Archive of Our Own ^beta

Welcome to Release 0.9.13. Ariana, Elz, Emily E, Enigel, james_, Naomi, sarken, Scott, and Stephanie S. contributed code to this release, which was tested by our awesome testing team: Alison Watson, aralias, Ariana, Camilla M, Emily E, Eve Forbes, Lady Oscar, Michelle Dong, Naomi, mumble, runt, Sam Johnsson, sarken, and Scott.

We're starting the year with a much needed performance fix, a major update of our Rich Text Editor, and a few importing fixes to make the lives of our Open Doors team a little easier. We have many big plans for the next several months and are also working continuously, and often invisibly, on upgrading and improving our server setup. For downtime announcements (both planned and unplanned), please watch our @AO3_Status Twitter account.

Highlights!

TinyMCE Upgrade!

We've updated our Rich Text Editor of choice, TinyMCE, from version 3.5.6 to 4.0.11. This takes care of several long-standing bugs in one fell swoop, and enables us to integrate bug fixes more regularly going forward. We took great care to make TinyMCE work properly with our own HTML sanitizer, which formats the underlying code more or less to our liking. However, some combinations of writing software, browsers, and formatting choices still pose a problem that cannot be easily fixed.

In particular, Google Drive/Docs documents will not retain their italic and bold formatting when pasted into the editor, and text from Scrivener is best pasted from the HTML output option. We've included a bunch of notes and usage tips in the new Rich Text help, accessible through the little question mark symbol after "Type or paste formatted text."

We are doing our best to make the Rich Text Editor work for as many writing platforms as possible, but we're limited by the features and bug fixes TinyMCE's own tireless team of developers gives us. For very complicated formatting (or even colors!), please consider writing your own HTML and using a work skin.

Archivist Imports!

Our amazing Open Doors volunteers have been hard at work preserving stories from at-risk archives! With the exception of two very large collections which were imported in bulk (Smallville Slash Archive and 852 Prospect), they've been mostly using the same importing tool that is available to all our users. Regrettably, they've had to work around several bugs for a while now.

This release takes care of a few smaller issues relating to imports and import management, and introduces a fixed and enhanced archivist feature. This allows designated archivists to import works for others, adding the author's handle and email address from the original archive. Archivist imports automatically generate an email notification to the author with links to further information and claim/delete/orphan options. This page was also updated in this release.

Better caching!

When a user accesses a work listing, e.g. all works for a particular tag, we cache that list of works and serve it to other users wanting to browse the same list. This means the information doesn't have to be retrieved from the database every single time, which makes for happier servers. However, somewhere in the code we have to make sure the listing is refreshed when anything changes, e.g. a new work with that tag is posted.

Previously, that check was done whenever a listing was accessed. We have a lot more people reading or looking at works than posting or editing, and those turned out to be a lot of checks: Was a new work added to this collection? Did this user delete a work? Was this tag added to an existing work? and so on. In short, the database server wasn't quite as happy as we wanted it to be.

We now update all data ("expire the cache") as soon as a change happens, not when a work listing is assembled. This required extensive changes to many parts of our code, as a lot of user actions affect work listings. All kudos to Elz for persevering through several rounds of testing and fixing all the things!

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page for current issues.

We've been having some server overload issues, detailed in our post, What's up with the recent downtimes? In order to cut down on excessive reindexing, we're currently not adding works to the reindex queue when their hit counts are updated in the database. Instead, the work information is refreshed when some kind of feedback (e.g. comment, kudos) is left or when the work gets a new chapter, forcing an update overall.

Sorting works by hit count will be slightly inaccurate as a result, and will lag considerably for works getting traffic but no kudos/comments/bookmarks/new chapters.

Release Details

Bug fixes

• Works
  • The cache expiry for work listings was rejiggered to happen when data is updated, not when a listing is accessed.
  • New hits on a work are recorded in the database, but don't make it into the search index currently. Instead, the index gets updated when other work information (new comment, new chapter, etc.) changes.
  • Work drafts (showing author and title information) were visible on the Related Works page; this has now been fixed.
  • There was an issue where kudos left by a guest weren't properly added to the list (thanks to stuck caching) unless a signed-in user left kudos right after. This has been fixed and all kudos should show up in the list at the bottom of the work immediately.
  • We've had reports of blank kudos notifications for a long while, and were never able to hunt down the cause. This release includes a fix of what we now believe is the cause. We'll be monitoring the situation!
  • Marking a work for later *and* marking a work as read would both bring up the same success message. This was changed to properly indicate that the work was added to or removed from your list. Please note that changes will take a while to show up!

• Work Importing
  • Trying to import a work as an archivist was throwing an error 500; this is now very much fixed.
  • Updated Claim page for newly imported external authors.
  • Fixed several bugs with importing from efiction archives, e.g. an issue with the same chapter being imported over and over again for certain story links.
  • The code for our Redirect Lookup Tool to find imported works on the Archive was refactored and streamlined.
  • Improved URL matching in the Redirect Lookup Tool. Extra bits such as ?mode=reply or #comments and other slight differences in the link (www/no www) are taken into account when looking for the existing import.

• Automated Testing
  • We continue to work on updating and expanding our automated tests. To this end, we have begun using a code coverage tool called Coveralls.io. You can view the current state of our code coverage by visiting our Github page (look for the little badge in the README section).
  • One of our automated testing tools, called Fakeweb, was outputting deprecation warnings every time we ran our test suite. This was inhibiting easy understanding of the test logs, so we have switched to Typhoeus. We also fixed the causes of other deprecation warnings in the process.
  • At one point, an error 500 was generated when attempting to delete your account and remove yourself as an author from co-authored works at the same time. This was fixed in another release, and we have added automated tests to cover this particular account deletion situation.

• Misc.
  • Signup summary generation was slow and included a query that was causing issues for the database. We made some changes to help it run more efficiently.
  • Fixed a number of issues with the Rich Text Editor, including non-functioning alignment buttons, problems with the browser spellcheck, missing formatting when pasting from MS Word documents, and others!
  • When toggling between HTML input and Rich Text, the help text "Plain text with limited HTML" would be displayed at all times. It now switches to "Type or paste formatted text" when in Rich Text mode. There is also a new help section for the RTE.
  • In the navigation header, put items under "Browse" and "Search" in the same order (Works, Bookmarks, Tags, Collections/People) for consistency

Welcome to Release 0.9.12! Cecilia, Elz, Emily E., Enigel, James_, Karangunii, Sarken, Scott, Stephanie, and tuff_ghost, contributed code to this release, which was tested by our awesome testing team: Camilla, Enigel, JanOda, Lady Oscar, MilenaDaniels, mumble, Runt, Sarken, and Sumeria.

This is our last deploy of this year, and we sincerely thank everyone who contributed to this or previous releases, in whatever small or big ways. Every line of code, every minute of testing, every supportive cheer helps this project prosper.

A look back at growth stats for this year will be posted in January, for all fans of hard data and color-coded charts. The Accessibility, Design & Technology team will take a short break over the holidays, but will stand by for any emergencies. We have big plans for 2014 and will share any news with you as we start new adventures. See you next year!

Highlights!

Backend improvements and server work

We've had an interesting couple of months, with growing traffic and increased server load, eventually leading to a collapse of our search index. You can find details about this in our updated news post, Site slowness and other currently known issues. We've been doing a lot of server maintenance in the past few weeks to tweak things, correct some settings, and generally make sure that the site will be running more smoothly. A million thanks to our all-volunteer Systems team, and especially sysadmin James_, for all their hard work! ♥

One issue we've consistently run into is with the code that refreshes the search index for works and bookmarks. This happens, for example, when a tag is edited by our wrangling team to reflect a new tag relationship or a new character name. Since we have a lot of works and bookmarks, updating the index to reflect all changes was taking a lot of time. More often than not, one re-index run wasn't even done when a new one was started.

This deploy includes a code change in how we handle these re-indexing tasks. They are now run by a tool called Resque, which we already use for many other tasks on the site that involve a queue (e.g. all subscription notifications going out at a certain time). This change allows us to monitor the re-indexing process and throw more power at it if necessary.

We are hopeful that this change will alleviate some of our problems during the traffic-heavy holidays, but we will also continue to look into further improvements both in our code as well as our server settings.

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page for current issues.

Release Details

Bug fixes

• Works & Bookmarks
  • Work and bookmark re-indexing is now being queued and run in the background using Resque, making it more robust and less of a strain on the servers.
  • Backdating wasn't working correctly when posting a work without previewing first. This has now been fixed.
  • Unposted drafts (created when previewing) had no revision date, causing errors in several places on the Archive, such as item management pages for collections. We fixed this recently, and are making the fix permanent now.
  • The "Works (#)" button on user dashboards (below the five most recent works) had accidentally vanished in a previous deploy. We have now restored it and also added "Works (#)" and "Bookmarks (#)" buttons to collection dashboards for consistency.
  • The "↑ Top" button on a work page was forcing a full page refresh; it now just jumps you back to the top of the work as intended.
  • The gifts page now displays gifts a user has received in order from most recent to oldest.
  • Searches with slashes in them (i.e. all relationship tags) were giving Error 500 after a recent Elasticsearch update. We fixed this problem shortly after being alerted to it; this deploy makes the fix permanent.

• Downloads
  • PDF and MOBI downloads were broken; we quickly fixed them after the last deploy and are making the fix permanent in this one.
  • Trying to download a MOBI file directly from a Kindle device would frequently lead to errors; we have changed the MIME type of our MOBI files so the Kindle browser can handle it correctly. (Due to another issue, multi-chapter works may need to be downloaded twice to get a functioning file.)

• Tag Wrangling
  • If a tag wrangler ticked the "Turn off emails about comments" option in their account preferences, they would also no longer receive comment notifications from tag discussions. They will now always receive such comments.
  • Updating an unsorted tag from a page other than the first would redirect you back to page 1; this no longer happens.
  • There was a small display issue with autocomplete fields on tag editing pages; this is now fixed.

• Misc.
  • The account creation page advised newly signed-up users to contact Support if the activation email hadn't arrived within two hours. We adjusted the time to 24 hours to account for clogged mail queues or issues with some email providers, which are delaying email delivery.
  • Our maintenance page (sometimes used for downtime during a deploy) was promising new features after the downtime; this wasn't always true, so we removed the line.
  • On our Invite Requests page, we were only displaying the number of people already in the queue. We have added the number of invites we automatically send out every day, which currently makes for a wait time of 24 hours or less.
  • On our Public Skins page, the skin descriptions were frequently one unbroken line, forcing sideways scrolling. In user inboxes, comments containing long unbroken words were also breaking the page. We have now added a fix that forces linebreaks. (In some browsers the lines won't be wrapped in the inbox; in that case a scrollbar at the bottom of the comment list should make it possible to read anyway.)

Welcome to Release 0.9.11. Elz, Enigel, James_, Lalith, Sarken, Scott, Stephanie, and tuff_ghost contributed code to this release, which was tested by our awesome testing team: Alix Mason, athenejen, Camilla M., Emilie, estirose, JanOda, Lady Oscar, MilenaDaniels, mumble, pocketmouse, Sarken, and Scott.

Highlights!

Changes to the Kudos Button

We are excited to announce that we have revamped the Kudos button to use an approach known as AJAX. Previously, when you clicked the Kudos ♥ button, the entire page had to be reloaded. This was often a considerable amount of data, and fetching it all again from the database put an unnecessary strain on the servers. When clicking on the button now, only the Kudos section will refresh.

(Note: While we were testing the new and improved code, we discovered some existing, but previously unreported, caching issues which prevent guest kudos from showing up correctly in the list unless a logged-in user leaves kudos at a later point. Please bear with us, and rest assured no kudos are lost!)

Home Page Improvements

This release sees the return of the Twitter widget to our home page! You can now get an at-a-glance view of the most recent OTW happenings (as summed up in 140 characters or less). In addition, we have expanded the number of visible AO3 News headlines from one to three, so that exciting announcements aren't overlooked by our eager users!

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page for current issues.

Please note that a fix in this release will unfortunately strip out all code comments in any Work or Archive Skins you edit now. We apologize for this, and are working on ways to handle comments in skins better!

Release Details

Updates

• We have updated our Terms of Service. The language is now consistently gender-neutral and we've added some clarifications about changes our Abuse personnel can make to mislabeled works. Please refer to the newly organized Tags category.

Bug Fixes

• Collections & Challenges
  • It was possible to set up a prompt meme challenge in such a way that more prompts were required than were allowed, making it impossible for users to sign up. This has been corrected.
  • Those who were not members of a challenge were not previously able to see the prompts requests page, and now are.
  • Editing a work which was already a part of a moderated collection was causing a blue notice to show up saying that the work would have to be approved before showing up in the collection. This erroneous message has been removed.

• Tags and Wrangling
  • Tags that are synned to a canonical tag didn't have buttons to show their usage on works and bookmarks. We have added those buttons (which will lead to the canonical tag's works or bookmarks).
  • Tags which aren't yet sorted into a category (fandom, character, etc.) can no longer be accidentally marked as unwrangleable.
  • The ticky box to mark a tag as unwrangleable has been physically separated a bit from the 'mark canonical' box, for ease of use.
  • On the comments pages for tags (only visible to wranglers), the pagination links were not working correctly if the tag had a slash or dot in it. We have resolved this issue.
  • Comment notification emails for fandom tag synonyms were not being sent. Emails are now correctly generated.
  • The default order for the mass-wrangle "bins" has been changed to show tags sorted by date in ascending order.
  • When using filters to show fandoms by their wranglers, the filter preference was being lost if you changed any of the assignments. This filter preference now persists through button usage.

• Works
  • Editing a recently posted work and then posting without preview would cause that work to be bumped back to the top of work lists, e.g. for a fandom tag. This has been corrected.
  • Creating a draft chapter on an already published work was causing that work's 'updated at' information to change, bumping it back to the top of work lists. We have fixed this error.
  • The automatic text about related works, inspiring works, inspirational works, etc. was failing to show up correctly in some cases. We have reworked this section of the code, so all relevant information should now be displayed at all times.
  • The notice that a work is a translation will now only show at the top of a work, as intended, instead of both the top and the bottom.
  • When viewing a work (e.g. a remix) inspired by a "restricted" work while logged out, you will now no longer see the name of the remixed work or a link to it. Instead you will be told that the work is restricted (locked to account holders), and that you need to log in to view it.
  • When pressing the button to create a new work skin you were taken to the 'New Skin' form, but the form by default was set to create a site skin rather than a work skin. The correct preference now loads when you open the page, and persists through error messages (e.g. a missing skin title).

• Miscellaneous
  • Previously, when any site admin deleted a work, an email was generated informing the work owner that the action was taken by the Abuse committee. The text of the email has been changed to qualify that the deletion may have occurred in the course of an archive import managed by Open Doors.
  • Filtering one's inbox and then using one of the management buttons (Mark Read, etc.) was causing the previous filter options to disappear. Filter preferences now persist when clicking the various Inbox buttons.
  • The radio buttons on the Inbox filters section were previously misaligned, but have now been fixed.
  • The Twitter widget has been returned to the front page!
  • The headlines for the three most recent news posts will show up on the homepage (instead of just one).
  • The header and main navigation were hidden from anyone viewing the Archive with Internet Explorer 7. While we no longer support IE7, we did at the time the header was designed, so we have fixed this issue, which was caused by differences between the live Archive and our testing environment.
  • We have added a mechanism to the Support form to prevent multiple copies of the same request from being submitted.
  • Our internal CSS Sanitizer was being inconsistent in allowing certain browser-specific prefixes. This has been corrected. Additionally, we fixed a bug that would erroneously add the #workskin prefix, and you can now target the #workskin container directly (e.g. to apply a background color).
  • Previously, when you left a Kudos the entire page was forced to reload. We have fixed it so only the 'Kudos' section of the page refreshes.

Welcome to Release 0.9.10. Ariana, Elz, Enigel, James_, Lal, Sarken, Scott and tuff_ghost contributed code to this release, which was tested by our awesome testing team: aralias, BelleGee, Camilla M., Emilie, hele, James_, Lady Oscar, Leigh Berry, Lucy Pearson, mumble, Reppu, Runt, sarken.

As some of you may have noticed, we had some site issues earlier that required one of our servers to be rebooted. Thanks to the efforts of our hard-working Systems team, those issues have now been resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience! As always, you can get the latest information on the state of the Archive by going to our AO3_Status Twitter Feed.

This is another small release focusing on bug fixes and some niggly bits, before we move on to new features and enhancements in next few deploys.

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page for current issues.

Release Details

Bug fixes

• Collections & Challenges
  • Ticking 'Semi-anonymous prompt' on a prompt submission form and then submitting an incorrectly filled out form was causing the ticky to become unchecked, potentially leading to non-anonymous prompt submissions (if you just fixed the prompt and submitted it again without looking at the ticky). This has now been fixed.
  • When trying to add a work to a collection, the autocomplete displayed only the collection's title (e.g. "Podfics"), causing confusion. Autocomplete now displays both title and name (e.g. "teenwolf_podfics") for clarity's sake.
  • The browser page titles for the Open Challenges, Open Gift Exchanges, and Open Prompt Memes pages were using abbreviations, e.g. GE or PM. They now spell out the challenge type in question.
  • The text on the buttons leading to some collection pages (Open Challenges, Top-Level Collections) used an extraneous 'See' (as in, "See Open Challenges"). This has been corrected.
  • There were some exposed HTML tags in the list of suggestions for creating a new collection; they are now gone.

• Tags & Wrangling
  • An error 500 was incorrectly showing when attempting to change the category of a bookmark tag; this has been fixed.
  • The help text for Relationship tags in the posting form suggested the use of pairing smush names, such as Snarry. Now it doesn't.

• Works
  • There was previously no built-in support for right-to-left languages on the posting form. We have now enabled: <div dir="rtl"> and <p dir="rtl"> and have also added an RTL button to the Rich Text Editor.
  • While editing an existing Work or Chapter draft, there was no immediately obvious way to re-save the work or chapter as a draft. We have now added a 'Save Without Posting' button to the editing form, so it's not necessary to Preview before re-saving as a draft.
  • The wrong blurb icon was set when both "No Archive Warnings Apply" and "Choose Not to Use" options were chosen by the work creator. Now the orange "?!" is set, signifying the choice not to warn.
  • The "adult content" warning will now show the work's blurb information on the same page as the warning, so you know which work was actually giving you the Proceed/Go Back screen.
  • On the posting form, the "Rich Text" and "HTML" buttons are now separated with a clear indication of which one is selected.
  • The help popup for HTML on the posting form spoke of work skins in the future tense. It now correctly refers to them as existing.
  • We corrected a typo in the posting form help popup for backdating.
  • We also corrected a typo in the 'Work Search' help popup.

• Sharing
  • Sharing a Bookmark on Tumblr was producing a broken link. The link now correctly points to the work or series that was bookmarked.
  • There was no button to share a Bookmark on Twitter. The button is now there.
  • When clicking 'Share' on a Work the help text did not mention the use of the Tumblr button, which it now does.

• Misc
  • A previous code deploy accidentally removed the users' time zone and page title preference from the Preferences page. It has now been returned.
  • We fixed an issue where certain CSS values in a user's work skin could escape the limits of the work text, potentially affecting the whole page.
  • Several issues in this release lacked automated tests. They have now been added.

Welcome to Release 0.9.9! Ariana, ecuoln, Elz, Lal, Naomi, Rebecca, Sarken, and Scott contributed code to this release, which was tested by our awesome testing team: Camilla M, Enigel, Estirose, FishieMishie, hele, James, Lady Oscar, mumble, Reppu, Runt, Sarken.

While we were working on upgrading our Ruby on Rails install, many other fixes and improvements had to bide their time in our "pull request" queue. A pull request is a way to submit code to a software project on Github, where we keep the Archive of Our Own code: A coder "pushes" a fix to Github (where it can be reviewed) and asks for the code to be "pulled" in (so it can be neatly slotted into the appropriate places).

Since we've had many more pull requests (yay!) than we could put in during the last few deploys (boo!), we're now dealing with a considerable backlog (and some dust and cobwebs in the corners).

We're hoping to chip away at the queue in the upcoming releases, while also starting to work on larger design projects we've had to put on hold. Expect many more fixes, and please stay tuned for news about upcoming features.

Highlights!

Tag Set and Challenge Fixes

The festive challenge season has started, with several holiday-themed gift exchanges starting to get ready for nominations, sign-ups, or assignments. We will continue to work to improve these features, and have included a handful of fixes in this release. Some of the more awkward tag set bugs should be taken care of, and many more fixes are yet to come. We are also working on improving our challenge/tag set documentation!

Lifespan of Drafts

This deploy increases the time between the creation of a draft and its automatic deletion to 1 month (from 1 week). We are considering ways to better handle drafts in upcoming updates, but do not have any plans to enable true drafts and document management in the immediate future. Please, please, please don't use Archive drafts as the only place to store your work! Browsers crash, errors happen, and yes, drafts will be deleted. Once deleted, a work cannot be retrieved, no matter how much our Support team would really like to help you. :-(

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page for current issues.

Release Details

Bug fixes

• Admin
  • Site admins could not view works restricted to site members, which has now been fixed.
  • An option in the admin interface said "days" instead of "weeks"; this has now been changed to reflect the actual setting units.
  • A setting in the admin interface could be set to zero; this caused errors and has been fixed.

• Front End
  • We had some lavender backgrounds hanging around where we wanted grey (e.g. to mark a draft as a draft). All lavender should be gone now.
  • We've changed the Terms of Service link on our sign-up form to open in a new window.
  • Due to a bug, expanding the fandoms list on your own dashboard left you with no way to collapse the list again. That is now fixed.

• Collections & Tag Sets
  • On fandoms pages in collections, fandoms with articles were breaking the order of the alphabet (e.g. "A League of Their Own" would shuffle the entire L section to the top of the list, where the A section should be); this has been fixed.
  • Tag sets that belonged to a collection did not actually show up on the collection's profile, and were hard to find by other users. This has been taken care of.
  • Non-canonical fandom tags vanish from a tag set when a work using that tag was posted and then deleted; this has been fixed.
  • There were some issues with accented characters in tag sets; these should now be taken care of.
  • Nominated canonical tags wouldn't display properly on the tag set page after approval by a mod; we've addressed the caching issue that caused this, so updates should now appear on the tag set as expected.
  • There were some issues with how associations between tags in a tag set were handled; these have been fixed.
  • Tag nominations with [brackets] in the tag could not be approved or rejected; now they can.
  • When signing up for a gift exchange, tags put into the "Optional Tags" field were not properly saved if there was an error in the signup or if the signup was edited; this has been fixed.

• Misc.
  • Users could not access the second page of bookmarks if they had filtered bookmarks by a tag containing a slash. Now they can.
  • The lifespan for drafts has been extended to 1 month.
  • We have added helpful explanations to every single option on your Preferences page! Just click the little blue question marks next to the headings.
  • Support have been working with the Translation committee to offer support in various languages; this deploy updates the list of the languages we can offer support in.
  • On the list of fandoms in need of a wrangler, the fandoms could not be filtered by medium and sorted by work count at the same time. Now they can. The menu box was also displaying at the bottom of the page; it's now correctly at the top.
  • Our .epub files were identifying themselves as "application/epub" instead of "application/epub+zip", which caused issues on some devices. This has been fixed.
  • We cleaned up the method we were using to handle error or success messages on cached pages.

Welcome to Release 0.9.8, our Big Rails Update of 2013! Ariana, Elz, Enigel, James_, Sarken, and Scott contributed code to this release, which was tested by our awesome testing team: aralias, Ariana, BelleGee, Camilla M., Enigel, Etharei, Eve Forbes, FishieMishie, hele, Jane, Jenny Scott-Thompson, Katy Armstrong, Key Foster, Lady Oscar, Leigh Berry, ljunattainable, matty, mumble, Northern_Star, Reppu, Runt, Sarken, Sumeria, Tai, and vtn.

Highlights!

This release was reserved for upgrading the version of Rails we are using. The Archive is built on the web framework Ruby on Rails, and it's important for us to make sure that we are always using a reasonably up-to-date version - this means that we have the latest security fixes (or can easily grab new security patches as they come out) and that we can take advantages of spiffy new features and plug-ins.

We've updated to Rails 3.2.13, which is the newest release of the version we're on. We're holding off on upgrading to the latest version because this is a BIG change - Rails 3.2. gives us up-to-date security with less potential for oddities. However, we will be upgrading to Rails 4 in the future (by which time lots more people will have made the switch and we'll know the most common gotchas).

This update shouldn't affect any of the visible parts of the site - it's just a change to the underlying code. However, sometimes these changes can have unexpected effects - for example, a form used by our Open Doors staffers suddenly disappeared because the updated Rails framework required a single extra character in our code! To avoid such problems showing up for our users, our trusty testing team (aided by our coders and tag wrangling volunteers) have been hard at work testing ALL THE THINGS and reporting issues to be fixed by our tireless coders. While our ever-growing suite of automated tests has helped a lot with this, it was still a major undertaking and we thank everyone involved!

Because this release involved subtle adjustments to the underlying code, we kept other changes to a minimum (it's useful to be sure we didn't create a problem ourselves). Now that the upgrade is done, we can once again turn our attention to bugfixes and site improvements! Stay tuned for a bugfix frenzy in upcoming releases! As always, if you think you've found a bug, or you have a question about any aspect of the site, our Support team are more than happy to help you out.

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page for current issues.

Release Details

Bug fixes

• The information in chapter headers was being aggressively cached, and would often not update to reflect changes made to authorship or chapter number unless the chapter title was also edited. This has been fixed.
• If a collection owner had ticked the "Send a message to the collection email when a work is added" option, trying to add a bookmark to the collection would result in an error 500. This has been fixed, and an appropriate email will be sent.
• Trying to search for a tag set would lead to an error 500. This has been fixed.
• Trying to load any bookmark page (by user, tag, work, or series) while logged in as an admin would result in an error 500. This has been fixed.
• Leaving a comment as the creator of an anonymous work would not properly update the comment (e.g. after creator reveals during a gift exchange) and instead keep attributing it to "Anonymous Creator". This has been fixed.
• The emails sent to authors when a work of theirs was imported from another archive included lingering information from a previous import. They have now been scrubbed clean of specific fandom references.

Here are the collected notes for a few small deploys we had recently!

Release 0.9.6.1, deployed on May 9, had code contributions from Ariana, Nathan J Xaxson, Scott, and tuff_ghost. It primarily contained the final pieces of code needed for the 852 Prospect import, with a couple of critical fixes thrown in.

Release 0.9.7 was deployed in two steps, with most of the fixes going out this week, and included contributions from Elz, Enigel, Sarken, Scott, and tuff_ghost.

All new code was tested by our awesome testing team: Belle Gee, Camilla M, FishieMishie, hele, Jay Bee, Jenny Scott-Thompson, Lady Oscar, Leigh Berry, mumble, Northern Star, Sam Johnsson, and Sarken.

Highlights

Making friends with Travis!

Over the last few months coders have been working hard on updating our test suite (a whole bunch of scenarios describing what our code should do, making it easier to tell if it doesn't) to prepare for our big upgrade to Rails 3.2.

In the process of doing so, the Archive has started using the Travis-CI platform, a Continuous Integration (CI) service. (Special thanks to coder Scott for all his work in this process!) This ensures that each and every code change is run against the entire suite of over 520 tests before being accepted into the main codebase. This, as well as continued progress in our adoption of helpful CI practices, helps keep the Archive running smoothly with fewer interruptions for code deployments.

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page for current issues.

Release Details

Features

• Travis-CI integration

Bug fixes

Works

• A previous code change made it impossible to remove gift recipient information from a work. Gift recipients can now be removed again!
• An issue had made it impossible to edit a chapter draft and then re-save it as a draft; this was fixed in 0.9.6.1.
• Subscription notifications for chapter updates now properly list the chapter number/count for the Work (e.g. 3/7), making it easier to tell if a work is completed. We also permanently brought back information lost in a previous deploy, namely chapter summaries, additional tags, and series information for all possible configurations of chapter updates.

Importing

• Code changes on external sites caused works to be imported incorrectly and with extraneous content. The importer should now correctly import works from LiveJournal, Dreamwidth, and DeviantArt.
• Redirects from the Smallville Slash Archive to works imported to the Archive were broken; they should now work properly.
• The emails sent to owners of imported works from 852 Prospect were updated to correctly reflect the claiming process and related information.

ToS and ToS FAQ

• Fixed several broken/misdirected links.
• Made changes to wording requested by the Legal and Content Policy committees.

Twitter

• Twitter retired its old API, breaking our Twitter widgets. They were temporarily removed from the Archive front page and maintenance page until they can be updated.

Welcome to Release 0.9.6: The Headering! Ariana, bingeling, ecuoln, Elz, Enigel, Nathan J Xaxson, Sarken, Scott, tuff_ghost and Tegan contributed code to this release, which was tested by our awesome testing team: Alison W, Ariana, Emilie K, Enigel, estirose, FishieMishie, Jenn Calaelen, Kylie, Lady Oscar, Matty, mumble, Sam J., Sarken, Scott S, and Tai.

NOTE: If you see a collection of buttons at the top of the screen rather than a thin bar with menu titles as in the screencaps in the header preview post, please try clearing your browser cache and reloading.

There are some instructions for clearing cache in various browsers here.

Highlights!

New header and footer and JavaScript, oh my!

This code deploy sees the release of our brand new header and footer! Back in February we gave you a sneak peek of our design, and we are now proud to give you the final product. Much love and thanks to Frontend Lead Sarken who was the lead architect for this redesign (and also made sure it works in all major site skins!), and many thanks to all those who spent hours poking and prodding it to make sure everything was working correctly in a wide selection of browsers and platforms. We have also cleaned up the footer so it matches the new header, and reorganized some of the links.

As we mentioned, a lot of work went into coding, testing, re-coding and re-testing the new dropdown menus, and we can confidently declare it usable with and without JavaScript enabled, no matter if you're using your mouse, keyboard, or touchscreen to navigate. It should also play nice with other assistive tech such as screenreaders. However, if you run into any issues on your particular device, please send in a report to Support and let us know! We will do our best to fix it.

In order for this header to be as accessible as possible, we were required to update to a new version of jQuery. (Also, it's just good practice to try and stay up to date.) Many thanks to everyone who helped regression-test features requiring JavaScript all across the site to make sure everything was still working as expected after the upgrade! Extra special thanks to Testing co-leads Jenn Calaelen and Lady Oscar for providing testers with a huge and beautiful spreadsheet of ALL the things to test and managing testing parties for our volunteers.

New notification emails!

With this release we also see the rollout of our brand new HTML and text-based emails! Frontend coder tuff_ghost was the driving force behind this massive undertaking, with beautiful HTML templates provided by summertea. All our email templates (comment notifications, subscription updates, challenge assignments, gift notifications, and many more) had to be rewritten to fit the new HTML design, and a plain text version had to be created for each email as well. Many thanks to tuff_ghost for all her hard work!

We now send out true multipart emails: users who for whatever reason cannot or do not wish to view HTML formatting in their emails will now be presented with a stripped down version of the message (as opposed to bits of visible HTML code or unclickable links). Delivering emails in this manner, and labeling them correctly in the email header, is another step towards keeping our emails from being flagged as spam by service providers.

New option to disable guest comments!

Finally, the last of our big features for this release is the ability for work creators to decide whether or not they will allow anonymous (logged out) comments on each work they post. The posting form has been adjusted accordingly and a new 'Privacy' subsection with two ticky boxes has been added: you can still restrict access to your work to logged-in users only, or you can choose to just disallow guest comments instead, while leaving the work open to the public.

New fixes to our automated tests!

For years now, we have been using something called Cucumber tests as a way to make sure our code isn't broken (without having to manually try out every possible feature on the site) whenever a new version of the site is finalized. However, every now and then we slip up in updating these tests or writing new tests to cover new features, leading to broken tests (the irony!) and making them much less useful than they could be.

While we're looking into ways to update and enhance our testing suite in general (e.g. with the RSpec framework), we needed to make sure our tests were useful again in the short term, and coder Scott has heroically stepped up to do just that. Many many thanks for all the hard work he's been putting in!

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page for current issues. This list is updated with each release, so please make sure to give it a glance before contacting Support - it might just offer you a temporary solution to your problem right away.

Release Details

Features

• Redesigned main navigation with drop-down menus and restructured footer area
• Improved homepage to display the AO3 News more prominently, include a link back to the Archive's parent organization, and display all the OTW's twitter feeds for latest news
• Ability to disable anonymous comments per work
• Multipart emails (HTML/plain text) with uniform design across all Archive notifications
• New About Us page

Bug fixes and backend enhancements

Works

• Previously it was not possible to edit works that were in closed collections. This has now been solved, and you can edit away!
• When posting a new work, the date of the work was set to "2013-01-01" in some particular cases. This was a difficult to pin down bug involving the backdating option, and we hope it has been resolved now.
• When you edited a chapter, then selected 'Preview', the preview page was rendering incorrectly. We have reworked this page, and previewing should now correctly display text changes.
• Trying to look up an imported work using the original URL was throwing a 404 error. Additionally, the tool was causing problems when the 'www' part of an address was left off. Both have been fixed!
• DeviantART imports were not working due to code changes on DeviantART's end. We have updated our import code to fix this.
• There was a bug in our backend code that was affecting the archive importing tool, resulting in errors. The bug has been fixed.
• Soundcloud has been added to our approved list of sites and can now be used when embedding media to your works on the Archive. 4shared has been removed.

Notifications

• Previously when works were deleted by the Abuse team, the email notification stated that the work was deleted at the request of the user. We have created a new mailer emphasising that the work was deleted for Abuse reasons and included a link to contact Abuse with any questions.
• Co-authors were receiving emails leading them to believe that they had deleted a work, when in fact it was one of their fellow authors. The wording has been changed to avoid confusion.
• When a user added a giftee to a work, and posted the work only after previewing, a gift email was not being generated. This has been resolved, and gift notification emails should go out using any workflow.

JavaScript and Frontend

• The help boxes (visible, for instance, when you click on any of the blue questions marks across the site) were a combination of different patches and workarounds. The "lightbox" code to create these help pop-ups has been entirely rewritten for better performance and accessibility, also fixing a bug where keyboard navigation inside the box wasn't working in some browsers. Please note that optimization for the iPhone is still in the works.
• The autocomplete dropdown (e.g. for adding tags to a work or using the wrangling interface) was not working on some browsers, most notably Opera. This has been resolved.
• There were accessibility problems when attempting to remove tags from a work using screenreaders and keyboard navigation. The "X" that deletes a tag has now been tweaked slightly to allow keyboard access.
• JavaScript tweaks have been added in some places to prevent the double submission of forms, e.g. when accidentally clicking a button twice. The 'Post' (or 'Update') button now changes into 'Please Wait...' once the form has been submitted.
• On a bookmark index page, such as for a particular tag, opening multiple forms to bookmark separate works caused the character counter for notes to stop functioning. This has been fixed.
• With JavaScript disabled, there were some non-functioning options when trying to access all pseuds by a user on that user's homepage. We have cleaned up this code to make it more accessible for those who choose not to use JS.
• When viewing a user's fandoms, clicking the 'Expand full list' resulted in the addition of an ugly grey space between the top five and the rest. This has been cleaned up to display all fandoms as one continuous list.
• The placement of our JavaScript code on a page was causing some performance issues. The JavaScript now loads after the main content, speeding up load times.
• We have created touch icons for mobile devices, which should now show up when you bookmark any Archive address to your phone's screen.

Tag Wrangling

• On Tag Wrangling pages, the ticky boxes for mass selection were in their own column, taking up valuable screen space. They have been moved to the column containing the tag names for more convenient selection.
• When Tag Wranglers assigned an unsorted tag to a category (e.g. Relationship) and then searched for that tag, an error was occurring in Tag Search. This has been resolved.
• When attempting to add synonym tags to a non-canonical tag, wranglers got an error message telling them that the tag wasn't canonical. The tag name is now a link to that tag, so wranglers can make it canonical if they wish.
• Text on the Tag Wranglers' former landing page was edited and a couple important links were added.
• The 'Unsorted Tags' wrangling page had no visible pagination links. They have now been added.
• The Tag Wrangling menu has been re-worked to make the wranglers' workflow more efficient.

Admin

• AO3 admins now have the ability to mass decline all requests for more invitations by registered users (like we decided to when we were battling server meltdowns last year), and notify the users by email with one button click.
• Validation issues were making it impossible for admins to decline invitation requests by users by setting the number of invitations to zero. This has been fixed.

Misc.

• For ease of navigation, we have added Next/Previous links to the AO3 News posts.
• At user requests, Quenya, Thermian, and tlhIngan-Hol were added to the list of languages a creator can mark their work as and to the list on the Languages page. Qapla'!
• To make it easier for users to see the latest update about the state of the Archive during scheduled downtime, we added a feed of our @AO3_Status Twitter to our "The archive is down for maintenance" page.
• We made some text changes to the page containing information about contributing to the AO3.
• Safari on iPhones and iPads was getting stuck to anchored links (e.g. ?show_comments=true#comments) and after leaving kudos, not allowing users to scroll away anymore. This was a bug in iOS 5 that was taken care of in iOS 6, but should now also be fixed in older models.
• Our automated tests were outdated in many places, leading to unhelpful results when running them. They have now been heroically fixed across the board.