AO3 News

Release notes - release 0.8.10.22

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Published:
2012-01-24 09:32:15 UTC
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Welcome to Release 0.8.10.22. Elz, Enigel, Jenny S-T, Naomi, Firewolf, Rebecca and sarken contributed code to this release, which was tested by our awesome testing team: Jenny S-T, Jenn Calaelen, Kylie, Lucy, Tai, XParrot, and Zebra.

This release fixes a few bugs, but also rolls out some exciting new features! We've been working on this stuff for a good while, so we're excited to be able to get it out in the world! Now that we have deployed this code, the next release will be dedicated to performance issues: we'll be trying to keep performance fixes separate from anything else so we can better monitor what's working and what's not.

Highlights!

Fandom feeds!

We know that lots of you want a more convenient way of keeping track of new works posted in your fandoms, so we're pleased to announce the launch of feeds for fandom tags! If you go to a fandom tag - for example Naruto, you'll see an option to 'Subscribe to the feed'. You can add the feed to any feed reader, or syndicate it on Dreamwidth, Livejournal, etc, and you'll be notified of new works in that fandom. \0/

The feeds are only visible on 'canonical' tags - the standardised tags which are marked for use in filters and which display on the fandom pages. This ensures you get everything tagged for that fandom, because all the variant versions of a fandom tag are connected to the canonical - for example, Supernatural also gets works marked SPN. However, if something changes and the tag you have subscribed to is no longer marked as canonical, your feed will still work.

If you subscribe to a 'metatag' which includes a lot of fandoms, you'll get updates for all those fandoms - for example, subscribing to Marvel will give you a feed which includes Captain America (2011), X-Men First Class (2011), Marvel 616, Iron Man (Movies), and all the other fandom tags that wranglers have linked to the metatag.

Right now, feeds don't show restricted works (we may introduce authenticated feeds sometime down the road). They also list works by creation date, not update date - this means that updated WIPs won't get bumped back to the top of the feed. We'll be working on improvements going forward - we welcome feedback.

We hope this makes it easier for you to keep track of ALL the works you're interested in!

Subscriptions to individual works

You've been asking for this for a long time, so we're really excited to be able to offer subscriptions to individual works! You can now choose to subscribe to a work-in-progress and get notified by email when a new chapter is added. \0/ HURRAY!

Importing features for Open Doors

One of the key aims of the Archive of Our Own is the preservation of fannish history. As part of this, we want mods to be able to import archives they maintain elsewhere, so they can rescue at-risk archives. We've now finished the code which will allow this! \0/ Working with the Open Doors committee, we'll be importing the Smallville Slash Archive as our first test case in the next month or so. For more on Open Doors and the archive importing feature, check out the Open Doors FAQ. Stay tuned for more news!

Improvements to our HTML parser

Those of you who have been with us for a while will know that improving our HTML parser, which cleans up your HTML when you post a work, has been an ongoing project. In this release, coder Rebecca has included a bunch of improvements, which include fixes for some of the most annoying bugs - no more br tags insinuating themselves into your code where they aren't wanted! HTML parsing is a very, very tricky area, and although we've tested as thoroughly as possible we can't test every possible use case. So, if you find that it does something undesirable to your code, please get in touch with Support.

Known Issues

If you've been using the site at all recently, you've probably noticed that we've been hit by a lot of performance issues. We've written a bit about what's going on and what we're doing to address it in our recent post on performance. The good news is that the new subscriptions options should actually help a bit - a lot of the weight on the site is people hitting index pages to see if anything has been posted in their fandom and/or if the WIP they're following has been updated. Going directly to a work is much less work for our servers, so giving people new ways to track what they want to read is likely to ease the performance issues rather than exacerbating them. The performance issues are our highest priority right now, so we'll be working on them for the next wee while.

We've had a few reports of email notifications not getting through. It looks like some ISPs may be marking some of our emails as spam: we're looking into the issues, but adding [email protected] to your email contacts list will help ensure our messages are treated as legitimate.

See our Known Issues page for other current issues.

Release Details

Features

  • Added an option to subscribe to individual works - you can now be notified when someone uploads a new chapter to a WIP! \0/
  • Added feeds for all fandom tags! \0/
  • Removed 'Series:' information from works which aren't part of a series when displaying feeds.
  • Added chapter count to 'Share' option and subscriptions information.
  • Added option to add bookmarks to collections.
  • Added new code for importing archives: people with the archivist role can now import works for other users, and the owners of the works will be notified by email
  • Added a comments field to icons, so people can give credit and other information

Bug fixes

  • Fixed importing from Livejournal (formatting was broken by the recent changes on their end)
  • Ensured epub mimetype headers are no longer compressed - should fix a bug causing Internet Explorer to download epubs as zip format, and should allow mobile browsers to recognise the content correctly.
  • Made database index for user accounts unique to prevent duplicate accounts
  • Fixed some outstanding bugs with our banner notices, so that they can now be dismissed by users
  • Parser and sanitizer
    • Fixed the issue where the parser would add an unwanted <br /> tag after various HTML tags
    • Fixed the problem where if there were some paragraph tags in the text, the parser wouldn't correctly add more when you edited.
    • Improved the parser's ability to handle mixed uppercase & lowercase HTML
    • Parser now respects blank spacing inside pre tags
    • Made it possible to assign more than one class to an HTML tag on a work
  • Tags and tag wrangling
    • Fixed bug where wranglers were unable to create tags with accented characters if a tag with the same name in unaccented characters already existed
    • Fixed a bug where tag hierarchical trees on wrangler pages did not display properly
  • Front end fixes
    • Made link styles in #footer more consistently defined
    • Fixed issue causing buttons to display weirdly on chapter reorder pages
    • Fixed bug causing filters to overlap inbox contents on mobile skin
    • Fixed display issues on the static version of fandom pages
    • Added some spacing on the static version of works pages so that kudos buttons aren't too close to text
    • Changed styling of :focus to make it more consistent and visible
    • Fixed header icon display so that it doesn't overlap post new/login buttons in Chrome and Safari
    • Input and h3 on reorder series page both set to full width