Archive of Our Own ^beta

My family claimed my attention this week (apparently there is a limit to how many times chairing a meeting can be used as a reason to be missing from Family Events) so the most awesome Enigel stepped up to chair in my stead. <3 Quite a few other people were claimed by Real Life, so it was a quiet meeting for once!

Highlights

• Bingeling did a heroic job of collating all the feedback about fanart on the Archive and we starting discussing what we'll need to do to make these dreams a reality. There's a lot of work that needs to be done first, but we're really excited to be moving forward on this.
• We talked about ways of making it easier to browse for works in a particular language - there are currently thirteen different languages represented on the Archive, but it's not too obvious how to find them (also, at the moment the languages page is a bit broken! We'll be fixing the layout in the next deploy). We'll be adding some more options for this soon.

Recent changes

We deployed Release 0.7.3.7. to the Archive with a couple of critical fixes - the option to hide warnings and tags by default should now be working properly (it was getting stuck in our cache) and you should be able to add other users as co-authors. Hurrah for Elz who coded and deployed these fixes.

Deploy schedule

• April 18th: We deployed a bunch more code to our Test Archive for our testers to bang on.
• May 2nd: If all goes well, we'll be deploying the new code to the Beta Archive in two weeks time! If our testers are feeling active and they don't discover any hideous bugs, it may even make it sooner.

Cool stuff coming up

There are loads of small enhancements in the new code we're testing now:

• A way of marking a work as a translation, and linking to the original work.
• A way of turning off admin messages so that people who aren't interested in getting our release notes can be left in peace.
• Comment notifications for admin posts (this is only really exciting to me, but I am VERY EXCITED).
• A basic bookmarklet for posting bookmarks of works not hosted on the Archive.
• A fix for a bug which makes the sort criteria on index pages invisible to screen-readers.

Public service announcement - problems importing from Fanfiction.net

We're experiencing an ongoing issue with importing works from Fanfiction.net. Unfortunately, the request from our server is getting 'stuck' on the way to theirs, which means that imports hang for a long time and then time out. We're looking into solutions, but because this is caused by a server routing issue and not by our code there's not much we can do. We're very sorry about the inconvenience! For more information on this and other bugs you can always check out our Known Issues page.

News from our sub- and sister committees

Everyone continues to work incredibly hard and to contribute in many awesome ways. Go team!

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