Archive of Our Own ^beta

For anyone who's missed our earlier posts, here's a rundown on all the other International Fanwork Day events!

The OTW’s chatroom games session is a 30-hour party that lasts from 21.00 UTC on 14 February until 03.00 UTC on 16 February. The times listed below are in UTC, but you can click the time to find out how that converts to your own timezone.

The games will be hosted on our dedicated Discord server and moderated by OTW volunteers throughout the day. Every hour you will be able to participate in a different fandom-themed game! The timetable and game descriptions are given below; if you want to join in, you can access the Discord server here. The games will be played and moderated in English.

14th Feb

21.00 5 Things - hosted by Izzy

22.00 That’s Life - hosted by Izzy

23.00 List Builder - hosted by C Ryan Smith

15th Feb

00.00 20 Questions - hosted by C Ryan Smith

01.00 5 Things - hosted by Mika

02.00 Trivia - hosted by Mika

03.00 Lyrics Round Robin - hosted by Zhal

04.00 That’s Life - hosted by Zhal

05.00 List Builder - hosted by Harold Liu

06.00 20 Questions - hosted by Harold Liu

07.00 Linkee - hosted by Kitsune_Scribe

08.00 Trivia - hosted by Pokestine

09.00 Lyrics Round Robin - hosted by Wishopenastar

10.00 That’s Life - hosted by Wishopenastar

11.00 List Builder - hosted by Uschi

12.00 20 Questions - hosted by Uschi

13.00 5 Things - hosted by C Ryan Smith

14.00 Trivia - hosted by C Ryan Smith

15.00 Linkee - hosted by Claudia Rebaza

16.00 That’s Life - hosted by Claudia Rebaza

17.00 Lyrics Round Robin - hosted by Zero

18.00 List Builder - hosted by Zero

19.00 20 Questions - hosted by Stacey Lantagne

20.00 5 Things - hosted by Stacey Lantagne

21.00 Trivia - hosted by Rain Shadow

22.00 Lyrics Round Robin - hosted by Rain Shadow

23.00 That’s Life - hosted by Chrome

16th Feb

00.00 List Builder - hosted by Chrome

01.00 20 Questions - hosted by Zhal

02.00 5 Things - hosted by Zhal

03.00 END

Game Guidelines

20 Questions
How to Play: The host will think of a person, place or thing. Your task is to guess what it is. The first person in the room roster (on the upper right side) gets to ask a question that the host will answer with a YES or NO. As soon as the host replies, the next person on the list can ask their question. Players can call out a guess at any time but the host will only answer if it’s correct so that the next person gets their turn. The game will continue until someone has guessed the person, place or thing.

5 Things
How to Play: During this game, the host will name a topic and players in the room will call out examples from their favorite fandoms. This will repeat for at least 5 rounds. Be prepared to explain why your answer counts (maybe you’ll recruit someone new to your fandom!)

Linkee
How to Play: The host will read a clue and each player should guess (to themselves — shhh!) what the answer is that fits into the [BLANK]. The host will then read 2 more clues. After each one, players can call out a guess about what they think links the clues together. The first person to guess correctly gets a point. When we have completed all clue sets, the person with the most points wins.

List Builder
How to Play: List Builder is a collaborative game in which players work together to come up with a list of items belonging to a particular genre, starting with consecutive letters of the alphabet. Start at A and work your way through to Z (you can be as flexible as required on the difficult letters!)

Lyrics Round Robin
How to Play: During this game, we’ll collectively write FANDOM lyrics to replace those of a familiar song. The host will choose the song and type out an alternate first two lines. Then those in the room will write the next lines until the song is finished.

That’s Life
How to Play: This is an RP game. Participants will first name a character that they know well for each round. Every round will consist of two random questions posted by the moderator. Participants share how the character they chose for that round would answer the questions as if answering from their point of view. For each round, participants will name a different character to answer the new questions.

Trivia
How to Play: Like most trivia games, the host will ask a question and the first person to answer correctly wins that round. Because we’re online and you’re free to do searches we’re going to add another factor, which is time — you must answer within 3 minutes. But you can call out your answer as soon as you think you know. If you have the correct answer, the host will type your name and award you a point. At the end of the game, whoever has gotten the most points will be named the winner!

We also want to hear from you about other celebrations taking place today. Leave us a comment here to tell us about what your fandom communities are doing!

Welcome to the International Fanworks Day Feedback Fest for 2023!

With over 200,000 works on the Archive to date and countless opportunities to get creative with our favorite characters and settings, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions are among AO3’s most popular tropes. We shared in January that the theme of this year’s IFD is When Fandoms Collide, and we invited you to prepare lists of recommendations of your favorite crossovers and fandom fusions. Today, we’re excited to see what you’ve come up with!

To participate, leave a comment below sharing what you love about your recommended crossovers and fandom fusions. Are you impressed by their originality? Did they introduce you to creative new crossover ships? Or did they teach you to see your favorite characters in a whole new light?

Don’t forget to include links in your comment to all of your recs! If you prefer, you can also link to a rec post that you’ve made on social media and tagged #IFD2023 or #IFDChallenge2023.

Of course, IFD isn’t just about celebrating fanworks: it’s about celebrating their creators, too! If you want to show them your appreciation, you can leave kudos, bookmarks, or comments on the fanworks you share—or on any new favorites that you discover from others’ recommendations.

Happy reccing!

The ninth annual International Fanworks Day (IFD) is approaching fast, and the OTW has a number of activities coming up soon to recognize it! Check out the list below to learn what we’re doing to celebrate and how you can get involved.

1. Fanworks Challenge

Last month, we invited you to join our When Fandoms Collide-themed fanworks challenge by creating crossovers and fandom fusions. You can join in by making fic, art, vids, headcanons, and more!

Tag your creations #IFD2023 or #IFDChallenge2023 on social media, or use the International Fanworks Day 2023 tag on AO3. We look forward to seeing what you concoct!

2. Feedback Fest

Is there a crossover or fandom fusion by your favorite AO3 creator that you love? Share it on social media with the tag #IFD2023 or #IFDChallenge2023! On February 12, we’ll also be making a post where you can give your fellow fans recommendations all in one place.

3. Fanlore Challenge

The festivities aren’t just on AO3: Fanlore, the OTW’s fannish history and culture wiki, will be celebrating as well! The challenge runs February 13-19 and involves a new editing challenge to complete every day. To participate, refer to the IFD 2023 Fanlore Challenge page for more information.

4. Games and Fan Chat

Between 21:00 UTC on February 14 (what time is that for me?) and 3:00 UTC on February 16 (what time is that for me?), English-speaking OTW volunteers will be hosting a chatroom with fannish games in the OTW’s official Discord server. We’ll be playing Trivia, 20 Questions, Lyrics Round Robin, and more! See that post for the Discord link!

Open Doors is pleased to announce the completion of 17 archive import projects in 2022, a total of over 18,500 works. This is a record number of completed import projects, beating our previous best of 15 in 2017! We hope that you will find old and new favorites in the collections listed below.

The Croft Codex

Completed: February 2022

The Croft Codex was an archive for all kinds of Tomb Raider fanfiction, founded in 2005 by HeidiA to house stories formerly archived at Lara Croft’s Tales of Beauty and Power. It ran until 2008, when the archive went offline as a generational shift in the fandom began. This coincided with fic culture shifting to sites such as fanfiction.net where authors managed their own work instead of sending them to curated, specialised smaller archives.

Find works at The Croft Codex AO3 Collection.

For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see The Croft Codex import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out The Croft Codex Fanlore page.

Thin Line

Completed: June 2022

Thin Line was a Severus Snape/Sirius Black fanfiction archive that opened in 2001. It later expanded to include pairings with Severus Snape and any male members of the Black family. The archive was a member of the Snape Slash Fleet, an association of archives centered around Severus Snape slash pairings.

Find works at the Thin Line AO3 Collection.

For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the Thin Line import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the Thin Line Fanlore page.

The Snape/Weasley Archive

Completed: June 2022

The Snape/Weasley Archive was a Harry Potter archive opened in 2001 that accepted fanworks that paired Severus Snape with any male member of the Weasley family. The archive was a member of the Snape Slash Fleet, an association of archives centered around Severus Snape slash pairings.

Find works at the The Snape/Weasley Archive AO3 Collection.

For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see The Snape/Weasley Archive import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out The Snape/Weasley Archive Fanlore page.

FrodoHealers

Completed: July 2022

FrodoHealers was a gen fanfiction archive for the Lord of the Rings fandom, focusing on angst or hurt/comfort stories involving an unwell Frodo Baggins. The archive was hosted on Yahoo! Groups, and began the move to AO3 following the Yahoo! Groups closure.

Find works at the FrodoHealers AO3 Collection.

For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the FrodoHealers import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the FrodoHealers Fanlore page.

Animators, Inc.

Completed: August 2022

Animators Inc., also known as Anita Blake Puddu's Site, was an Italian-language fanfiction archive for all pairings from the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series by Laurell K. Hamilton. The archive contained a forum with ongoing debates, sections for character portraits and book abstracts, and a fanfiction section with original Italian works and Italian translations.

Find works at the Animators Inc. AO3 Collection.

For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the Animators Inc. import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the Animators Inc. Fanlore page.

All Things Rat

Completed: August 2022

All Things Rat was an archive of fanfiction, fanart, and .wav sounds featuring Alex Krycek, a character from The X-FIles.

Find works at the All Things Rat AO3 Collection.

For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the All Things Rat import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the All Things Rat Fanlore page.

Weaver of Dreams

Completed: August 2022

Oded Fehr Weaver of Dreams was a fanfiction archive dedicated to Oded Fehr, "the actor and the characters he's portrayed and some that our imaginations create".

Find works at the Weaver of Dreams AO3 Collection.

For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the Weaver of Dreams import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the Weaver of Dreams Fanlore page.

Of Elves and Men

Completed: September 2022

Of Elves and Men was the archive for the Yahoo! Groups LOTR_Adult_Fiction and Of Elves and Men SLASH. It initially focused on FPS and RPS for the Lord of the Rings films, but later added several other fandoms.

Find works at the Of Elves and Men AO3 Collection.

For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the Of Elves and Men import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the Of Elves and Men Fanlore page.

Harry Potter Fanfic Archive

Completed: September 2022

The Harry Potter FanFic Archive (HPFanFicArchive.com) was created and run by Chad (CazBandit). Sadly, Chad died suddenly in March of 2020, but with the help of the archive's new custodian, HPFanFicArchive.com will continue through the AO3.

Find works at the Harry Potter FanFic Archive AO3 Collection.

For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the Harry Potter FanFic Archive import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the Harry Potter FanFic Archive Fanlore page.

By Your Command

Completed: November 2022

By Your Command was an archive for the Battlestar Galactica (1978) TV show; it preserved stories from the BSG Slash mailing list from the mid-1990s to mid-2000s.

Find works at the By Your Command AO3 Collection.

For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the By Your Command import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the By Your Command Fanlore page.

Pony Fiction Archive

Completed: November 2022

The Pony Fiction Archive describes itself as the original My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fanfiction archive. It was active from 2011 to 2019.

Find works at the Pony Fiction Archive AO3 Collection.

For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the Pony Fiction Archive import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the Pony Fiction Archive Fanlore page.

West Wing Fanfiction Central

Completed: November 2022

West Wing Fanfiction Central is an archive for West Wing fanfiction that's working on being the most comprehensive archive of West Wing fanfiction on the net. It currently consists of three archives: the National Library, Big Block of Cheese, and the West Wing Fanfiction Archive.

National Library

Completed: June 2018

The National Library is a searchable archive of complete West Wing fics. Opened in 2002, it is the only current WWFC archive that is still accepting new works.

Big Block of Cheese

Completed: April 2022

Big Block of Cheese was an archive for The West Wing slash. The archive was last updated in May 2005, and was then taken over by The National Library.

West Wing Fanfiction Archive

Completed: November 2022

The West Wing Fanfiction Archive is the oldest of the WWFC archives. It was rescued in 2004.

Find works for all three archives at the West Wing Fanfiction Central AO3 Collection.

For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the West Wing Fanfiction Central import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the West Wing Fanfiction Central Fanlore page.

Elusive Lover

Completed: December 2022

Elusive Lover was a fanfiction, fanart, and poetry archive focused on the Star Wars Original Trilogy pairing of Luke Skywalker/Han Solo. It featured works published in the Elusive Lover zine series which ran from 1996 to 2001, as well as other works.

Find works at the Elusive Lover AO3 Collection.

For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the Elusive Lover import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the Elusive Lover Fanlore page.

The Bureau of Time and Space

Completed: December 2022

The Bureau of Time and Space is a Flint the Time Detective fanworks archive. The Bureau of Time and Space has been offline since the early 2000s. Small as it was, moving it to AO3 has doubled the amount of fic available for the fandom!

Find works at the The Bureau of Time and Space AO3 Collection.

For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the Bureau of Time and Space import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the The Bureau of Time and Space Fanlore page.

春日泽 (SpringFen)

Completed: December 2022

春日泽 (SpringFen) is a Chinese language Prince of Tennis fanworks archive focusing on the relationship Fuji Shuusuke/Tezuka Kunimitsu.

Find works at the 春日泽 (SpringFen) AO3 Collection.

For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the 春日泽 (SpringFen) import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the 春日泽 (SpringFen) Fanlore page.

The Kirk/Spock Fanfiction Archive

Completed: December 2022

The Kirk/Spock Fanfiction Archive includes stories, poetry, and essays about Kirk and Spock. All works in the archive feature the Kirk and Spock relationship as a key element. This is the largest single-pairing archive that Open Doors has imported yet!

Find works at The Kirk/Spock Fanfiction Archive AO3 Collection.

For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the Kirk/Spock Fanfiction Archive import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the Kirk/Spock Fanfiction Archive Fanlore page.

We want to give a huge THANK YOU to all of the archivists and volunteers who made these imports possible, as well as all the creators who have transferred or claimed their works! We look forward to importing more archives in 2023.

Commenting on this post will be disabled after two weeks, on February 22, 2023. If you have any questions, concerns, or comments regarding these imports after that date, please contact Open Doors.

In our ongoing efforts to give you more tools for curating your Archive experience, we're rolling out a new interface to let you hide content by specific users.

Blocking and Muting: A Refresher

We'll be implementing two sets of features to help users curate their own experiences and add a layer of protection against harassment, without making it harder for people to create and interact with content on the Archive:

• Blocking, which will prevent certain users from interacting with you.
• Muting, which will exclude content by certain users from your personal Archive experience.

Because applying these concepts to all of the Archive's numerous and often interconnected features at once would be a massive undertaking, we're taking a gradual approach that will allow you to block and mute users in some areas while we continue to work on others.
You already have the ability to block specific users from commenting on your works or replying to your comments; now you will also be able to hide users' works, bookmarks, and comments from view.

What does muting do?

While we plan to extend the functionality in future updates, for now you'll be hiding the following items if you mute a user:

• works they've created (or co-created) in search results and tag listings (you can still access the works themselves, if you have a direct link)
• bookmarks they've created
• other users' bookmarks of their works or series
• comments they've left

We're accomplishing this by automatically generating a bit of CSS that removes the relevant content from view and hides it from assistive tech, such as screen readers. While you were already able to do this with a custom site skin, this new feature only asks for a username and does the rest.
Since this is still done with skins, please note that numbers at the top of search results or in the tag filters (which are provided by our search engine) might be different from the number of works or bookmarks that are presented to you. We also don't replace content by muted users with empty space, placeholder text, or any other indication that something was hidden.

How do I mute users?

A "Mute" button will be added to user and pseud dashboards as well as user profiles. It will turn into an "Unmute" button when activated, so you can easily reverse your choice.

We're also providing an interface to manage your muted users. It allows you to add new users to your list, and unmute users. A muted user will remain muted even if they change their name.

From this page, you can also easily access your list of blocked users, to manage those separately.

Other options

In addition to our blocking and muting features, there are a variety of existing ways to control your Archive experience, including built-in preferences and third-party tools. You can also use a site skin to mute specific works, bookmarks, or series.

I. OPEN DOORS IMPORTS

Open Doors had a very active December and completed three archive imports, including the long-anticipated Star Trek archive The Kirk/Spock Fanfiction Archive, the Star Wars archive Elusive Lover, and the Chinese-language Prince of Tennis archive SpringFen. Check out the linked collections to read all of the imported works! Also in December, Open Doors announced the import of The 9 Forum, an archive of fanworks for the movie "9".

II. AT THE AO3

Accessibility, Design & Technology had an eventful two months! It deployed some significant changes to our HTML parser, a ton of gem updates, and an update to Ruby 3.0, plus a few odds and ends. It also worked with Systems to find and fix some things that went wrong following the triple whammy of a Ruby update, a change in the Archive's SQL software to MariaDB, and a hardware swap. Having three big changes close together made it tricky to pinpoint what was causing the slowness that resulted in issues with user histories, work and bookmark listings, and work stats not updating, but now AD&T has now ordered new hardware and modified the code to be more resilient in case we run into similar slowness in the future—and did it all without losing any data.

The AO3 Support team handled a massive influx of tickets these issues caused, but was glad for the support and patience of our users while we straightened things out. Speaking of increased ticket counts, Support received 18,248 tickets in 2022, compared to 16,162 in 2021. This was a reasonable 13% increase. Surprisingly, it's only a couple hundred tickets more than 2020! As well, 1,774 of Support's tickets in 2022 were in a non-English language. We give a hearty hat tip to both our multilingual Support volunteers and to the Translation volunteers who provided support!

Policy & Abuse hit a whopping 2001 tickets in December. It received a few more tickets this past year than expected, but having switched some of its categories over to our wonderful Support volunteers, PAC is now working on tackling what remains.

Meanwhile, in December, Tag Wrangling wrangled more than 380,000 tags across more than 55,000 fandoms—a little over 800 tags per active wrangler!

III. ELSEWHERE AT THE OTW

The Board of Directors held an open meeting on January 7th. Minutes can be accessed on the OTW website. If you'd like to attend future meetings, please feel free to join the official OTW Board Discord server.

Communications celebrated two social media milestones in the past two months. The OTW's Facebook account passed 2,000 followers, and its Tumblr account passed 20,000 followers. Comms is finalizing preparations for International Fanworks Day (IFD) in February. Stay tuned for more information about how to take part!

Fanlore has also been hard at work preparing for its own IFD Fanlore Challenge, running from February 13-19, and for its themed Femslash February month on Twitter and Tumblr.

In December, Legal joined allies in sending a letter to United States government bodies opposing a treaty that has been proposed by the World Intellectual Property Organization. The treaty would require nations to enact laws that would make some fannish activities, including fan vidding, more difficult. In January, Legal responded to quite a few user queries about law and fandom.

The Board of Directors kicked off the new year with a public meeting, which was held on January 7th, while Finance completed the 2021 audit (to be published on the OTW's website soon) and updated all the individual USA state filings that required the completed audit. It continues to work on the 2023 budget and the remaining bookkeeping from 2022.

V. IT'S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

From 25 November to 24 January, Volunteers & Recruiting received 136 new requests, and completed 168, leaving us with 38 open requests (including induction and removal tasks listed below).

As of 24 January 2023, the OTW has 930 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below.

New Open Doors Volunteers: Elf and 1 other AO3 Fanzine Scan Hosting Project (FSHP) Volunteer
New Translation Volunteers: Anastasia Rey Reed (Translator)

Departing Elections Volunteers: 1 volunteer
Departing Open Doors Volunteers: 1 volunteer
Departing Support Volunteers: Zoë Renee
Departing Tag Wrangler Volunteers: Anggi, woyo, Glasses (all Tag Wranglers) & 10 other volunteers, 3 Supervisors
Departing Translation Volunteers: Elif Köylü (Translator), Laure (Translation Volunteer Manager) & 4 other volunteers

For more information about the purview of our committees, please access the committee listing on our website.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

We made a number of changes to our HTML parser, more behind-the-scenes improvements with no real common theme, and started off the new year with Ruby and database upgrades!

A special thank you to our first-time contributors Camila Noceda and albinantti!

Credits

• Coders: albinantti, Brian Austin, Bilka, Camila Noceda, Ceithir, Cesium-Ice, EchoEkhi, Enigel, korrien, Potpotkettle, redsummernight, Sarken, Stephen Lewis, ticking instant, warlockmel, weeklies
• Code reviewers: bingeling, Brian Austin, james_, Potpotkettle, redsummernight, Sarken, ticking instant
• Testers: bingeling, Brian Austin, CJ Record, Claire Baker, Dasha, james_, Jennifer D2, lydia-theda, Mai Daye, Nary, Paula, Priscilla, Ranowa, redsummernight, Runt, Sammie Louise, Sarken, Teyke, ticking instant, V Snow

Details

0.9.327

Our November 15 release included allowing two new HTML tags in works and enabled RSS feeds for news posts in languages other than English.

• [AO3-5242] - It was hard to close our help pop-ups on mobile because, if you scrolled past the bottom of the pop-up, the pop-up would reposition every time you tried to scroll back up to the Close button. We've stopped them from jumping around so you can now get to that button.
• [AO3-5628] - If your work had draft chapters but only one posted chapter, various options for editing chapters were missing from the Edit Work page. We've made sure it will have the links for editing your draft chapters and for managing all of your chapters.
• [AO3-5856] - When gift exchange moderators download a list of sign-ups in the CSV format, we now include the titles of both requests and offers.
• [AO3-6089] - The script for creating site admins is no longer picky about which case you use when entering an admin's role -- typing SUPPORT will work just as well as support now.
• [AO3-6286] - Users who have been suspended or permanently banned will now be unable to leave kudos.
• [AO3-6290] - Our translators can now translate the chapter number information in emails sent to co-creators.
• [AO3-6375] - Comments that are marked as spam or hidden by site admins will now be removed from users' inboxes.
• [AO3-6419] - We sanitized parameters for creating prompts and sign-ups more thoroughly. 🧼
• [AO3-6421] - Weird things used to happen if you tried to use single quotes inside HTML title attributes. Now expected things will happen instead.
• [AO3-6337] - We removed some unused code in the collection items controller.
• [AO3-6414] - When we upgraded to Rails 4 a hundred years ago, we had to explicitly include a bit of code (ActiveModel::ForbiddenAttributesProtection) in all of our models. That's done by default in the newer version we're on now, so we've tidied up and removed that code.
• [AO3-4355] - You can now use the RSS Feed button to get feeds of AO3 News Posts in languages other than English.
• [AO3-5745] - We added an option for prompt meme moderators to download a list of prompts in the CSV format.
• [AO3-5781] - A little progress on internationalization: we added locale-specific digit grouping to the number of results on listings (works, bookmarks, etc.) and search pages. In the Archive's default locale (en-US), this means adding thousand separators.
• [AO3-5934] - You can now use the figure and figcaption HTML tags in works!
• [AO3-6410] - Our dependency-updating bot, Dependabot, now also helps us keep our GitHub Actions workflow up-to-date.

0.9.328

Our November 19 release involved some additional work on two issues from the November 15 release.

• [AO3-6421] - Fixing title attributes that contained single quotes needed some follow-up work, so we did it.
• [AO3-6410] - We also did some follow-up work related to allowing Dependabot to keep our workflow actions up to date.

0.9.329

On December 23, we made a number of changes to our HTML parser.

• [AO3-3313] - The parser used to displace img tags within a tags. Used to.
• [AO3-3565] - HTML tags for formatting text (e.g., italics, bold, and emphasis) can now span line break tags.
• [AO3-3710] - Extra blank paragraphs are no longer added before blockquote tags when editing works.
• [AO3-3769] - The text following center tags used to have weird line spacing because it wasn't enclosed in paragraph tags. Now it is properly treated and formatted as a paragraph.
• [AO3-6421] - More work involving HTML title attributes containing single quotes? Yeah, more work involving HTML title attributes containing single quotes.
• [AO3-6426] - We set GitHub Actions to not run our automated tests on the newest operating system versions, which do not have all the software packages we need.
• [AO3-6424] - We asked Dependabot to label its pull requests on GitHub the same way humans do.
• [AO3-6433] - We had a whole lot of old, one-time-use code without tests, and it was dragging our test score down. Rather than waste time writing tests for old code we'll never use again, we deleted the code.
• [AO3-6436] - We updated our robots.txt file to disallow Common Crawl from scraping the Archive.

0.9.330

Our December 27 update included a variety of little changes we chose because they were easy to test.

• [AO3-6418] - On the page for importing works, we updated the list of sites that don't allow imports to include Wattpad.
• [AO3-6317] - Site admins who volunteer with Support are taking over a few tasks from Policy & Abuse (specifically, deleting duplicate works and managing Fannish Next of Kins), so we've updated their permissions and changed the relevant contact forms.
• [AO3-6408] - We corrected the text on collections' tag clouds, which previously said the tags were the most popular tags on the entire site. Those pages actually show the most popular tags in the collection.
• [AO3-5535] - We removed the series index, which was unused, and made sure you get a 404 error when attempting to go to the series page of a user who doesn't exist.
• [AO3-6197] - We removed some unused variables from our config file.
• [AO3-6393] - It used to be possible for a site admin to post a news post translation in the same language as the original post, e.g., an English translation of a post that was already in English. We never actually wanted to do this, but it would occasionally happen and we'd have to fix it. Now it's no longer possible to do that.
• [AO3-6130] - When a site admin deletes a news post that has translations, all the translations will now be deleted as well. Yay, efficiency!
• [AO3-6423], [AO3-6434], [AO3-6441], [AO3-6446], [AO3-6447] - We updated the Dalli, Sinatra, Nokogiri, Loofah, and Rails Html Sanitizer gems. And then we checked the capitalization of each of those names so we could write this summary.
• [AO3-6224] - Trying to access the wrangling page for a nonexistent user now gives a 404 error because the page could not be found rather than a 500 error because the code was incapable of dealing with this scenario.
• [AO3-6417] - Trying to access the gifts page for a nonexistent user will now give a 404 error instead of redirecting to the homepage.
• [AO3-6443] - We removed some code that sent copies of tickets to a mailing list the Support team no longer uses.
• [AO3-6421] - We tweaked the code for resanitizing input so it wouldn't add HTML to admin notes.

Release 0.9.331

We updated to Ruby 3.0 on January 8!

• [AO3-6409] - Version 2.7 of our programming language, Ruby, is going to enter its end-of-life phase soon, so we upgraded from 2.7 to 3.0.

Release 0.9.332

...and then, on January 9, we fixed some things that broke when we updated to Ruby 3.0!

• [AO3-6452] - For performance reasons, we update work hit counts in batches and on a delay rather than instantaneously. Removing the transaction_retry gem when we updated Ruby led to a high number of deadlocks in this process, so we started sorting the batches to avoid those errors.
• [AO3-6453] - The library we use to talk to our third-party spam checker is pretty old and was using a bit of code that is no longer available in Ruby 3.0, so any time we tried to check something (e.g., guest comments) for spam, we'd get an error. We've implemented a workaround until we can move away from the library.

Releases 0.9.333 - 0.9.335

We made some behind-the-scenes changes related to our database structure and improved the code for moving certain types of data from our temporary database to our canonical database on January 11, January 18, and January 21.

• [AO3-6438] - To make things tidier, we've started excluding the innodb_monitor table from our schema dumps.
• [AO3-6456] - MariaDB, our new relational database, works better when all of the tables have primary keys, so we added them to the two small tables that were missing them: roles_users and schema_migrations.
• [AO3-6455], [AO3-6457], [AO3-6458], [AO3-6459], [AO3-6462] - When we changed our database software from MySQL to MariaDB, we also switched to new database servers with hardware issues. Because of the slowdown in database performance, some of our jobs for moving data from our temporary database into our canonical one stopped working properly: saving users' reading history; updating numbers of comments, bookmarks, and kudos for searching works; and updating numbers of works using tags for wranglers. We've updated the code so these jobs will scale better and play nicely with the database even when things are a little slow.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with Akima Ras, who volunteers as a Webs volunteer.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

As a Webs volunteer, I keep things running smoothly behind the scenes of OTW’s website. Maintaining our main address ensures that the people who come across our website have a good browsing experience, and also find it easy to access different pages in their own languages, or connect with the right committees through our forms.

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

Most of the time, it’s taking care of recurring updates. But sometimes, we have to deal with the many ghosts that lurk in between the binaries and throw monkey wrenches into the gears. We also work with other OTW teams like Translation to give uploaders access, and tweak some forms when we have drives.

What made you decide to volunteer?

My interest in programming was the first reason. I was really curious about running a website, I wanted to learn about how it all worked. Also, I had the time to take on more responsibilities. Besides, from my earliest months of joining OTW, I was thinking about joining Webs, and the only thing that kept me back was thinking that I need to know a ton of programming languages (I think I had mistaken AD&T for Webs). The moment I found out, there was nothing that could keep me from wanting to be a Webs volunteer.

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?

My biggest challenge doing work for the OTW as a Webs volunteer was something that happened before we migrated to our shiny, beautiful theme.

I was doing some housekeeping, trying to make some sense out of our multilingual menus, and making sure that every translated page and submenu was in the right place. Some titles were long enough that our menu bar ended up being several lines at the top instead of just one. This could be solved if we could have those pages in a drop down menu. But whenever I changed the order of the menus for each language, the one for the English also followed suit (but it shouldn’t have had).

Long story short, numerous attempts at several languages were made; I gave myself heart attacks seeing a very messed up English menu on our landing page; panicked that I had broken the website, and didn’t know how to fix it or revert to a previously unbroken theme. The website was finally saved, and later, transformed into our current theme (a transformation I absolutely love and adore since it’s made everything easier for all of us), and the rest as they say, is history.

What fannish things do you like to do?

I like to write and read fanfics most of the time. Recently, I tried my hand at creating a fanvideo, but sadly, it got banned from Youtube and then deleted due to copyright. It made me realize how hard the whole process can be, but at the same time, so gratifying because I really enjoyed the finished project. I think I might try doing it again. Actually, the snippets of a tv series I have on my laptop have been calling my name for a while, I just have yet to find time in the unorganized chaos that is my life.

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out earlier Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.