Archive of Our Own

2010 was a wonderful year for the AO3! It was our first full year in Open Beta! We ran two big challenges and lots of smaller ones! We filled up our servers, introduced a bunch of new features, made 1451 code commits and got shout-outs all over the web.

Our team had an eventful year! People moved countries, travelled across continents, changed jobs, got PhDs and had babies. Oh, and we built this great Archive for fandom to enjoy! We feel a great sense of achievement!

We are incredibly grateful to everyone who worked on the Archive during 2010: coders, testers, sysadmins, tag wranglers, support team, designers, and many more!

We're also hugely grateful to all Archive users and members of the OTW for your great feedback, your generous financial contributions (which will pay for beautiful new servers this year), and most importantly, your fannish energy and creations, which are the true heart of the Archive. At the close of 2010 we had:

• 7,927 fandoms
• 11,504 users
• 128,806 works
• 4,949 series
• 591 collections
• 164,450 tags (of which 100,046 are 'canonical' and can be filtered on, 79,294 are character tags, and 45,569 relationship tags)
• 158,639 comments
• 69,153 bookmarks
• 40,299 kudos

We think this is an AMAZING output for just over a year of real usage! GO GO FANDOM!

We're looking forward to seeing what awesome new fannish output 2011 brings! Thanks everyone for your support! Happy New Year!

Welcome to revision 3453, up from revision 3435! This release contains some minor bugfixes as well as a few nice feature enhancements! Thanks, as always, to the wonderful coders and testers who contributed to this release.

Highlights

Kudos improvements!

The new Kudos feature is very popular! However, a number of people found that they had accidentally added Kudos to their own works and felt a little bashful about it. In response to user feedback, you will no longer be able to add Kudos to your own works. Additionally, existing self-applied Kudos have been removed.

In other Kudos news, we've also added notification of Kudos being given for your works. You will receive these notifications so long as you have comment notifications turned on in your Preferences. You will also be able to search for stories by number of Kudos.

Improved Fandom Index Pages!

Fandom index pages have been redesigned with the addition of handy alphabetical jump links to help you find your place in the listing more quickly.

Admin Post Translations

This release also adds an improved system for the translation of Admin Posts, no longer requiring manual linking to the translated versions. Non-English posts will not show up in the RSS feed, but you will be able to subscribe via RSS to posts in the language(s) of your choice.

Non-English admin posts will be automatically linked from the English version, and will show up under the url for the language in question, e.g. the German posts will be at http://archiveofourown.org/languages/de/admin_posts. To get the rss feed, simply append .rss to the relevant url: http://archiveofourown.org/languages/de/admin_posts.rss.

Note: Change to Search Function

For performance reasons, you will no longer be able to search on the full text of works content. Summaries and notes are still searchable.

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page.

Release details

Features

• Improvements for fandom index pages (sorted alphabetically, with quick jump links)


• List of fandoms in collections and challenges can now be filtered by media type


• Added ability to search for stories by number of kudos


• Added notifications for kudos (unless you turned off comment notifications under Preferences)


• Added a fix that will prevent users from adding kudos to their own works


• Made unposted chapters in a chaptered work more noticable


• Enabled comment management for admins (mark as spam, delete)


• Better system for admin post translations (different versions of an admin post don't have to be manually linked anymore)

Bugs

• Fix for updating all unposted stories in a challenge as defaulters


• Fixed a bug causing some users to be without default pseuds; if you found that you got multiple 500 errors when logged in (couldn't view profile, works, or sign up for challenges) then this should have fixed your problem

Welcome to revision 3435, up from revision 3403! We have a bunch of fun things in this revision along with some much-needed performance enhancements! Thanks to all the wonderful coders and testers who contributed to this release, and a special thanks to mumble, who put the release notes together!

Highlights

RSS feed for admin posts

If you want to keep track of what we post about the site, you can now follow our admin posts via an RSS feed: add http://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts.rss to an RSS reader of your choice.

CSS styling for works!!!!

For a long time our users have been asking for better ways to style their works on the AO3. We really wanted to give users greater control over their font choices, positioning, typography, etc, but accessibility is also a major concern for us, and we wanted to make sure that it would be easy for users to override more complex styling if they wanted or needed to. We’re thrilled to announce that we have now introduced ‘work skins’, which allow us to have our elaborately iced, twelve-tier cake with sparkles on and eat it too! For information on the new feature and how it works, check out our Tutorial on styling works (coming soon!).

Kudos

Lots of people have asked us for a quick way to leave love or appreciation for a work, and we were very happy to oblige! You can now leave ‘kudos’ at the click of a button – works with kudos will display this happy little AO3 dude: along with names and numbers of folk who left kudos. We think this will be a great way for people to spread the love during the holiday season, when finding time to read fic in between family commitments can make it hard to leave long comments.

BABY

Finally, we couldn’t let this release go by without welcoming the newest addition to the AO3 family! After a month of producing amazing amounts of code, our senior coder Astolat went one better and also produced a beautiful baby girl! Baby Hypatia was born on the 7th December, weighing 7lbs 4oz. Astolat was coding right up until her waters broke, and sending emails about our new servers while she was in labour! (Our staff are crazy dedicated, OMG.) Mommy and baby are doing well – KUDOS ASTOLAT!

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page.

Release details

Features

• Added the ability to post works without previewing them first (especially handy for editing!)
• Added the option to leave ‘kudos’ on works.
• Made ‘leave comment’ box visible by default.
• Added new styling option for works via ‘work skins’:
  • Renamed “Light Style” to “Hide/Show Creator’s Style”
  • Renamed “Disable User Generated Styles” to “Always hide custom styles”
  • Created public “Basic Formatting” work skin
• Made comment form show by default
• Added additional caching to works and chapters for better performance
• Comments now display user’s local time instead of server time
• Entering a wrong collection name in the Post New form now yields an error message
• More improvements and bugfixes for automated tests
• added RSS feed for admin posts (http://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts.rss)
• Tweaks to the “share” option to spiff it up a bit!

Bugs

• Fixed a bug causing 500 errors for some people when posting to fulfil challenge assignments.
• Unbroke OpenID login
• The share box is now disabled for users without javascript so that it doesn’t hog screen real estate.
• Fixed issue causing 500 errors when downloading fics with related works
• Fixed some overlapping issues in the comments section
• Fixed some mangled text on the sign-up page

Es ist wieder jene Zeit des Jahres, in der Fans sich am Geschichtenwichteln beteiligen, Glühwein trinken und das Eigene Archiv verfluchen, weil es wieder mal so verdammt langsam ist. Denn nach einem anstrengenden Tag in der Innenstadt, in der man sich durch Menschenmassen drängeln und an der Kasse ewig warten musste, gibt es nichts Nervigeres als mit der Fehlermeldung Error 502: Page did not respond in a timely fashion konfrontiert zu werden, wenn man zum Entspannen auf seine liebste Fanfiction klickt.

Bitte glaubt uns: Wir wissen, wie das ist. Wir sind auch Fans und benutzen das Eigene Archiv, und nach einem Tag voller Schlangestehen oder dem Programmieren einer neuen Funktion stört uns auch nichts mehr als ein Fehler 502, wenn wir zum Entspannen auf unsere liebste Geschichte klicken.

Deshalb möchten wir euch wissen lassen, dass wir etwas dagegen tun. Wir arbeiten gerade an einem neuen Systemaufbau (dank eurer Unterstützung mitsamt schicker neuer Server) der die Leistung deutlich verbessern wird.

Wir haben eine Menge Vermutungen angestellt, bevor wir die letzte große Aktualisierung durchgeführt haben. Ein wichtiger Teil dieses Updates war die Einführung von Rails 3, das die Grundlage für die Umgestaltung des Systemaufbaus bildet. Sowohl währenddessen als auch kurz danach haben wir schon einige Leistungsverbesserungen auf den Weg gebracht, aber letztendlich gibt es leider keinen Ersatz für die Erkenntnisse, die wir aus den tatsächlichen Nutzungsdaten des Archivs gewinnen.

Wir haben nun 11.000 Nutzer und Nutzerinnen und 120.000 Werke und sind damit wesentlich schneller gewachsen, als wir uns jemals erträumt haben.

Was genau wird sich durch den neuen Aufbau verändern?

Derzeit läuft das Archiv auf zwei Servern – einer für die Datenbank, der andere für die Rails-Anwendungen.

Die neue Systemarchitektur wird in etwa so aussehen:

Zum Vergrößern auf die Grafik klicken

Kurz gesagt werden wir auf einen Systemaufbau umsteigen, der es uns erlaubt, in der Zukunft leicht zusätzliche Hardware zur Leistungsverbesserung anzuschließen.

Wir kaufen gerade die neuen Server für diesen Aufbau, aber im Moment der Zeitpunkt für eine so drastische Veränderung ungünstig. Der Umstieg auf einen neuen Systemaufbau ist keine triviale Sache, und wir verschieben ihn deshalb lieber aufs neue Jahr, wenn wir mehr Zeit für Ausfälle haben und nicht mehr so viel los ist. Im Eigenen Archiv herrscht derzeit reger Betrieb (nicht nur durch Yuletide, auch wegen anderer Wichtelaktionen) und wir wollen nicht riskieren, dass uns das alles um die Ohren fliegt.

Daneben ist Yuletide, unser erster und größter Testfall, in diesem Fall Teil einer langfristigen Lösung. Tausende Nutzer und Nutzerinnen, die alle zur selben Zeit auf dieselben Teile des Archivs zugreifen wollen, werden unsere Systeme bis zum Anschlag belasten und uns helfen herauszufinden, wo die größten Engpässe liegen. Das wiederum zeigt uns, welche Prioritäten wir beim Kauf der Hardware setzen müssen.

Das heißt aber auch, dass im Moment alles etwas langsam läuft. Das tut uns sehr leid. Auch aus diesem Grund ist das AO3 immer noch in der Betaphase. Wir werden das “Beta”-Schild auch nicht herunternehmen, solange wir nicht einigermaßen sicher sind, dass das System mit möglicherweise Millionen von Nutzern und Nutzerinnen und Geschichten umgehen kann, ohne dass uns alles um die Ohren fliegt oder nur im Schneckentempo läuft. Und soweit sind wir noch nicht.

Wir müssen euch also um Geduld bitten. Yuletide und andere Geschichten-Tauschaktionen – und die daraus resultierende intensive Nutzung – sind für das AO3 und diejenigen, die es programmieren und verwalten, auf lange Sicht sehr wertvoll. Es ist alles Teil des Betaprozesses – habt also bitte Verständnis dafür, dass solche Hänger nötig sind, um das Eigene Archiv langfristig voranzubringen.

Esta es la época del año cuando los fans participan en en intercambios de fics, beben sidra fermentada y maldicen a Un Archivo Propio por ser tan @#$!% lento. Porque después de un día de lidiar con multitudes o esperar en las cajas de las tiendas departamentales, nada te frustra más que ver un Error 502: Page did not respond in a timely fashion en tu fic favorito para confortarte.

¡Creénos, lo sabemos! También somos fans y usamos el AO3, y después de un largo día luchando contra las multitudes festivas o programando, nada nos frustra más que nos salga un Error 502 en nuestro fic favorito de confort, tampoco.

¡Queremos que sepas que estamos haciendo trabajando en esto! Actualmente estamos en el proceso de armar una nueva arquitectura de sistema — incluyendo la inminente adquisición de nuevos y brillantes servidores, gracias a tu ayuda — la que ayudará a mejorar nuestro desempeño de forma considerable.

Podemos (y lo hemos hecho) hacer montones de presunciones al realizar nuestro último lanzamiento, el cual incluyó la actualización a Rails 3 que era necesaria antes de proceder con la remodelación de los sistemas, y dimos lo mejor para mejorar el desempeño tanto en el proceso como inmediatamente después del lanzamiento. Pero al final, no hay substituto a observar resultados en el uso real cotidiano del sistema.

En este momento contamos con 11.000 usuarios y 120.000 trabajos hospedados: ¡estamos creciendo más rápido de lo que nunca habíamos soñado!

¿Qué es lo que va a suceder con este nuevo diseño?

Actualmente estamos trabajando con dos servidores — un servidor para una base de datos individual y otro servidor para la aplicación Rails.

La nueva arquitectura se verá más o menos así:

Haz click en la imagen para ampliar

Básicamente, estamos moviéndonos a un diseño donde podríamos, en un futuro, fácilmente conectar máquinas adicionales cuando se requieran, para mejorar el desempeño.

En este momento estamos comprando los nuevos servidores para implementar esta nueva arquitectura, pero no creemos que sea una buena idea implementar un cambio de sistema tan grande como este en este preciso momento. La implementación de esta nueva arquitectura no es trivial y planeamos hacerla en una forma más controlada y con mucho más espacio para tiempo fuera de línea cuando las cosas se calmen entrando el año. Están sucediendo muchas cosas en el AO3 – no sólo Yuletide, sino montones de otros intercambios festivos de fic – y realmente no queremos que todo nos explote.

Pero también, en este proceso, Yuletide – nuestro principal y más grande caso de prueba – es parte de una solución a largo plazo. Tener miles de usuarios, todos golpeando a las mismas secciones del archivo al mismo tiempo y estirando nuestros sistemas al límite, nos ayudará a identificar donde están los cuellos de botella más grandes y eso nos dirá cuales deberán ser nuestras prioridades al comprar el nuevo hardware.

Esto significa que las cosas están lentas ahora. Y estamos muy apenados por eso. Es parte de las razones por las que AO3 aún está en proceso de prueba o beta. No quitaremos el aviso de “Beta” hasta que no estemos razonablemente confiados de que el sistema puede manejar millones de usuarios e historias, sin caerse, explotar o tener grandes estancamientos. ¡Aún no llegamos a eso!

Así que les pedimos paciencia. Yuletide y otros intercambios – y el resultante uso intenso – son tremendamente útiles a largo plazo para AO3 y sus diseñadores y administradores de sistema. Es parte del proceso de prueba – ¡por favor entiendan que todo esto es necesario para que nosotros llevemos a AO3 a donde necesita estar!

This post is also available in Deutsch and Español.

This is the time of year when fans participate in fic exchanges and drink mulled cider and curse out the Archive of Our Own for being so @#$!% slow. Because after a day of fighting holiday crowds or waiting on lines in department stores, nothing bums you out like getting Error 502: Page did not respond in a timely fashion on your favorite comfort fic.

Believe us: we know!  We're fans too, and we use the AO3, and after a long day fighting holiday crowds or coding a new feature, nothing bums us out like getting Error 502 on our favorite comfort fic, either.

We want you to know we're doing something about it! We're currently in the process of putting together a new systems architecture -- including the imminent purchase of several very shiny new servers thanks to your support -- that will boost performance substantially.

We could (and did) make lots of guesses going in to our latest big deploy, which included the Rails 3 upgrade we needed to make before we proceeded with the systems revamp, and we did our best to put in performance improvements both on the way and immediately after the deploy. But there is no substitute in the end for looking at actual results from real-world usage.

We're now at 11,000 users and 120,000 works: we've grown much faster than any of us ever dreamed!

So what exactly is going to happen with this new design?

We currently are running on two servers -- a single database server and a single Rails app server.

The new architecture will look something like this:

Click image to see larger

Basically, we are moving to a design where we can easily in future plug in additional machines as needed for performance improvements.

We are currently buying the new servers to implement this architecture, but we don't think it's a really good idea to implement a major system change like this right now. Implementing this new architecture isn't trivial, and we plan to do it in a more controlled way and with a little more leeway for downtime once things slow down in the new year. There's a lot going on at the AO3 - not just Yuletide, but loads of other holiday fic exchanges - and we don't really want the whole thing to go boom.

But also, in this process, Yuletide, our first and biggest test case, is part of the long-term solution. Having thousands of users all banging on the same parts of the archive all at once and stressing our system to the limits helps us identify where the biggest bottlenecks are, and that in turn tells us what our priorities need to be when we buy our hardware.

That means things are slow now. And we're very sorry about that. It's part of why the AO3 is still in beta. We won't be taking the "beta" sign off until we have reasonable confidence that the system can handle potentially millions of users and stories, without falling down and going boom or having major slowdowns. But we are not there yet!

So we need to ask for your patience. Yuletide and other exchanges - and the resulting intense usage - are tremendously useful in the long run for the AO3 and its designers and sysadmins. It is all part of the beta process - so please understand it is all necessary for us to get the AO3 to where it needs to be!

Welcome to Revision 3403, up from 3295. Since our last set of release notes we've had a bunch of small bugfix releases and added enough extra bits of code to warrant another round-up - we've rounded up the key changes here. These release notes put together for you by new tester mumble - thanks, mumble!

A note on Archive performance

Anyone who has accessed the Archive recently will have noticed that it is very slow. This is due to a combination of different factors - our servers are at more-or-less full capacity (we're getting new ones soon!), some of the changes in our Rails 3 upgrade unexpectedly slowed down code or required some Systems readjustment, and we're experiencing a high level of demand due to holiday challenges including Yuletide.

If you repeatedly receive a 502 error on the same page, but other pages on the Archive seem to be loading fast(ish), it's possible that your browser has cached the error page. Try clearing your browser cache if this is happening to you. (However, unfortunately quite a lot of the 502 errors are real ones.)

We know it's super-frustrating for everyone when the site is slow, and our coders and Systems team are working like crazy (seriously, eighteen-hour days in some cases) to make performance improvements. Please bear with us - we're doing our best!

Highlights

"Share" a work

This was already introduced in the last big release, but got lost in the barrage of new features and fixes. Works now come with a "Share" button above the header, which enables you to quickly paste all relevant information about the fic (title, author, fandom, pairings, word count etc. etc.) into a Livejournal post or similar, to either link to your own work or to a story you want to recommend. The same button can be found on all works you've added to your AO3 bookmarks. No more fiddly copy-pasting or formatting, it's already been done for you!

Challenge improvements

Yuletide proved to be a good test case for creating a challenge with several thousand users and fandoms. Most of the major problems could be solved during the sign-up phase, other bits and pieces are still being worked on. The sign-up form was streamlined to lessen the load on our servers, and the summary page (for an overview of offered and requested fandoms) was rewritten to deal with a large number of sign-ups and an equally large number of people continuously hitting refresh in excitement. Several smaller issues regarding secrecy and fandom stats were fixed as well. This release also added a "See Open Challenges" button to the collections page, which lets you do just that. The list is based on the "Signup open?" ticky box under Challenge Settings, which a moderator has to check or uncheck manually, so if they forget to do this, the challenge might show up even if the dates say it's closed. You can see the current list here.

Spam protection on the Support form

We were getting hit with spam through the Support form, so we installed Akismet to weed out the p3n1s-related messages. This shouldn't affect regular support requests and feedback, but if you run into any problems, please let us know in the comments to this post.

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page.

Release details

Features

• Option to share a work through preformatted header information for easy copy-pasting (since 0.8.2)
• List of all challenges which are currently open
• More improvements to automated tests
• Made the HTML parser behave more consistently
  • the <del> tag works now
  • <br /> tags will be added to all linebreaks, so if you've pasted a work from an email message or similiar, you'll have to strip out any unwanted carriage returns first
  • Formatting tags such as <em> or <strong> that span across several paragraphs will be closed by the parser at the end of one paragraph and re-opened in the next
  • Fixed an issue with <hr /> tags (which should go on their own line with no surrounding text to allow the parser to do its thing)
• Added an email link to assignments that only the challenge owner can see

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a tag wrangling bug regarding the introduction of new fandoms
• Fixed an issue with auto-complete in the fandom field when posting a work
• Fixed several issues regarding collections and challenges
  • You can now post works to a collection before fulfilling your main assignment
  • If you've posted a work to a secret exchange, this work's fandom won't show up on your user page before reveal
  • If a challenge has more than x sign-ups, the summary page will only be generated hourly to make it less of a resource hog (currently x = 20)
• Added an error message when auto-complete can't find characters or relationships for the fandom you entered (or when you forgot to enter a fandom)
• Fixed a bug where the Rich Text Editor wouldn't work after preview
• Fixed a bug where you couldn't dedicate more than one gift to the same user
• Unbroke the tag clouds (which now actually show the most popular and some random tags, respectively)
• Fixed a bug that would delete characters from titles in epub and mobi files

Today, November 15th, is the first anniversary of the Open Beta launch of the Archive of Our Own! We're totally thrilled to reach this milestone!

Open Beta was the launch of our beautiful Archive into the fannish world at large, and came after two years of intense coding, testing, fundraising, writing of docs, development of policy, and other amazing work. Everyone working on the Archive was super-excited to be able to share the fruits of this work with the rest of fandom, after a year of testing with just a small group of volunteers in Closed Beta.

The results since we launched suggest that fandom loved our shiny work as much as we did! We have expanded faster than we ever dreamed.

When we entered Open Beta on 15 November 2009 we had:

• 347 users


• 668 fandoms


• 6565 works

At the time of writing we have reached:

• 10649 users


• 7757 fandoms


• 116888 works

We're looking forward to seeing our userbase grow and diversify even more - our International Outreach committee have been working hard on the mission of improving the experience for multinational fans. We already have 22 languages represented on the Archive, but we want to see more! (Let Support know if you want to post in a language not represented on that list!)

All this fannish activity filled up our servers quick-smart, so after only one year we're investing in new, much more powerful ones - an investment made possible by the generous support of fandom at large.

We've still got much, much more work to do - Open Beta is, well, beta, and it's been a year of immense change and growth for us. We've learnt a lot about what makes our users happy and we look forward to improving based on all the feedback we've had from fandom. But we're also VERY proud of how much we've achieved so far. Here are a few reflections from staffers on what reaching the first anniversary of Open Beta means to them - do add your thoughts in comments!

Zooey Glass, AD&T Chair

I'm totally amazed and proud of how much work and dedication has gone into this project. I was around last year for Open Beta, and I remember how crazily hard everyone involved was working (I think I still feel exhausted by it). Just this week, I've watched my team sit up all night to test and deploy new code - and then to bugfix when unexpected problems cropped up - and it makes me feel awed and proud. There's so much passion and so much hard work invested in this project.

For me personally, the year since Open Beta has also been about learning - about what kind of features users want, how to communicate with people inside the org and out, how to balance what we want and what we need, and HUGE amounts about servers and code and technical stuff I never dreamed I could understand (I was an English major!). My personal journey also reflects the journey the Archive has taken, and I know everything we have learnt this year will go to make the next year even better. I choke up when I see the feedback we get from users - fandom has supported us not only financially but also by taking the time to say thanks when they see things they enjoy. We're so glad we make you happy, and we really appreciate it when you tell us!

On a practical note, I also LOVE reading on the Archive - so much nommy fic to enjoy!

Helka Lantto, International Outreach member and Finnish translator

My involvement with AO3 has been mostly as a user – as a reader, to be exact. I began reading fic on the Archive after the Open Beta launch, and with time passing, I've come to prefer it to any other archive. True, the code is still in beta, but the Archive shows so much promise that I can't help but love it. In the future, my involvement with the Archive will grow when we get to translate the interface. It'll be a huge undertaking, especially for a small team like Finnish (hint! hint!), but it'll be worth it. It warmed my heart to see that we already have a few fics in Finnish there. Let's hope that with the translation of the interface, we'll get more of them.

Sidra, Systems Co-Chair and AD&T coder

The past two years have been a tremendous learning experience. Those of us in Systems had little to no experience with web applications that receive (during busy times) more than sixty thousand hits per hour, or databases that average two hundred requests per second. And those numbers will just keep climbing. Keeping the servers up and running has been a challenge but the rewards have been huge. Every time I look at the Archive I think, "I helped make this happen". And every time I see something I wish were different (which is, unfortunately, quite often), I know that I can work on making it better.

Enigel, AD&T coder, honorary tester, tag wrangler

I remember the flurry of activity before we launched Open Beta - coding, testing, bug-hunting, performance-testing - and the worries about the best number of invites to hand out per day. There were around 300 users back then, and I can now, when we're at over 10 000, confess that I had some doubts about the worrying itself. I was thinking to myself that it was kind of presumptuous to imagine the hordes of people knocking on our door before we were sure they were indeed going to be that eager, you know? ;)

It was amazing, over the next days, to see people asking for invites, people posting their works, people actually using this thing I had helped build. Every message with praise was a sign we did something good, every message with criticism was a sign that people cared enough to let us know what could be improved, and was a step towards making the Archive better.

10 000 users and 100K works later, I still have that awe and joy at seeing people use the Archive. If you notice something you think could be better, remember: your next support request might become my next coding project! :)

Kristen Murphy, Webmasters chair and tag wrangler

We made this. Once upon a time someone asked, "Can't we do this?" and fandom answered, "YES." That can-do, DIY spirit is one of my favorite things about the Archive. Every time I visit it, whether it's to browse for new works, post a story of my own, or wrangle tags, I think: this is here because a whole lot of fans cared enough to make it happen. The Archive truly is a labor of love. And it isn't only the staff and volunteers who have made it happen, although their efforts have been superheroic — this has been and continues to be a community-wide endeavor. Everyone who offered feedback on the early drafts of the TOS, everyone who's ever submitted a bug report or suggestion, everyone who's donated, everyone who's helped spread the word by posting a story to the Archive and inviting their friends to come and read it — all of these people have made the Archive possible and are helping to make it better, day by day. Thank you.

Rebecca Tushnet, Content Policy chair

I'm pretty sure there are monkeys that know more code than I do, but I'm so pleased to be able to participate in building the Archive by working on policy language that is, we hope, understandable, flexible, and inclusive. What the AO3 means to me is an archive that tries to do things that fans want done in a way that is sustainable in the long term. I have particularly enjoyed seeing tags used in new and exciting ways, combining folksonomy with structured organization. I really admire all the fans who've coded, wrangled, and kept the site up and running, and I look forward to the shiny new servers to make things even better.

Megan Westerby, Archive Support Chair and Development Officer

Stepping into the Support Committee recently I was struck by not only the Archive's fast growth but with how diverse that growth has been. When the Archive went into Open Beta there were 668 fandoms represented -- to have 7757 fandoms just one year later, on servers we own, on a system we built, on an Archive we've invested in -- it's boggling to think where we might be in a year, after video embeds, tagging structure and bookmarking start to make an impact. It's boggling and encouraging. We're building a home and a future and we built it from the foundation up.

Yuletide Treasure, an annual fic exchange challenge hosted by Astolat and Elynross, is running on on the Archive of Our Own again this year. This is a big fannish event which has a big impact on the Archive: this post aims to give a bit more information about the relationship between Yuletide and the AO3 and to give Archive users an idea of what to expect while the challenge is running — roughly from now until the first week of January.

Yuletide is not an OTW project; rather, it's a private project created and moderated by two fans who make decisions about how it will be run. The timeline and parameters of the Yuletide challenge are set by the Yuletide moderators, and the Archive team expends significant time and effort to accommodate those needs for two compelling reasons: first, because it is part of the OTW's mission to support at-risk fannish endeavors such as Yuletide; and second, because Yuletide provides a valuable test case for the Archive, providing us with the opportunity to develop and refine our code in realistic conditions while the site is still in beta. Because of the size of the Yuletide challenge, it provides us with a level of use which would be exceedingly difficult to replicate under testing conditions. In addition, because one of the Yuletide mods is also a staffer with the OTW, we have the ability to work closely with them and get the feedback we need.

Yuletide is a very large challenge with thousands of participants, and it involves periods of heavy server traffic — particularly around the time of sign-ups, the story-uploading deadline, and the day stories are revealed to readers. Although our volunteers have been working hard to improve system performance, we know that this heavy traffic will cause the Archive to be slow, and we fully expect that some things will break. Please understand that this is the nature of beta testing. We know it's no fun to encounter a slow or buggy website when you're trying to view or post works, but by testing the Archive under the intense conditions of Yuletide now, we can learn where the problems are and how best to correct them while the code is still in beta. This is particularly important for us this year, as we're on the brink of investing lots of money in new, shiny servers, and understanding where the points of stress are in the existing servers will help us evaluate our needs going forward.

The Archive staff wish to express our gratitude to everyone who is assisting with this massive effort, including the coders, testers, tag wranglers, Support and Systems staff, Astolat and Elynross, and the many Yuletide participants who have pitched in to help with testing and tag checking. We would also like to ask all Archive beta users, including those who are not participating in Yuletide, for their patience and understanding during the next several weeks. We cannot promise that everything will run smoothly, but we can promise that this experience will help us make the Archive stronger, more resilient, and generally shinier in the future. If you'd like to participate more directly in making the Archive better, we welcome feedback and volunteers!

Welcome to Revision 3295, up from 2998. This release is a big one - we've upgraded the framework the Archive runs on to version 3 of Rails, which involved rewriting ALL the code.

7 different coders contributed code to this release, and many, many more people worked to bring it about. Major kudos to Sidra, Elz and Naomi, who did all the heavy lifting when it came to rewriting ALL the code. We're also excited to welcome first commit from new coder rebecca, who contributed lots of fixes to this release! Thanks to Cesy and all the coders who worked to write Cucumber tests, which helped us make this upgrade with confidence. Much gratitude to Eylul and Kylie, our test leads, for their hard work coordinating volunteer testers and testing. And thank you to everyone else who contributed with support, documentation, cheerleading, tag wrangling - and to the users who contributed generously during our October membership drive to help provide a secure financial future for the Archive (next stop - more servers!) \0/

Highlights

Rails 3 upgrade

This release is also known as "OMG Rails 3! \o/" You might see us a little excited by this - so excited we added a special Rails 3 Archive logo for this deploy. :) We have upgraded the framework the Archive runs on to Rails 3 - this basically meant rewriting or tweaking ALL the code. Most of the changes should be invisible to users, but Rails 3 should bring a lot of performance improvements. The awesome testing team and temporary testers have done an amazing job of doing a full regression test in a very short time, making sure that you see only the nice outcomes of the upgrade!

Sanitizer and parser changes

We have significantly changed our HTML sanitizing and parsing. When you post a work on the Archive, we check the code and strip out anything that we can't be sure is safe, and also format it nicely for you. We used to do this when someone viewed the code, but that was a big performance drain! Now we do it when we save the code, and when you edit you'll be able to see the formatted code we produced (don't be alarmed when HTML tags show up on edit!). This should make things much clearer for authors and much faster for readers! For more details of the change and how it will affect you, please see our post on the new parser.

Video embedding

We're super-excited to be able to announce the introduction of something many people have been waiting for - you can now embed video on the Archive! Video embeds are working from Youtube, Vimeo, blip.tv, Dailymotion, Viddler, Metacafe and 4shared. We have to limit it to specific sites for security reasons, but if you use another hosting site and want us to add it, please submit a support request with a link to the site and we'll add it if we can.

AO3.org

We spent some shiny pennies to purchase AO3.org, so now, if you type this into your browser, it will redirect to archiveofourown.org. Less typing for you!

Gift Exchange improvements

Gift exchanges now offer the following dazzling options to moderators setting
them up:
- allow offer/request ANY
- require unique values across prompts/offers (ie "all fandoms must be unique")
- generate fandom, character, relationship, and freeform tag lists based on the average number of uses of the tag on the Archive (so if you want to run a challenge focused on under represented characters you can create an easy list to start with)
- restrict character/relationship/freeform tag autocomplete to those belonging to
the selected fandom (this depends on whether they have been wrangled by our team of intrepid wranglers - get in touch with them via a support request if you have particular needs)

New default font

You may notice that headings on the Archive now look a bit different. We used to use a custom font, Fertigo, which was packaged with the Archive (so every user could see it, regardless of whether they had it installed on their own computer). It was very pretty! Unfortunately, it did not behave well with some non-Latin characters, and was causing a few perfomance issues too, so we have retired it. If you have works in Cyrillic or Greek which previously had weird characters in the title, this change should fix it.

If you miss Fertigo and would like it back, or you want to change the way the Archive looks in other ways, don't forget you can create a custom skin! Check out our tutorial on skins for more information.

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page.

Release details

Features

• Challenges code


• A lot of improvements and additions to automated tests


• Some extra security to tag wrangle filtering


• Renamed user-generated-views to userstuff for conciseness


• Huge overhaul of sanitizing and parsing


• Added custom author parser in preparation for rescuing the whitfic and
  grahamslash archives


• Ability to turn off tag wrangling at times of heavy traffic


• Adding page for fandoms without wranglers


• Styling and sorting for challenge summary page


• Swapped out birthday party icon for another temporary icon celebrating our Rails upgrade!


• Modified styling in the rich text editor so that it displays in the same way as it will look on post.


• Improved accuracy of wordcount feature. \0/


• Modified comment link on downloads so that it goes direct to the 'Add comment' form, for greater feedbacking ease.


• Added ability for admins to edit public skins.


• Added meta section for downloaded works.


• Added ability to delete or post drafts directly from the 'My Drafts' page.


• Added ability to tag works on import.


• Moved 'Mark to read later' to the top of works.


• Retired our old custom font, Fertigo.


• Added a descriptive title for downloads so that all devices list downloads by the work title instead of just by 'download'.


• Added ability to restrict downloading works to logged-in users, for times of heavy load or in case of a DoS attack.


• Changed the list of fandoms on user profile pages so that it only shows fandom tags they have actually used on their works (not the parent metatags) and sorts those in order of the number of works.

Bug Fixes

• Fix for "Chapter 1" heading appearing on downloads of stories with only one chapter


• Unposted chapters included in downloads


• Fixed bug with edit option showing on the work preview page.


• Fixed bug causing some symbol icons to disappear on works listings.


• Fixed bug causing unposted chapters to appear on chapter navigation listings.


• Fix for bug causing no results to be returned when limiting search to a specific category.


• Fixed various encoding issues causing problems with tags which included special characters.


• Fixed a problem causing endless redirects on the preferences page when there was an error.


• Fixed problem causing errors when downloading some works with special characters.


• Modified pdf downloads so they appeared with a plain white background.


• Improved adult content warning behavior so that links to 'Show comments' are preserved when you have to click through the warning.

Along with the upgrade to Rails 3, there have been significant changes and improvements to our HTML sanitizing and parsing in Release 0.8.2. These changes should make things clearer for authors and much faster for readers!

Here is a quick breakdown for those who just want the highlights, followed by a more detailed explanation of what was changed and how it all works.

Highlights

• Blank lines and carriage returns will now be converted to paragraph (<p></p>) and line-break (<br />) tags in the text editor.


• The text will automatically be parsed and "cleaned up" -- any tags that were left open get closed, any mis-nested tags get fixed, etc.


• The text will be sanitized, to remove any elements that are potentially harmful to our server.


• This change fixes the known bug where switching from HTML mode to Rich Text mode causes all your paragraphs to disappear. (Yay!)


• This change will also allow users to embed video from: youtube, vimeo, blip.tv, dailymotion, viddler, metacafe, and 4shared. (Yay!)

What's Behind the Scenes

The new back end for content works in three steps.

1. There is now a paragraph-adder that converts blank lines and carriage returns into paragraph tags (<p></p>) and break tags (<br />) based on a few simple rules:

• A blank line left between two pieces of text will be made separate paragraphs:

Here is paragraph one.

Here is paragraph two.

will become:

<p>Here is paragraph one.</p>

<p>Here is paragraph two.</p>

• A carriage return or newline in the middle of text will add a break tag:

Here is a line
with a carriage return in the middle.

will become:

Here is a line <br />
with a carriage return in the middle.

• We also will preserve extra blank lines -- if you have TWO blank lines in a row, we will add in an empty paragraph:

Here is paragraph one, and I want extra space after it.

Here is paragraph two.

will become:

<p>Here is paragraph one, and I want extra space after it.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Here is paragraph two.</p>

• Note: The paragraph-adder will put <br /> tags at the end of each line whenever there is a carriage return, even in things like lists. So, if you have a nice chunk of HTML in your story that you coded up by hand like this:

<ul>
<li>Item one.</li>
<li>Item two.</li>
</ul>

You can avoid having <br /> tags added by putting the list into a single line with no carriage returns instead:

<ul><li>Item one.</li><li>Item two.</li></ul>

• any tags that were left open get closed


• any mis-nested tags get fixed (eg, if you do <strong><em>foo!</strong></em> Nokogiri will turn that into the correct version (<strong><em>Foo!</em></strong>)


• any attribute values that aren't properly in quotes get fixed

There is lots of documentation available on Nokogiri and Sanitize on their respective sites.

What you see when editing

• If you are working in a field (like content in the Post New Work form) that allows you to use the Rich Text Editor, the tags <p> and <br /> will show, because otherwise if you switch to the Rich Text Editor, it will do that horrible thing where your whitespace disappears and your text all runs together into one giant blob!
• If you manually put in some <p> tags that had extra attributes on them, like "<p align=center>", the tags will show.
• The <p> and <br /> tags will not show when you edit fields like notes and summary, however, where there is no option to use the Rich Text Editor.

Here's an example of how the tags will look on content in the Post New Work form:

Barring last minute snags, we'll be deploying new code to the Archive of Our Own today! This is a BIG release - we've upgraded the site to run on Rails 3 (the framework the Archive is built on), a change that involved changing ALL the code. We also have some new code for collections and challenges, some performance enhancements, and a bunch of other nice little tweaks and enhancements.

Because this release involves lots of big changes, the Archive will have scheduled downtime while we deploy. We expect to take the site down for approximately 12 hours from 13.00 EST on 11 November 2010 (what time is this in my timezone?) . This time may change if we hit unexpected problems, but we'll send out a message on our Archive status Twitter account AO3_Status before we start and when the Archive comes back up.

We thank you for your patience, and we hope you'll enjoy the improvements in the Archive when the maintenance is done!

The Archive has had an exciting year! We bought shiny, shiny servers (of our own!) in September 2009, allowing us to move out of closed beta and share the wonderful fruits of our coders' and testers' labor with the rest of fandom! Since entering Open Beta on 15 November 2009, we've had a dizzying succession of exciting achievements!

• We've introduced tons of awesome features, both big and small: the ability to backdate a work, new options for bookmarking and reccing, skins, mobile downloads, tools for running collections and challenges, and many, many more!


• We saw two successful challenges run as test cases for our collections code - Yuletide Treasure in December 2009 and Remix Redux in March 2010 - and saw many more wonderful challenges and collections set up home on the Archive, including the Final Fantasy fanworks exchange, the House M.D. Big Bang Challenge, and the LGBT fest.


• We celebrated the first birthday of the servers of our own with a party, cake and lots of fannish creativity!


• We helped set up two new committees in the OTW - Tag Wranglers and Support - who joined Accessibility, Design & Technology in managing the day-to-day work on the Archive!


• On 20 August 2010 we hit 100,000 works on the Archive!


• On 10 October 2010 (10/10/10!) we hit 10,000 registered Archive users!


• We add approximately 150 new users per week (and we have more requests that that - we have to add people slowly so the site can cope).

We have so many more exciting things planned, including art and vid hosting, subscriptions, improved challenge code, more options for bookmarking and reccing, private messages, and better commenting features.

All of this cool stuff is made possible by the collective contribution of fandom, which has come together to code, test, run systems, tag wrangle, provide user support, offer legal advice to help protect the fannish mission of the Archive, and support the AO3 financially through donations to the OTW. Our user numbers grow every day, and the servers of our own are already creaking under the weight of all that fannish passion and creativity. Thanks to the support of our members, we're already able to commit to buying new, more powerful servers (our Systems committee are choosing them RIGHT NOW) - but we need your continuing financial support going forward to keep on extending our infrastructure, and to pay for bandwidth and hosting costs. Just $2 from every Archive member would be enough to pay for our new hardware; we're asking for a US$10 donation. That support will make you an OTW member, with voting privileges. You already have a voice in the future of the AO3 - all users do. But your donation will help us make fandom's dreams a reality.

Make sure fandom can continue to own our own servers! Donate to the OTW now!

There have been a few discussions around the last few weeks about commenting on the Archive of Our Own, and while we have some ideas of our own for improving and encouraging more feedback in general, we would love to invite more ideas from all of you!

Some of our current plans:

• basic performance improvements to the comment form so it works quicker :)
• a "kudos" feature that lets a reader indicate (with an optional one-line comment) if they enjoyed a story, complete with happy icon:
  

• adding more nifty stats including # of downloads, and referring pages in the last month or so (so author can see if they were recced somewhere)


• "badges" for heavy commenters (possibly with bonuses for commenting on older stories)


• marking stories on the Reading History page as commented-on or not, allowing you to sort by this status


• an option to reply to multiple comments at once


• a "private" comment option to send comments just to the author


• Adding an option to send an invite to people who comment without an AO3 account.


• This is a more general feature: an optional "tip of the day" that will show the first time you come to the archive on a given day, which might point you to a new feature, suggest creating a new bookmark, or suggest posting a comment on a read story.

Do you have other ideas? Thoughts on these? Let us know what would make commenting more fun, or what other kinds of feedback you would like to get on your works!

All the latest news on the Archive of Our Own! Cake, servers, and Rails 3!

We all still had slight cake hangovers at this meeting after our wonderful party to celebrate our servers' first birthday!

Baby servers are one - our birthday party

Thank you to all the Archive users and volunteers who came along to our birthday party to celebrate the first anniversary of our servers of our own! It was an amazing party full of squee, virtual cake, fannish chat and amazing creativity - check out our round-up post for more details of all our party hijinks! Since the party our users have been busy - we now have over 107500 works hosted on the Archive and over 9496 users!

We really appreciate all the lovely feedback we receive - thanks to the many people who take a moment to drop us a line via our Support form or leave us a comment to let us know the things they are enjoying. This project is the hard work of lots and lots of volunteers, and it's a huge boost when people let us know our hard work is appreciated!

Forthcoming changes - Rails 3

There'll be a longer gap than usual before we release any new features, as the next task our coders will be working on is the upgrade to Rails 3 (the framework the Archive runs on). This is a big job which will affect all the code in the Archive, so we're pausing work on new features to allow this to take place. We think that the shiny new features in the last release make up for a little pause!

News from our sub-committees and sister committees

• Coders are working on all the tasks necessary to upgrade to Rails 3 - writing more automated tests, updating our documentation, and figuring out the actual changes that will be needed in our code base.


• Testers are updating documentation about regression testing in readiness for the Rails 3 upgrade. Regression testing involves working through every aspect of the site to check that everything is working right and looking good (automated tests help to check these things, but for big changes there is no substitute for real people testing!)


• Tag wranglers have been thinking about ways of making our wrangling system easier for users to understand and keeping up with the many new tags being added to the Archive by our new users!


• Support have been working hard to keep up with lots of Support requests from new users. They're doing a fantastic job, but there is a higher volume of requests than usual, so please bear with us if it takes them a little while to get back to you.

If there are things you'd like to do or say, please share them in comments, via the AO3 support and feedback form, by volunteering, or in whatever medium you feel comfortable with. Everyone is welcome to this party!

This party had it all: a glittery cake to fuel our server anthropomorphic challenge, a scavenger hunt, reccing and self-reccing fests, teamwork to help each other upload back catalogs, and a special tag just for party fic. Here’s to another year of cheering each other on as we read, create, and transform.

Midnight to midnight is a long time to party but our wonderful guests have kept the energy high! Here are some details on our marvelous accomplishments:

• 1411 new works, 224 new users, 103 new fandoms!!!


• Archive Of Our Own Anthropomorfic!


• AO3 RPF!


• AO3 Party RPF featuring eye shadow and a sly reference to the OTW Brandbook!


• Collaborative AO3 Chat Party Poetry!


• Party icons!


• Our Favorite Things in the Archive. You can still add yours in the comments!


• 105K Works! A party-wide post-a-thon helped us reach our goal of 105,000 works posted to the Archive – and then we surpassed it! It was probably all that anthropomorfic…

We also compared time zones! And there were a LOT of them. During the last hour alone, the partygoers hailed from:

New Zealand — New York City, New York, USA — Buenos Aires, Argentina — Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA — Indiana, USA — Finland — Romania — Turkey — Quebec City, Quebec, Canada — Maryland, USA — Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA — Los Angeles, California, USA — New Hampshire, USA — upstate New York, USA — North Carolina, USA — Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA — Niedersachsen, Germany — Dublin, Ireland — Seattle, Washington, USA — Missouri, USA — Ontario, Canada — England, United Kingdom

We even had a fandom roll call in our final hour! Check it out:

Classical music RPF — Can I call "crack" as a fandom? — Community — Disney RPF — Miami Vice — House — Doctor Who, ElfQuest, Anita Blake — Tokio Hotel — Sophie's World — Highlander, Doctor Who, British Actor RPF — SGA — Beatles RPF — Fandom: YES. — baum's oz books! — Sherlock (BBC), The Dresden Files (books), Doctor Who (2005), Temeraire, Hut 33, Traveler, Supernatural, Merlin (BBC), White Collar, Chuck — this one's easy, I'm actually the ONLY ficcer in one of my fandoms! — David Eddings — Black Rock Shooter! — Power Rangers! — (monkees is the only fandom of mine where i have written poetry) — Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes, DCU, Slings & Arrows, Promethean Age (oh GOD) — robotech is the only fandom that i've painted in! — Lord of the Rings — Vorkosigan — Man from UNCLE — \o/ Vorkosigan! — Star Trek, X-Files, Hilda Tablet and Others, McCarthyism RPF — Covert Affairs — elisabeth, tanz der vampire, mozart! — Jane Austen, Firefly, 28 Days Later, Once and Again, Breakfast Club, Naruto, Hikaru no Go, X-Files, Harry Potter — claymore, black rock shooter, pretty cure, akira (manga), belgariad/malloreon, elenium/tamuli, eureka seven, kino's journey, gundam wing, aaaand dc comics — Hellboy II — oh also JAMES BOND — Sherlock Holmes. Book-verse. — Iron Man — Akira — Harry Potter, Star Trek, X-Men and X-Men: Evolution — Battlestar Galactica! — ooh, robin of sherwood was my very first fic-reading fandom — highlander films, historical fiction, stephen king's rose red, raymond e. feist’s riftwar saga (and everything else in those universes he wrote, jesus christ mr feist), spooks, spice world.

Gentle reminder: the OTW and AO3 are run through fan energy, commitment, and donations — and eventually we’ll need more servers to slash with the existing servers. Please consider becoming an OTW member and donating to the cause!

We're celebrating the birthday of our shiny shiny servers! One of the most important and most exciting things about the Archive is the fact it represents the amazing achievement of fandom pulling together to generate the investment and expertise needed to create a true home of our own. Since September 2009, fandom has owned the servers, and the OTW is committed to making those servers a safe space for the fannish community.

Owning the servers is awesome, but just as important is what we use those servers for! We aim to make the Archive a welcoming place for fans not just because fandom owns the servers, but because the Archive is built by fans, for fans and has lots of awesome features which make a better experience for readers and creators. During our birthday party, Archive staffers and users have been talking about our favourite features - check out our list below and comment to let us know you what you love the most!

Here are a few of our favourite things!

Zooey, AD&T Chair: I LOVE the History feature! It keeps track of everything you view on the Archive, and records the date you viewed it and whether it has changed since. I am incredibly lazy about bookmarking fic, so this is totally a killer feature for me - when I think 'what was that awesome fic I read?' I can look back and find it. We're planning more features for this in future - I can't WAIT till we add the filtering option so it's easy for me to find a specific work without browsing through the whole list.

Astolat, coder: OMG advanced search! It is a little bit tricksy and we are still working on the GUI for it, but there is nothing not awesome about just being able to do: "tag: merlin/arthur (explicit|mature) words: >1000" and suddenly you have JUST THE STORIES you want.

Sidra, coder: Download as epub! You can browse the archive inside stanza on your iPhone and when you find something *poof* it's offline and ready to read. And when you get to the end, there's a link which takes you right back to comment. Super cool!

Enigel, coder: Tags! (Also known as "wuzzles".) Tags and the way they tie into browsing: I'll be reading a John/Sherlock fic and then I can use the tags to hop to the Sherlock (TV) listing, and then follow the Crossover tag and maybe pick up a new fandom... It's a never-ending link-hopping dance. :D

Yueix, user: Favorite feature so far is being able to read whole works (multi-chapters) as one continuous story.

bingeling, designer: I love the Archive simply for being multi-fandom. Whenever I'm in the mood to read something that's not my main fandom I simply check what the Archive has to offer and most of the time I'll find something. Pre-Archive it was always quite a bit of work to actually find the fic. If it wasn't your fandom, you didn't know its infrastructure. Thanks to the Archive I now always know where to start looking. ♥

Helka, kääntäjä: Minusta on hauskaa, että niin moni pieni fandom on edustettuna Arkistossa. Yli 5500 fandomia! Joissakin fandomeissa on tuhansia tarinoita, joissakin vain yksi ainokainen, mutta jokainen tarina on arvokas. Voin mennä fandom-listaukseen ja selata vaikkapa kaikkia kirja-fandomeita, tai sitten voin etsiä jotain tiettyä fandomia etsintä-toiminnolla. Ja joka päivä Arkistoon tulee lisää tarinoita! \o/

lorax, user: Favorite archive feature by FAR is the challenge sign up features. I did remix through the auto sign up this year, and it's fantastic and keeps everything so easy to find. I'm really looking forward to seeing how yuletide uses the challenge sign up through the site this year, if they do.

Julia, Übersetzerin: Ich halte das Eigene Archiv jetzt schon für eine wunderschöne, nützliche Sache, aber was es für mich auszeichnet ist dieses Gefühl, dass nach oben hin alles offen ist. Dass durch die Vorschläge der Nutzer gepaart mit der Reaktionsfreudigkeit der Programmiererinnen zusammen Stück für Stück ein Archiv entsteht, das in der Summe seiner Teile dann doch verdammt revolutionär ist -- besonders, weil es im Moment erst einen Bruchteil seines Potentials zeigt.

mlle, user: My favorite feature is the little symbol box next to each work. It tells me at a glance whether or not a fic has anything in it I want to avoid. Priceless.

X-parrot, tag wrangler: As a hopelessly pedantic author, I love that whilst replying to a comment, I happen to notice I'm missing yet another "the" in my latest chapter's final paragraph, I can hit "edit" and instantly put that to rights!

Christie, user: I love the freedom to post anything and the great search :D

Anne-Li, Support staffer: I love that it is central, you don't have to look at a gazillion places to find (good) fic.

Derry, user: My favourite feature is the ebook download! I can stuff my PRS full of juicy, glorious fanfic with just one click!

Tai, tester: My favourite thing is the Reading history - I don't have to muck around bookmarking stuff I want to read and then wondering where I put it, just open the page and come back to it at leisure.

theliterator, user: Here's what I love the most, which is what I'm using right now. The importer.

zelempa, coder: I am still discovering new features so what I love in advance is this blog post.

Alison, tag wrangling committee: My favourite is ALL the features.

Share some of yours!

We currently have nearly 9000 users on the Archive, who between them have posted more than 100,000 works, in over 5500 different fandoms. We figure this means we are making lots of people happy! Let us know in the comments to this post what you enjoy about the Archive!

Happy birthday to us, happy birthday to us, happy biiiiirthday dear servers, happy birthday to us! The beautiful, beautiful servers of our own are one year old! We're incredibly proud of the fannish energy and investment that enabled us to buy our beautiful servers - thank you fandom!

Birthday presents

As our birthday gift to fandom, we've launched an AWESOME code release. Release 0.8.1 includes skins, mobile exports, and a very special guest logo!

As part of our birthday goody bag, we're also giving every Archive user an invitation so that everyone can invite a friend to the party! If you go to your user home and check out 'Manage invitations' you'll be able to see and use your invitation. You can also request more if you need them!

If you don't already have an Archive account, you don't have to be left out! Just add your email address to our Invitations Queue and you should receive an invitation within a few days. Everyone who was in the queue after we released our birthday code was issued an invitation right away!

Birthday party!

We're having a party to celebrate, starting now! Drop into our Public Discussion chatroom anytime today to join the party - Just head for this URL and type in the name you'd like to represent you, and you'll be in: https://fanarchive.campfirenow.com/28473.

Singing happy birthday!

All birthday girls deserve some praise! Throughout the party, we'll be talking about what Archive staffers and users love the most about the Archive -- we'll round up a sample of these, and post them for everyone to enjoy and add their own thoughts to! Everyone's killer features in one place!

Also posted on the OTW News Blog

Welcome to Revision 2998, up from 2850. 8 different coders worked on this release! \0/ [sparkles]

Highlights

Refactoring, performance fixes and automated tests

Our senior coders have been continuing to work on refactoring, performance fixes and automated tests in preparation for our upgrade to a newer version of Rails, the programming language the Archive is made in.

Skins

Skins are here at long last! You can now choose how the Archive displays fonts and colors when you're logged in to your account.

We have a few site skins ready-made for you. You can see a quick preview and the code we use to make them at the skins page. Now, when you look under "My Preferences", there is a drop-down menu that lets you choose a different look and feel for the archive. For more details on how to create and use Skins, please check out our Skins Tutorial.

This is just the beginning. Skins are still in beta, and we have some great plans for the future, including a much better Wizard to help people create their own skins.

Ebook downloads

Lots of fans asked for this, and we're very happy to be able to release it at last - we've added the option to download stories for your ebook reader. You can choose from epub, mobi and PDF formats.

Minimize your user page's inclusion in search engines

We've added a new preference, to minimize your user page's inclusion in search engine results. This isn't a guarantee, as not all search engines respect the guidelines, but it will help. This setting currently only affects your user profile - the next release will apply it to your works as well. However, if you want to make absolutely sure your works don't appear in search engines, you'll need to lock them to Archive users only.

Changing "Pairings" to "Relationships"

In order to reflect the purpose of the field more accurately, we have changed the 'Pairings' label on works to 'Relationships'. We think this better reflects the diversity of romantic configurations as well as encouraging people to include friendships in this field (this was always the plan, but we didn't advertise it well!).

Friendship tags work the same as pairing tags have worked in the past and, once the wranglers have wrangled them, take the canonical form "Sha Gojyo & Cho Hakkai", so this is what your friendship tags will look like in filters!

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page.

Release details

Features

• Introduction of Archive skins! This involved many, many separate code issues!


• Added the option to download works in mobile formats


• 'Read later' button - adds the work to your viewing history (if you have it enabled) and flags it as unread.


• Moved revision number from the header to the footer, for greater prettiness.


• Added sparkly logo for Archive birthday!


• Changed 'pairings' to 'relationships' across the Archive.


• Added lots more automated tests for collections, skins, chapter rearrangement, autocompletes, tag wrangling, visibility, series rearrangement, support form and CSS sanitization.


• Split different advanced search types onto separate pages.


• Added the option to minimize the inclusion of works and user profiles in search engines.


• Added lots and lots of new options for colored text!


• Added the option to mark series as works in progress or complete.


• Added a feature to suggest posting a work or bookmark to users who have nothing on their user homepage.

Bug Fixes

• Fix for broken bookmark autocomplete.


• Text areas (like the post work form) were affected by a very annoying bug in IE8, which made the text jump after every edit. We added an IE8-specific style sheet to get around IE8's bugginess.


• Fix for bug which caused errors when wranglers added synonyms to a canonical freeform tag.


• Importing works: Ensured that the original posted-on date is preserved when a work is imported form another site.


• Fix for bug preventing the creation of new series.


• Fix for bug which erroneously caused works to appear as if they belonged to collections.


• Ensured that users will not see the date in their local time if it is the same as the Archive default time (so they don't see the same date twice).


• Fix for some inaccuracies in character counter.


• Fix for overzealous imports from Yuletide - these no longer import navigation!


• Changed outdated 'challenges' link in site map.


• Ensured that works still get added to history when read chapter-by-chapter.


• Ensured that 'add to collection' link appeared when viewing works chapter-by-chapter.


• Ensured that 'redirect to back' will work without an error for users who have set their browsers not to send referrer information.


• Ensured that running our automated tests does not send test messages to our Support bug tracker!


• Fixed minor inconsistencies in HTML and grammar of our TOS.


• Added a hyphen on the Archive homepage.


• Fixed a problem causing the wrong name to appear in notifications for co-authors.

Willkommen zur Revision 2998, die auf Revision 2850 folgt. 8 verschiedene Programmiererinnen haben an dieser Veröffentlichung gearbeitet.

Anmerkung der Übersetzerinnen: Alle Links in diesem Text führen zum Archiv, das zur Zeit nur auf Englisch vorliegt. Für weitere Details siehe die englische Version der Anmerkungen.

Highlights

Refaktorierung, Leistungsverbesserung und automatisierte Tests

Unsere erfahrenen Programmiererinnen haben in Vorbereitung auf die Aktualisierung zu einer neuen Rails-Version weiter an Refaktorierung, Leistungsverbesserung und automatisierten Tests gearbeitet. Rails ist die Programmiersprache, in der das Archiv geschrieben wird.

Designs

Die langersehnten Designs sind da! Ihr könnt jetzt einstellen, in welchen Schriften und Farben das Archiv dargestellt wird, wenn ihr mit eurem Nutzerkonto eingeloggt seid.

Wir haben einige fertige Designs für euch vorbereitet. Eine kurze Vorschau sowie den verwendeten Code seht ihr auf der Seite für Designs. Unter "My Preferences" ("Meine Einstellungen") gibt es jetzt ein Aufklappmenü, in dem ihr das Aussehen des Archivs für euch bestimmen könnt. Mehr Informationen darüber, wie man Designs benutzt und erstellt, findet ihr in unserem Design-Tutorial.

Aber das ist erst der Anfang. Die Designs sind noch in der Betaphase und wir haben große Pläne für die Zukunft: etwa einen viel besseren Design-Assistenten, der euch beim Erstellen eigener Designs hilft.

E-Book-Downloads

Auf eure zahlreichen Wünsche hin haben wir die Funktion hinzugefügt, Geschichten in gängigen E-Book-Formaten herunterzuladen. Ihr könnt zwischen epub, mobi und PDF wählen.

Verringern des Auftauchens eurer Nutzerprofile in Suchmaschinen

Wir haben eine neue Einstellung hinzugefügt, mit der ihr die Wahrscheinlichkeit verringern könnt, mit der euer Nutzerprofil in Suchergebnissen externer Suchmaschinen auftaucht. Zwar können wir nicht garantieren, dass alle Suchmaschinen diese Richtlinien einhalten, aber es hilft auf jeden Fall. Momentan betrifft das nur euer Profil – in der nächsten Veröffentlichung werden wir das auf eure Werke ausweiten. Falls ihr absolut nicht wollt, dass eure Geschichten bei Google auftauchen, müsst ihr den Zugriff auf Archivnutzer beschränken.

"Pairings" werden zu "Beziehungen"

Um den Zweck des Stichwortfeld besser wiederzugeben, heißen "Pairings" von jetzt an "Beziehungen" ("Relationships"). Wir glauben, dass damit die Vielfalt romantischer Verflechtungen besser dargestellt wird und außerdem Nutzerinnen eher dazu ermutigt werden, auch Freundschaften in diesem Feld einzutragen (wozu es zwar immer schon gedacht war, was wir aber nicht deutlich genug gemacht haben).

Freundschafts-Stichwörter funktionieren genauso wie die früheren Pairing-Stichwörter. Sobald die Stichwortsortiererinnen sich ihrer angenommen haben, erscheinen sie in der offiziellen Form "Sha Gojyo & Cho Hakkai", und so sehen eure Freundschafts-Stichwörter dann auch in den Filtern aus.