes to it. So it may be some time before changes appear on the beta archive; but new tag features are under development now.

In the meantime, the wrangling committee relies on all its awesome wrangling volunteers to keep up with the tag load! Thus far they have been more than up to the task, and we are confident that with improvements, the wrangling system will remain functional for both wranglers and users as the AO3 continues to expand in the years to come.

The following is a post created by a member of the Tag Wrangling Committee to address some ongoing questions and discussions involving freeform tags on the Archive of Our Own.

So.

Let's talk about those Additional Tags.

More specifically, let's talk about the long-form descriptive tags that are frequently being placed in the Additional Tags field. I want to get some facts on the table so our users - both consumers and creators - can have this important discussion properly. Any numbers cited are as of 0100UTC, 27 Oct 2012.

Full disclosure: Hi, I'm Sam J. I am a Wrangling staffer, a Wrangling volunteer, a Support staffer, and an Archive user. I have four horses in this race and, frankly, they're running in at least two different directions, leaving me with a varying opinion of these tags depending on when you ask me.

• At last count, there were around 160 Tag Wrangling Volunteers. There are 10,232 Fandoms on the Archive. Of those, roughly 5,300 do not have a wrangler listed, so they are not tightly monitored. Many of these unwatched fandoms are occasionally wrangled by volunteer teams, or are metatags containing fandoms that are tightly wrangled.
  
• As per the precedent established in the AO3 Terms of Service, we consider the tags on a work to be part of the content of that work. As such, the Tag Wranglers do not—and cannot—change, add, or remove tags from a creator's work. Any such changes to tags have to be initiated by Abuse, who only act in cases of tags that are against policy and are handled according to their protocols and the Terms of Service.
  
• In recent months, the Archive's seen an overall increase in the number of Additional Tags on works. From last October to November, the number of Additional Tags on the Archive increased by 2,535, while the number of total works increased by 7,046. From this September to this October, that number has increased by 12,920 while the number of total works has increased by 22,936. Neither increase is linear - the works-per-month growth has been roughly stable since April, and the Additional Tag growth has been consistent, plus or minus 10%, since July.
  
• The rate of growth for canonical Additionals over the last year has remained fairly consistent, gaining a average of 220 a month. (Four months were aberrations: March increased by 388; May, 296; March, 288; and September, 147.)
  
• The Additional Tags were not responsible for the Death of the Filters. The sheer number of works on the Archive are what stressed the old code, and the sudden spike in readers/viewers starting in May pushed it past its capacity to fulfill requests. Because the filters pulled and displayed the canonical forms of tags, there were often far fewer Additional Tags listed than in the actual search results.
  
• Non-canonical tags with only a few uses put almost no strain on the servers. It's the popular canonical tags and metatags that put the most strain on the servers.
  
• Additional Tags are not distributed evenly throughout the fandoms—the massive increases in Additional Tags are concentrated in a limited number of fandoms. Even fandoms of similar sizes can have wildly divergent Tags/Works ratios. Drawing from random fandoms:

  Fandom Tag	Works using Fandom Tag	All Additional Tags*	Additional Tags per 1000 Works	Canonical Additional Tags	Canonical Additional Tags per 1000 Works
  Buffy the Vampire Slayer	10847	692	63.80	184	16.96
  Cats - Andrew Lloyd Webber	37	4	108.11	0	0
  Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling	19422	2391	123.11	344	17.71
  Hockey RPF	1381	179	129.62	82	59.38
  Homestuck	9990	2475	247.75	97	9.71
  Inception (2010)	3796	300	79.03	19	5.01
  Marvel Avengers Movies Universe	16442	3164	192.42	166	10.10
  Naruto	3167	281	88.73	19	6.00
  Sanctuary (TV)	1359	117	86.16	53	39.03
  Sherlock (TV)	18300	3981	217.54	60	3.28
  Xena: Warrior Princess	293	16	54.61	4	13.65

  *NB: These numbers do not include Additional Tags already wrangled into "No Fandom", as the system does not have a way to generate those numbers. However, the number of "No Fandom" tags tends to be proportional to the fandom-specific Additional Tags.
• When users create new tags (be they Fandom, Character, Relationship, or Additional/Freeform), they automatically:
  • will not show up on that fandom's Show Tag page;
  • will not show in the Filter sidebar of Works pages (exception: your personal bookmark tags will show in your personal bookmarks filter), though they can be filtered on, to an extent;
  • will not show up in auto-complete fields.
  A wrangler has to manually add Fandom links (or toss the tag into No Fandom) by typing in the Fandom name(s), and/or mark it as Canonical (allows the tag to appear in the auto-complete and be filterable by anyone) via a checkbox. The Wrangling interface does allow for mass-wrangling tags into a fandom and mass-marking them as canonical. The guidelines for Additional Tags are very selective as to what should or should not be marked as canonical.
• Users can search for works using unwrangled Additional Tags by either clicking on the tag where it appears or by using the Works Search. (The Works Search uses a string search for the text of the tag, in addition to searching via wrangled tags.)
• Logged-in users have the options of a few skins that affect how Additional Tags display in search lists. This skin shortens the Additional Tags to around 15 characters. This one puts all tag fields over a certain length into a scrollbox so they take up less room on the works pages, and this one hides the appearance of Additional Tags in search lists completely. If you do not yet have an AO3 account, the CSS listed in these skins can also be used in third-party site scripting tools, such as Stylish. Additionally, a logged-in user has the option to go to their Preferences and activate "Hide additional tags". This turns the entire content of the "Additional Tags" field to a "Show Additional Tags" link. Currently, both of these options are primarily available to logged-in users and do not apply to email subscriptions or tag ATOM Feeds.
• Wranglers and Coders alike have been considering ways to additionally mark these tags in the front-end code, so that via a site skin, a third-party plugin, or another method, a user can have more fine-grained control over tag viewing when browsing. (Any coding solution will, almost by definition, require more data pulled from the servers, so there's a lot of evaluation before we push any buttons.)
• The wrangling interface does need some improvements. (Depending on who you ask, a lot of improvements.) We are working on them, but our coders' time is a limited resource. As well, we have wranglers on as many browser and OS combinations as our users in general, so it takes significant testing to make sure the interface doesn't degrade for anyone, which is time-consuming.

There will be a second post tomorrow stating the Tag Wrangling Staff's official point of view on the sustainability of the current Wrangling system. If there's something you have a particular question about, leave a comment and we'll try to get an answer for you!

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

Cool stuff on the Archive

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

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

Your Archive needs you!

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

Bugs we’ve squashed

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

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

What’s up in the world of tags?

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

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

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

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

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

Adventures with Support

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

AD&T Committee business of note

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

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

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

Tag Wrangling Committee business of note

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

Questions? Comments?

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

While we were happy to get out the last release in time for gift exchange season, there were a few bugs in the code that we didn't detect in our testing environment. This release fixes them.

Systems maintenance - new servers coming soon!

The AO3 and its sister projects keep on growing! Happily, this growth is supported by the generosity of our users - the OTW's last membership drive raised more than US$18,000! Thanks to your support, we're able to expand our server setup further: we'll shortly be adding three more servers to our server family. These will give us more power to run the AO3 and add more space for our databases, while freeing up one of our older AO3 servers for Fanlore (which is also growing, but doesn't need quite as much muscle as the AO3).

Bumps in the road

Our Systems team are currently getting everything set up and ready for the new servers. This involves some maintenance on the existing servers, including some revisions to our deploy script - which is actually a sizable *collection* of scripts, weaving together several bits of backend magic that tell the servers new code has arrived and we need them to update some stuff. Unfortunately, there were some unforseen problems with these changes which caused the deploy script to fail when we tried to update the site last Thursday. Consequently, the code update had to be rolled back, and some caching had to be temporarily disabled. The dates on works suddenly displayed as "2 days ago" instead of "6 Dec 2012" and the servers seemed a bit unhappy for a while there.

After several hours of code prodding and server wrangling, a second deploy attempt later on Thursday was successfully completed. Many thanks to Elz, James_, and Naomi for their tireless work, and to Jenn and Lady Oscar especially for a whole lot of testing! However, the aforementioned bugs now reared their ugly heads, and an emergency deploy (now without any major hiccups!) happened late Friday night in the US, or very early morning for the unfortunate Systems monkey in the UK.

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page for a full list of current issues.

Release Details

Bug fixes

• The search index for bookmarks was being updated everytime a bookmarked work got a hit or had some kudos added. This was both an incredible strain on the server and completely unnecessary, so now it's not happening anymore.
• When a logged-out user left a reply comment, the notification email wasn't going out due to a slight code mishap. This was fixed almost immedately after the deploy, this deploy just makes the fix permanent.
• Trying to reply to the aforementioned comments from the inbox wasn't working either; it does now.
• A fix in the previous deploy was messing up paginated pages of works, and was also generating pages that weren't different for logged-in users and guests; this has now been fixed.
• Individually revealing/de-anoning works in an unrevealed/anonymous collection wasn't working; it does now.
• Works and bookmarks were appearing on a moderated collection's list of works or bookmarks even before being accepted by a moderator; this has been fixed.

Welcome to Release 0.9.3. Ariana, Elz, Enigel, look_closer, Naomi, Sarken, Scott and Tegan contributed code to this release, which was tested by our awesome testing team: Alison, Emilie, Hele, Jenn Calaelen, Lady Oscar, mumble, Naomi, Sarken, and Scott.

In this code release, we focused on squashing bugs in our collection and challenge code, and we're proud to close over 50 issues as "done!" in our bug tracker this soon after our big tag filter deploy. Unfortunately, we had to iron out some major bumps in the tag wrangling code as well, forcing us to disable wrangling while working on the fix. Wrangling is now back, with apologies to the wranglers for leaving them with the backlog!

Huge thanks to the testing team, to the wranglers for their patience, and to coder Scott for contributing a whopping 25 fixes to the grand total. As always, much more work needs to be done while we're still in beta, and we thank all our users for sticking with us during this journey.

As part of this deploy, we also made some changes to our server setup. We're still ironing out a few glitches which happened in relation to this, and we had a little more downtime than we expected. Big thanks to James_ for his hard work on this Systems maintenance, and thanks to our users for their patience.

Highlights!

Anonymously commenting on your own anonymous work

Just in time for several gift exchange deadlines, we've introduced a small enhancement that will allow you to respond to feedback once works have been posted, but before authors are officially revealed. This applies to any of your works in a collection (or challenge) that has been set to Anonymous by the collection owner: When you reply to a comment, your name in the thread and any outgoing comment notifications will be masked as "Anonymous Creator", and will be automatically switched to your username once authors are revealed. \o/

Fixes to the search and filter functionality

While it was previously possible to put something like "words: 100" into the main search box (finding only drabbles in any fandom), the recent filter deploy did not include that functionality. Yet! The search code has been adjusted and sorting options have been added to make the following possible:

words:1000, words=1000, words>1000, words<1000
- To find works with exactly 1000 words, more than 1000 words, or less than 1000 words. Replace "words" with "hits", "kudos", "comments", or "bookmarks" to search for those instead.

sort:kudos, sort=kudos, sort<kudos, sort>kudos
- To sort search results by the number of kudos a work has. The default order here is descending ( to reverse that order to ascending. You can replace "kudos" with "author", "title", "hits", "comments", "bookmarks", etc. to sort by those.

Furthermore, you don't have to enclose f/f in quote marks anymore when searching for femslash (or when searching for M/M or F/M works) - just add f/f to your other search terms, if any, and you're done.

Fixes and improvements to search results

When the wranglers make changes to tags or their relationships, our search engine needs to be told to reindex (that is, re-check) the works and bookmarks under those tags, so that search and browse results will continue to list the right works. This wasn't happening properly with all subtagged works in the previous deploy, so as a result we had to turn wrangling off until we could fix it. Works and bookmarks will now be properly reindexed in response to tag wrangling changes, so the wrangling can recommence!

In addition, sorting by hit count was going out of order because the search engine was not being told to reindex works when they got new hits, only when they got new kudos/comments/bookmarks. We can't reindex after every hit for performance reasons, but we will now reindex every ten minutes, which should keep the hit counts from going out of date.

Sometimes, when sorting lists of works, you may find that some works seem to be out of order. For example, you might sort by number of kudos and find that a work with 2 kudos shows up above one with 6. Fear not, your sort order is right! It's just that we cache some bits of the views, so sometimes you see an old count displayed on the work list. This is a bit confusing, but it does help site performance.

Known Issues

In order to address a bug which emerged during this deploy, we had to disable part of our caching which relates to the way dates are displayed in works lists. This means that where it used to show the exact date a work was posted, it currently just says a timeframe such as 'one day ago'. This is temporary - we already have a fix for the underlying problem and just need to test and deploy it. Please bear with us in the meantime!

See our Known Issues page for a full list of current issues.

Release Details

Features

• When replying to comments on your work while it's in an anonymous collection, your name will be masked as "Anonymous Creator", to be revealed once the work is revealed.
• Collection owners will now be notified via email when a new work is added to their collection. This email is sent to the address entered on the 'Collection Settings' page (which needs to be present), making it possible to use a shared email address among challenge moderators, instead of just the owner's account address.
• When users are 'Posting to Fulfill' on a Prompt Meme challenge, the prompt which is being filled is now automatically inserted into the 'Notes' section of the posting form. The section is automatically ticked and expanded so users can see the prompt and remove it if they wish.

Bug fixes

• Collections
  • Users trying to add a work or bookmark to a moderated collection are now notified when posting that their work or bookmark will not show up until it has been approved by a collection maintainer.
  • Owners and moderators of collections now have the ability to post to the collection even if the collection is set to closed.
  • There was an issue with work data not being updated properly if the work was taken out of a collection, e.g. a work that had been removed from an anonymous collection would still remain anonymous; this has been fixed.
  • A collection's work count was including 'locked' works for non-Archive members as well, causing a discrepancy between the number count shown and the actual number of works listed. This has been fixed to only count publicly visible works when a site user is not logged in.
  • A collection's bookmark count was counting private, and thus invisible, bookmarks. The count has now been fixed to exclude these.
  • A user's work count was including works that were in a hidden challenge, causing a discrepancy between counted and actually shown works. Works are now only counted if they are revealed.
  • Remixes and translations of unrevealed works were showing the name of the inspiring (unrevealed) work instead of the inspired work, breaking the unrevealed status of the inspiring work; that logic has been reversed and work titles are now shown as expected.
  • Commas used in a collection's 'Display Title' were causing internal code errors. An error message is now generated when attempting to use a comma in this field.
  • Previously only collections which a user owned showed up on the user's 'My Collections' page. This page now includes collections which the user maintains (e.g. helps moderate) as well.
  • The placement of the "Update" and "Delete Collection" buttons (as well as a useless "Back" button) on a collection's settings page was confusing and inconsistent with the rest of the site; this has been rectified.
  • Work blurbs on the 'Collection Items' page were confusing. They have been reformatted to easily show the most important information about a particular work.
  • The "You can also individually Manage Items" text and button were formatted oddly on the 'Edit Collection' page; this has been fixed.

• Challenges
  • Challenges which were closed were wrongly appearing on the Open Challenges page, and generally the page wasn't as useful as we intended it to be. Bugs have now been squashed and sub-pages for Gift Exchanges and Prompt Memes (respectively) have been added. Closing sign-ups or changing the sign-up deadline to a past date removes a challenge from the relevant list.
  • There was some inconsistency in navigation buttons displayed in the information blurb for collections and challenges (such as on the main Collections index), leading to empty button code; this has been adjusted to always show Join/Leave and Sign Up/Edit Sign-up/Cancel Sign-up options as appropriate.
  • After a gift exchange owner had generated potential matches for participants, the (possible) assignments were already showing up as options when participants went to post a new work; this has been fixed to only display assignments in the posting form once finalized and sent out.
  • When defaulting on a challenge assignment, the assignment would be updated accordingly in one own's assignments, but still be available for defaulting and fulfilling on the collection's page; this has been adjusted.
  • When fulfilling an assignment and then deleting the work (e.g. in a blind panic five minutes before the challenge deadline), the assignment would vanish as well. It now reappears to be fulfilled again.
  • The 'Post to Fulfill' button was showing up even on challenges that were no longer accepting submissions. This button is now visible only if the challenge is open.
  • Users attempting to use non-canonical tags in a challenge signup were given an unhelpful error message. Users are now directed to contact the challenge maintainers (who can contact Support to fix the issue if necessary).
  • In challenges using tag sets for sign-ups, tags weren't properly displaying in autocomplete fields if they had been marked as canonical before being linked to other tags (e.g. characters to their fandoms) by a wrangler; this has been fixed.
  • The 'Categories' field on a Gift Exchange signup was not clear about asking for types of relationships (M/M, F/M, etc). A help popup has been added to alleviate confusion.
  • When users attempted to view a restricted work from a collection's "static" page (a feature created to reduce server load during busy challenge times), they were receiving a 404 error message; this has been fixed.
  • Gift notification emails (such as sent out in a gift exchange challenge) were linking to a work's general URL instead of the work's URL inside the collection; this has been fixed.
  • After the creation of either a Prompt Meme or a Gift Exchange the user was taken to two different places depending on the type of challenge created (collection dashboard or collection profile). Now the landing page for both challenge types is the collection's profile page.
  • Prompt Meme request forms were asking for tags called "Freeforms", which are called "Additional Tags" elsewhere; we changed the code to make it easier to adjust the name everywhere and now they're called Additional Tags here as well.
  • A bug was allowing the 'Allowed Prompts' on a Prompt Meme to be set to zero, causing some logic problems. It now requires at least one (1) prompt for sign-ups to work.
  • Prompt Meme request submissions were allowing an unlimited number of characters in the 'Prompt Description' field, but cutting off after a certain number without warning. This has been resolved and descriptions are now limited to five thousand (5,000) characters.
  • In the work 'Notes' section, the link to a prompt that was filled led to a page not viewable by non-collection members. The notes now link to the user and the challenge that the prompt fill was for.
  • Challenge maintainers cannot edit prompts submitted to their challenge, yet the button to do so was displayed for them. The button has now been removed to properly reflect options available to Prompt Meme maintainers.
  • The title text for the "Choose Not To Use Archive Warnings" icon in a work's blurb was broken when no warning had been selected in a prompt meme request; this has been fixed to display the "Choose Not To Use Archive Warnings" instead.
  • In the challenges area, our front end code was hard to read for coders and some of the user-facing text was inconsistent. Now it's pretty and consistent, and also better prepared for eventual interface translation.
  • The buttons to manage assignments on the 'My Assignments' page were ordered as "Default" first, then "Fulfill"; this was different from the order of "Post" and "Cancel" buttons elsewhere on the site and was reversed.
  • On the challenge settings page, there was a white margin underneath the footer that has now been eliminated.
  • On the same page, the date picker pop-up helping you enter start and end dates for your challenge was prettied up and misaligned buttons were aligned properly.
  • The challenge signup summary page is now presented as a table for easier readability.
  • In Internet Explorer 9, the 'Update' button on the challenge's settings page was covered and unclickable; this has been fixed.

• Searching & Browsing
  • Way back when we deployed the filters, filtering was broken on user works pages. We did the fix live, which means it didn't get added to our code base. Now it's in there and will not re-break when we deploy new code.
  • We also fixed a search indexing problem way in the backend that affected some bookmarks.
  • Some bugs in our code prevented work listings to update properly when tags or tag relationships were changed by the wranglers; this has been fixed.
  • Sorting by hit count was giving wonky results due to the way the numbers were updated for each work; the new code should show works in a more proper order.
  • Orphaned and deleted works were lingering in work lists due to faulty caching; this has been fixed.
  • Using the main search bar, or the "Search within results" box in the filter sidebar, you couldn't do any numerical searches (such as works with a certain word count, or a certain number of kudos); this has been fixed.
  • However, the main search field in the header was turning the > and < symbols into their HTML counterparts - &gt; and &lt; - making some numerical searches impossible; this has also been fixed.
  • After the last deploy, the search hints that pop up when hovering over the main search field in the header were partly outdated; this has been fixed. Examples include: katekyou "alternate universe" sort:>words to find AU works in the Katekyou Hitman Reborn! fandom, shortest works first; and arthur merlin words>1000 sort:hits to find works of over 1000 words that have both Merlin and Arthur (not necessarily paired up), works with the most hits on top.
  • A tiny typo in the filter help text has been fixed.

• Misc.
  • An option was added that allows admins to temporarily turn off the "Request more invites" form for users, e.g. to control growth during times of heavy server load.
  • Our error 502 page (indicating heavy server load) was still displaying information about performance problems from back in May; this has now been removed.
  • When looking for works for a non-existent tag, a worrying number of error 500 bombs would go off in the background. It now produces a simple and much more appropriate error 404 page.
  • On mobile browsers, the bookmark index pages had a large right margin due to a display bug; this has been fixed.

The Content Policy workgroup is presenting a set of proposed changes to the Archive of Our Own’s Terms of Service and Frequently Asked Questions. These are largely clarifications and changes made to deal with functionality as the Archive has developed. This post marks the start of a two-week public comment period. The Content Policy group will track any comments or questions made here and will then evaluate if further revisions need to be made.

The content change files are available in either a FAQ revision PDF and and ToS revision PDF or a FAQ revision doc file and ToS revision doc file format and will show proposed changes to the language at different points in the document.

The proposed changes do not include any discussion of meta, which is still under review by the Board. This document is mostly a matter of language cleanup and putting the answers to some common Support questions in the AO3’s FAQ.

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

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

Some guidelines, just to keep things running smoothly

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

As Support, our function is to help users with bugs and issues, and pass reports on to our Coders and Systems team, who actually keep the place running. This means that policy questions are way over our pay grade. (Just kidding--none of us get paid!) So, if you have questions or comments about AO3 or OTW policies, good or bad, Support Chat isn't the right place for them. If you do want to talk to someone about policy issues (meta on the Archive, philosophical issues with the tagging system, category change, etc.) we can direct you to the appropriate admin post or contact address so you can leave feedback directly for the people dealing with the area of your concern.

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

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

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

For example, you might have been wondering:

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

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

In conclusion....

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

ETA: Support Live Chat is now over - thanks all!

Welcome to Release 0.9.1, Part 2: The Filtering; also known as Release 0.9.2 to its friends. Some context for this deploy can be found in our post, Release 0.9.1: An Unexpected Journey.

This code update contains a massive amount of changes, improvements, fixes and happiness, almost all provided by one of our most senior coders, Elz, who now gets to nap for a week. Elz has worked tirelessly over the past months to re-write the tag filtering code from scratch and implement a host of related improvements. Leading a revision like this is an enormous task for a fan with a day job, and while we are aware that users were missing the filters dearly and the planned release date had to be moved quite a few times, we hope all the awesome will more than make up for it!

Elz, mumble, Lucy, Sarken, and Scott all contributed code to this release. It was tested by Alison W, Ariana, bingeling, briar_pipe, Emilie, Fishie Mishie, Hele, Hill, Irene U, Jenn Calaelen, Kylie, Lady Oscar, Lucy, mumble, Radka, Sam, Scott, and supergreak. In addition, lots of other OTW volunteers and members of the Yuletide community pitched in to help with the final testing of the filters - not everyone left their name along with their comments, but everyone's contribution was greatly valued. Feedback from this wider stage of testing will also be used to inform further revisions of the filters: we got lots of good suggestions, but decided to limit the number of enhancements at this stage in order to avoid delaying the main functionality.

Thanks to all our users for your patience while we worked on this - we hope you'll join us in a big THANK YOU to Elz! Our Systems lead James also deserves a special shout-out for his dedicated work and advice: the changes we've made required some major systems-related work. Thanks also to the very many other people who worked on this deploy: testing code, providing advice and support on specific coding challenges, implementing the necessary database changes, and doing all the other tasks that make a change like this possible. <333

Highlights!

New tag filters \0/

TAG FILTERS ARE HERE!!!!

Yes, this release sees the return of the much-missed tag filters, in a new, improved form. Our search and browse functions are now built on Elasticsearch, a far more flexible search engine which uses Solr to perform searches without accessing the database every time. This means that the new filters are MUCH more lightweight than the old ones and won't make such heavy performance demands. HURRAY!

We've written a handy guide to searching and browsing under the new system which walks you through all the details of the new filters. The new filters restore all the functionality of the old ones, with a few extra features. You can now:

• Sort by number of kudos, comments, or number of bookmarks received! We received lots and lots of requests for this option, so we're very pleased to have been able to implement it.
• Search within your results and exclude certain tags! The new search box which has been added to filters allows you to narrow down the results of your search even further - see our post on searching and browsing for more details on how it works. It isn't quite the "NOT this" filtering option that users have asked for in the past (that was beyond the scope of this deploy), but it provides at least some of the same functionality.

Bookmark filtering! \o/

A great side effect of rewriting the work filters was that we were able to apply the new filters to bookmarks as well: you can filter all bookmarks for any canonical tag (fandom, relationship, widely used additional tag, etc.) just as you would works, with a few differences. The sorting options are Date Bookmarked (fresh bookmarks, regardless of when the work was posted) or Date Updated (bookmarks of fresh works, including WIPs that recently had chapters added), and you can choose to only display bookmarks marked as a rec, or only bookmarks with some notes added by the bookmarker.

Oh, and we added filtering options to personal bookmarks while we were at it. That's right, one of the most requested features made it into this deploy as well. Users have saved over 1.3 million bookmarks so far, and we're happy to make it easier for you to browse, find and organize them. They have all the features of the work filters, and sorting by Date Updated will show you at a glance which of your bookmarked works has new chapters waiting for you!

New search forms for works and bookmarks

Our Advanced Search form (or simply, Work Search) has been thoroughly redesigned to give our users a more intuitive access to the powerful search feature which we've been offering all along.

All fields in the tags chunk were previously smushed into one "Tags" search field, encompassing everything from fandom to warnings. Naturally, this wasn't obvious from a look at the search form and left many users unsatisfied. The field has now been broken down into options for each kind of tag, making it much easier to see how to search for specific things. The whole form has been reorganised, with similar types of information grouped together, to make it much easier to use. We've also added sorting options for search results. See our guide to searching and browsing for some more tips on how to use it!

New works and bookmarks index pages

The main /works and /bookmarks listings will now only display the 25 most recent works or bookmarks. This lets users have a snapshot of the very latest activity on the Archive, without causing performance problems or being impossible to navigate.

If you're searching for things to read, watch, look at, or listen to, we recommend starting on the main fandoms index or a particular fandom page and working your way down the rabbit hole from there. Tag and author pages will still show all works and provide filtering options. (Hey, remember the 1000 works limit of yore? Gone forever!)

In general, we'd like to move away from listing ALL the data and focus instead on giving users tools to find the things they're looking for. For those who like to browse without any particular goal in mind, we are working on ways to access, for example, new or popular works or hidden gems, and explore the Archive in more interesting ways than a main index of unsorted data. We stopped listing every single Archive member on our /people page when we found that it needlessly added to our performance problems, and we'd like to continue in this vein going forward. Please bear with us while we work on browsing improvements and slowly phase out the main index pages in their current form.

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page for current issues.

Release Details

Features

• New and improved filtering features for works and bookmarks
• New and improved search forms for works and bookmarks
• Personal bookmark filtering
• A dedicated page for a user's works in collections and challenges, including unrevealed and anonymous ones, for at-a-glance management and editing access, to be found at archiveofourown.org/users/YOURUSERNAME/works/collected
• To legally host a fanmix on the AO3, you can now embed playlists you have created on 8tracks or Spotify (taking care to follow their own TOS when you do so)

Bug fixes

• Bookmarks & Works
  • When looking at bookmarks for a metatag (such as Star Trek), only bookmarks with that exact tag would be listed (when it should pull up bookmarks for all its subtags as well); this has been fixed
  • Conversely, bookmarks would sometimes show up on fandom tag pages they didn't belong on; this has also been fixed
  • In the Share box for quickly copy-pasting work info, the Twitter button was slightly broken and didn't fill in title and author anymore when creating a new tweet; this has been fixed
  • The text in the Rich Text Editor was teensy-tiny thanks to the default size in TinyMCE's stylesheet; this should be fixed now
  • Links to the Tags on the Archive FAQ have been added to the help text that pops up for the different tag types (Fandom, Relationship, Additional Tags, etc.) on the "Post New" page

• Filters & Search
  • Admins are now able to temporarily turn filtering off for works and bookmarks index pages, meaning the index pages for users, tags, collections, etc. would remain accessible even if the underlying search engine was down or under heavy load
  • Searching for an author's works would break anonymity by displaying concealed ("mystery") blurbs of their works, or of works that had been orphaned by them; this has been fixed
  • Relatedly, sorting works by author would make anonymous authors guessable by listing their anon works together with the rest; this has been fixed by treating Anonymous as its own author and shuffling all their works to the top
  • Search results would previously include blurbs of members-only works even for logged out visitors; this has been fixed to hide all traces of locked works when searching
  • Searching works by tag wasn't bringing up works with related tags; it has now been modified so that searching by a canonical tag will bring up works with its synonyms and subtags as well, while putting in a non-canonical tag will restrict results to that tag only
  • For performance and caching reasons, the kudos, comment and bookmark counts (as well as hits) that are used for searching and sorting works are now updated periodically instead of instantaneously, which means ever so slightly outdated search results at a given moment, but also happier servers
  • (Tiny frontend issues for 200, Alex!) If a search returned 0 results, some empty list mark-up would linger unnecessarily; this has been cleaned up

• Collections
  • Sorting collections by size (i.e. the amount of works in them) was taking a long time and put an undue strain on the servers; we have removed this sorting option until a better solution is found
  • Using the "New Subcollection" button would lead to an error 500; this has been fixed
  • On collection dashboards containing both works and bookmarks, the "Recent bookmarks" section was styled differently than the "Recent works" header; this has been fixed
  • When uploading a header image for a collection, it would show in the footer as well, creating problems with the footer navigation; it will now only be used for the header

• Notifications
  • In subscriptions emails, the link to series pages was broken; this has been fixed
  • Several email providers (Gmail especially) keep eating our account activation emails, preventing users from finishing the sign-up process; we thought we had conquered the issue when we changed the subject line to something less looking like spam; we have now also expanded the email text to hopefully appear more legit to spam filters
  • Relatedly, "We strongly recommend that you add [email protected] to your address book to prevent the invitation email from getting blocked as spam by your email provider." was added to the little note that appears after you've added yourself to the invite queue

• Misc.
  • Using the Reply, Edit, or Delete buttons on comments would jump the page to the top of the comments section; this has been fixed
  • Certain wrangling actions, such as trying to change the canonicals of a tag with lots of subtags or associated works, would time out with an error 502; to fix this the database requests associated with that action have been adjusted to run in the background instead of being (unsuccessfully) applied right away
  • When logged in as an admin, the notes section on bookmarks would overflow the bookmark blurb; this has been fixed

We have shiny new tag filters and a new, improved Advanced Search form! See below for a few tips searching and browsing on the new-look AO3!

Browsing via tag filters

The new tag filters look similar to our old tag filters, but they have lots of greatly-improved code behind the scenes, and a few visible tweaks to improve performance. You can use the filters to browse for works on the AO3 - see below for a few tips on how they work and how to find what you want.

Select a fandom

The first step of browsing is to select a fandom to help us narrow down the results. (If you're going in search of crossovers, then just pick one of the fandoms you'd like to see included in the crossover - you can add the others later.) You can also filter from a Character or Relationship tag to start with a narrower selection, or even an Additional Tag, such as Kinks.

Narrow down your results

Once you've selected, for example, a fandom, you can narrow down your results further by filtering by Rating, Warning, Category, Fandom, Character, Relationship, or Additional Tags. The filter boxes will show the ten most popular tags for each category. This is different to the old filters, which showed all the tags for each category; this created impossibly long filter options and was a drain on performance, which is why we've limited the options.

If the tag you want isn't showing in the filters, you have two options:

1. Type the tag you're looking for in the 'Other Tags' box. Some suggestions will come up in autocomplete to help you out, but if what you want isn't among the suggestions, you can type it in yourself. (Note that tags that don't appear in the autocomplete are non-canonical and may not always give expected results.) All types of tags can be mixed and matched: John Luther (character), The Losers (2010) (fandom), Crossover (additional tag) can all be entered in the same text field and will all be factored into your filter results.
2. Select some options from the available choices to narrow down your results, then filter again. For example, if you start with Stargate - All Series you'll get filters showing the top ten characters across the whole of the Stargate universe, including characters from Stargate SG-1 such as Teal'c. If you select 'Stargate Atlantis' and filter again, the filters will show you only the top ten characters from Stargate Atlantis. You can drill down to get more and more specific filter results.

Please note that selecting multiple options in the filters will always produce an AND search - so if you select 'Naruto', 'Bleach', 'Mature' you'll get works tagged with Bleach AND Naruto AND with the Mature rating. If you want to add OR or NOT options to your browsing, you'll need to use the 'Search within results' option.

Search within your results

A search box has been added to the filter sidebar that mirrors the search box at the top of every page. It will search all types of tags plus summaries and notes for the keywords you put in, and narrow down the results to only those matches.

Unlike the ticky boxes and the autocomplete field, this search box allows to you to generate results containing one thing OR another, not both of them. So, ticking 'Thane Krios' and 'Liara T'Soni' on the Mass Effect page will find you only works that contain both characters. Leaving the tickies alone and entering Thane OR Liara in the search field will find you works with one or the other or both. You can ticky any of the other boxes, e.g. only Explicit works and only F/M pairings, to narrow down your search results, and pick a sorting option. Note that this field only searches within your selection, so if you're already on a fandom page, adding unrelated fandoms in an OR search won't add works from these fandoms to your results.

Conversely, you can use the NOT search operator (or the minus sign "-") to specify things you don't want to see in your results. So, for example, on the Death Note page you could ticky "Mature" in the Rating options and "L/Yagami Light" under Relationship, and then enter -"major character death" or NOT "major character death" into the search field. This will exclude works with that warning.

Sort your results

You can use the drop-down box at the top of the filters to order your results. This replaces the sort options which used to show at the top of your list of results - we've moved them into the filters so that we could include a lot more options. As many users have requested, you can now sort by the numbers of kudos and comments a work has received and the number of times it was bookmarked, in addition to word count, hits, title, date posted, and date updated.

One downside of moving this to the filters is that you can't reverse sort order (e.g. starting with low word counts instead of high) with a second click on the button anymore. However, you can now browse through all the works returned with a given search, so you can go to the last page of results and work backwards to get the same effect.

Filter bookmarks

You can now browse bookmarks using the filters! First select a fandom, then hit the 'Bookmarks' button on the page of results. You can then use the filters in much the same way as if you were browsing a list of works, but you'll find two additional options: you can browse Recs only, and you can choose to show only bookmarks with notes. Note that you don't have the same sorting options as for works (kudos, hits, title etc.), as those belong to the work, not a bookmark. You can, however, sort by the date the bookmarked item was updated and by the date the bookmark was created.

Another much-requested improvement is the ability to filter your own personal bookmarks. You can use all the same filter options when looking through bookmarks you created, and sorting by Date Updated will show you at a glance which of your bookmarked works has new chapters waiting for you. Hurray!

Advanced work search

Advanced search is still much the same behind the scenes, but the search form has been radically redesigned to make it easier to access the Archive's powerful search capabilities. Upon popular request, we've also added sorting options to your search results! By default, best matches will be listed first; you can change the sorting order before submitting your search by picking another option from the drop-down menu.

Search fields

The search fields are now grouped into topical chunks roughly along these lines:

• General information about the work (title, author, language, posting date, completeness, etc.)
• Tags attached to the work (ratings, warnings, fandom, characters, additional tags, etc.)
• Stats concerning reader interaction (hits, kudos, comments, etc.)

Each section is broken down into separate fields for each kind of tag (Fandom, Character, etc), with ratings, warnings, and categories displayed in the form of a drop-down menu and checkboxes. You can choose to enter options in all these categories, or just in one, to get precisely what you're looking for.

Where applicable, an autocomplete will suggest tags as you type. If the autocomplete doesn't offer the option you want, you can type it as free text.

Boolean searches

By default, each search term you enter will be searched for as an AND search, i.e. will be treated as if you're looking only for a work that has ALL these things.

If you want to exclude some terms, or look for works containing one term OR another, add your search terms to the 'Any field' and use the search operators NOT (or minus sign: -) and OR (or two pipe symbols: ||). All spaces between search terms will automatically be interpreted as the AND operator, although you can also add the AND if you like.

Searches with quotes

Search terms consisting of more than one word, such as "Riza Hawkeye", or containing characters like / or -, such as "X-Men", will return more accurate results when surrounded by quotes.

We plan to add more enhancements to search and browse in the future, but we think this new system will be much more flexible and useful than before. Happy browsing!

The Archive of Our Own will have approximately two hours of planned downtime on 8 November 2012, starting c. 05.30 UTC (see what time that is in your timezone).

During this time we will be installing new discs in our servers, giving us more space to accommodate the demands of serving lots of data to lots of users!

If all goes well with the hardware installation, we will also be deploying new code during this downtime. The new release will include the long-awaited return of the tag filters! We're very excited (and a bit nervous).

Please follow AO3_Status for updates on the downtime and maintenance - we'll tweet before we take the site down and again when the work has been completed. If our Twitter says we're up but you're still seeing the maintenance page, you may need to clear your browser cache and refresh.

Hello, this is Sole G., the Category Change workgroup lead, and I'd like to introduce the workgroup, talk a little about our goals, and ask for some initial feedback from all of you as fellow fans and users of AO3.

The Category Change workgroup was created to address a long-standing debate, both internally and externally - that is, whether or not the current Fandom Categories in the Archive are the best possible browsing solution. Our goal is to take a look at the current categories and how they work and see what other options we can come up with that might be more effective at representing different fannish traditions, aiding fandom browsing, and reflecting the diversity of the Archive.

While we are taking previously held discussions into account, we are analyzing the issue from scratch and trying to find new perspectives. We are looking at the Fandom Categories framework and analyzing it from every possible perspective - even considering whether or not they are necessary at all or how the browsing experience can be changed to better reflect the needs of our users.

The most heatedly contested categories are 'Anime & Manga' and 'Cartoons & Comics & Graphic Novels'. To begin with, this division strikes some fans as artificial, since they are all either forms of animation or different traditions of comics under geographically- or culturally-determined names. Naming those two categories explicitly also implicitly leaves out other traditions, such as manhwa, manhua, bande dessinée and historieta. In addition, the inclusion of all different East Asian comic traditions under 'Anime & Manga' is inaccurate, as well as culturally insensitive.

Concerns about 'Music & Bands' and 'Celebrities and Real People' have also been raised, again citing the artificial division and the confusing categorization of albums and bands side-by-side. Other issues that have been brought up are, for example, multimedia fandoms, audio-based sources, folklore and mythology fic, etc.

We're looking for a solution that balances complex, sometimes competing, factors such as diverse fannish traditions, user behavior (current and potential), and ease of browsing.

Since this is a task that involves the purview of several different committees, a workgroup consisting of members of all involved committees has been formed. These committees are:

• Accessibility, Design & Technology (AD&T), due to the certain possibility of changes in the AO3 code being required, and the potential impact on design, user experience and archive browsing.
• Internationalization & Outreach (I&O), since one of the issues with the current Media Categories is related to the different boundaries between media categories international fandoms have.
• Tag Wrangling (TW), because tag wranglers are in charge of categorizing fandoms, and any changes will have direct impact on tag wranglers' procedure and workload.
• Support, since any change in the categories will involve responding to users' concerns.

This workgroup was developed by I&O and then backed by all of the involved committees. Each committee then chose their own representatives from among their interested staff members. While several of the Category Change staffers are also tag wranglers, a tag wrangler volunteer was recruited as well in order to directly represent the interests of that volunteer pool.

One of our top priorities is to maintain a healthy, fluid communication with the Archive of Our Own userbase, so we want to start gathering feedback as soon as possible. If you have any opinions, feedback, suggestions, knowledge or ideas, you can either leave a comment on this post or you can contact us through the Category Change contact form. We don't see the emails used when you post guest comments, and you can request that any feedback that you send through the contact form be archived anonymously in OTW workspaces so that your name and contact information are only visible to members of the workgroup and not to all staff and volunteers.

We are particularly interested in answers to these questions:

1. Do you currently use the Media Categories in order to browse the Archive? If yes, then how do you do it? For example, are you generally looking for a specific fandom or do you browse the different pages to see what fandoms are listed on the site or to find new ones? What are your usual routines? If you want to find a specific fandom on the archive for the first time, how do you do that? How do you find fandoms by more casual browsing? Don’t be afraid to be as specific and detailed as you want; details and step-by-step descriptions are really useful to us.

2. What issues have you run into with the current media categories? Are there fandoms that aren't listed where you might have expected them to be? Are there other problems you've noticed with fandoms being either grouped with or separated from one another in a way that's not ideal?

3. How would you like to see the categories and the media/fandom pages be improved? What's your vision of a better way to find, browse, and organize fandoms? We're open to all kinds of ideas, not just different names for the existing categories.

Please feel free to comment and brainstorm, and also to discuss and engage with each other. We're very interested in hearing what you think, and thanks in advance for your feedback!

Mirrored on the OTW blog. Find related news by viewing our tag cloud.

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

Cool stuff on the Archive!

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

What’s up in the world of tags?

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

Support issues

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

AD&T Committee business of note

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

Support Committee business of note

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

Tag Wrangling Committee business of note

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

Questions? Comments?

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

This post by Camden

We've made it another year! As part of the OTW October Membership Drive, we thought we'd share some of the stats and growth over the last two years, and a breakdown of the tags on the Archive.

Warning right up front: this post is very graphics-heavy.

Overall tag growth and canonical growth

Overall, our growth has (inevitably) been nothing but up. There has been proportional growth between the number of works and number of unique tags over the last two years. In October 2010, there were 107,430 works on the Archive and 105,750 unique tags; in October 2012, there are 459,655 works and 395,099 unique tags. The number of canonical tags (the ones which come up in the autocomplete and filters), however, scaled up much more slowly: from 55,697 in October 2010 to 140,306 in October 2012. This reflects the fact that the AO3 tagging system is designed to give creators as much freedom as possible in how they tag their works, so while the arrival of a new fandom on the Archive might generate only a few new canonical tags so the fandom name and characters can come up in filters, there might be a whole host of non-canonical synonyms reflecting the different preferences of creators.

Ratings

For these next few categories, we don't have a historical comparison.

The greatest number of our works - just over 31% - are tagged "Teen and Up", with "General Audiences" close behind at just under 30%. "Explicit" works make up roughly 18% of the Archive, and "Mature", 16%. Roughly 5% of the works are "Not Rated".

Warnings

Unlike Ratings, Warnings are non-exclusive: a work can have multiple warnings. The vast majority of works on the Archive - almost two in three - are tagged "No Archive Warnings Apply". Around a quarter of the works are tagged "Author chose not to use warnings." "Major Character Death" has roughly 18,000 works; "Graphic Depictions of Violence" has 17,000; "Underage" has around 10,000; and "Rape/Non-con" is tagged on just over 8,600 works.

Categories

Like Warnings, Categories are also non-exclusive. Roughly four in nine of the 460,000 on the Archive are tagged "M/M", making up the largest Category by far. "Gen" has roughly 125,000 works, and "F/M" has just under 100,000 works. The other three categories are much rarer with 23,000 works or fewer.

Tags by type, 2011 - 2012

All User-generated Tags

The following two graphs show the month-by-month growth of total unique tags and canonical tags on the Archive, with the vertical bars broken up for each type of tag.

The unique tags have a linear growth from the 105,000 tags on 01 October 2010 until around December 2011, then they start showing a slight upward curve to their increase, to a current total of just under 400,000 unique tags on the Archive. Characters and Relationships are almost as large a percentage of the total tags as Freeforms (aka Additional Tags).

The canonical tags, on the other hand, are maintaining a roughly linear increase, from 56,000 in October 2010 to today's 140,000. Proportionally, characters comprise the majority of canonicals, followed closely by Relationships. Freeform canonicals are roughly as common as Fandom canonicals. (Reasons for this can be seen in our Freeform Wrangling Guidelines.)

Fandoms

Fandoms have had a very consistent growth, with a notable bump in unique tags in May 2012, when many new users imported existing works from other sites. The number of canonical tags roughly follows this increase, but has been slowing down in recent months. 50% of the 14,000 Fandom tags were canonical in October 2011, decreasing slightly to 43% of the 23,000 unique tags in October 2012.

Characters

We can see a similar pattern with the Character tags - a linear increase in unique tags, and a slowing down of canonical tags. The increases aren't proportional, however: while almost 74% of the 72,000 character tags were canonical in October 2011, only 57% of the 114,000 tags are canonical in October 2012. This may reflect a greater diversity of fannish terminologies being contributed by newer users of the site.

Relationships

Relationship tags also show the same linear growth as the other two, with a slight decrease in the number of canonical tags. Due to the ever-climbing number of combinations, these increased more proportionally: in October 2011, canonicals were 47% of the 68,000 relationship tags; in 2012, they're only 44% of the 118,000 tags.

Additionals

In what should not be a surprise, the majority of growth in unique tags comes from the unique Additional tags (also called Freeform tags). The number of freeforms has increased along an increasing slope from 43,000 last October to 138,000 this October. However, as the vast majority of freeforms entered are not intended for searching and indexing, far fewer have been marked canonical: there were just under 9,000 canonical freeforms in October 2011, and there are only 11,500 canonical freeforms in October 2012, as most freeform wrangling consists of glancing at a list and picking out the ones that would be useful as canonical tags (for example, common terms such as 'Angst').

Last Words

We always enjoy taking a look at stats, and tags are particularly interesting because they often give a snapshot of different fannish communities or traditions. We love the way different communities of users on the Archive take advantage of our unique tag system to tag in all kinds of different ways!

The growth in tags reflects the massive increase in the number of users on the site. If you're enjoying using the AO3 and you'd like to help with our running costs, please consider donating to our parent Organization for Transformative Works. Donations help fund the AO3 and all the OTW's other cool projects!

A note on tag filters

In any post about tags, we know people will want to ask about tag filters. We know that the Archive is much harder to browse without this feature, and we're sorry it's taking us a long time to restore it - the rewrite is a significant piece of work. The good news is that we're so close now we can almost taste it - the new filters are on our Test Archive and if testing goes well they should be rolled out to the main site in a few weeks time. Wish us luck!

Happy Ada Lovelace Day from everyone at the Archive of Our Own!

The majority of AO3 volunteers are women, so we're thrilled to have the opportunity to celebrate women in technology! Our testers, coders and systems staff are all inspirational, and in the five years they have been working on the Archive they have all become role models for one another.

This Ada Lovelace Day we'd like to give a shoutout to one inspirational woman in particular: AD&T Co-chair Elz. Elz has been coding on the project since the very beginning, and we're in awe of her amazing patience, her great teaching and mentoring skills, and her ability to produce massive amounts of code: she is the number one contributor of code to the AO3 and has written over 130,000 lines of code!

Elz is particularly inspirational because she didn't originally come from a STEM (science/technology/engineering/math) background: she majored in literature at university and is a self-taught coder. The experience she gained working on the AO3 enabled her to move into coding professionally, and she now works in the tech industry: a great example of how sharing skills in the open source community can enable people from non-STEM backgrounds to move into technology.

Elz has done amazing work on the AO3 over the years, and she's been incredibly generous with her time and her skills over the years. We're happy to celebrate her on Ada Lovelace Day!

We'd also like to celebrate all our volunteers, especially those who joined us more recently: we've had fifteen coders make their first commits to the project in the last year. We're proud of the achievements of all our volunteers - of all gender identities - and we're grateful to them for their hard work.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

You may have seen the banner on the site this week asking for donations: our parent organization (The Organization for Transformative Works) holds membership drives twice a year, and the money raised is what pays for AO3's hardware, hosting, and maintenance costs. We don't have paid accounts or advertising, so donations from regular users are what keeps the site running and allows us to expand.

If you enjoy using AO3 and you're able to help support us, please donate today!

A few common questions:

What is the Organization for Transformative Works and how is it related to the Archive of Our Own?

The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) is a nonprofit organization established by fans to serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms. It's the parent organization that runs AO3 and several other fan-oriented projects.

What do you spend donation money on?

Neither OTW nor AO3 has paid employees or offices - all of the work of building and maintaining AO3 is done by volunteers like you. OTW funds and supports other wonderful projects as well (legal advocacy for fans! a fan wiki! an academic journal!) but because of the scale of the Archive, its hosting and hardware costs do make up a good chunk of the organization's expenses each year.

If you're interested in more detailed information, you can find an expense breakdown in our annual report.

Can I get an Archive invitation if I donate?

No, sorry! For privacy reasons, donations and organization memberships are entirely separate from AO3 user accounts and invitations. It's free for everyone to use the Archive, and invitations are granted by our automated queue in the order that requests come in. There may be some indirect benefits to donating: how much funding we have determines how much we're able to expand our systems, which affects the rate at which we can send out invitations. But it's not possible to directly purchase an account.