Archive of Our Own ^beta

These release notes bring together details for two small updates, one we deployed shortly after Release 0.8.19 to address a couple of issues which arose, and the one we deployed today.

Some of you may have noticed a temporary site glitch on June 30/July 1. This was caused by a leap second in the UTC time standard which caused problems for a number of sites across the web. Our servers got all confuzzled and had to be rebooted by our ever-alert Systems team. Unfortunately, a small number of kudos and subscriptions emails were lost during this time: many apologies for this!

Today's deploy comprises a handful of small tweaks to the Archive, which make up the last of our performance-related "emergency" updates. We will now focus on the upcoming 0.9.0 release, which we're hoping to have ready to go later this month. This release will come with a major rewrite of the browse & search navigation (replacing the currently disabled filtering system) and a host of bug fixes. Expect significant improvements to rich text editing, collections and challenges, and the help pop-ups all around the site, among many other things.

Over the past few months, we've had a total of eight new coder volunteers coming in, many of whom dived right into our code and already submitted bug fixes or are currently working on feature enhancements. In addition, the Testers group welcomed several new volunteers. We are grateful to anyone donating their time, skills and passion to the Archive, be it as coders, testers, tag wranglers or Support staff. Many thanks also to the members of the Volunteers & Recruiting committee, who have been tireless in getting new people sorted and settled in. \o/

Mini-release: 0.8.20 (deployed 17 June 2012)

• We made some tweaks to the caching system introduced earlier (more details in our Update on AO3 performance issues), because it was generating error messages for some tag pages.

Current release: 0.8.21

• We added a help pop-up to the Work Search form, including some tips for searching by tag, which lets you combine ratings, warnings, fandoms, characters etc. into a host of search options.
• Since it was taking a very long time to generate the search index, making it impossible to search for new works, we've disabled searching by the number of kudos (which were the major bottleneck) until the new system is up and running.
• Several users contacted Support in alarm when it looked like they were suddenly logged into someone else's account. At no point was security actually compromised, this was merely the result of faulty cookie handling in some browsers confusing the caching and serving up "logged in" pages to guests. Since guests cannot access areas restricted to account holders to begin with, this only affected public pages. We believe the problem is now fixed.
• Assigning numbered IDs to each invite request created a potential security issue which we fixed in Release 0.8.19. Due to this change, the previous, bookmarkable page to check one's position in the queue wasn't working anymore. We fixed the message and page text accordingly.
• When checking up on an invite request on the requests page, the search button would just hang without a message if your email wasn't found in the queue. This has been fixed.

Known issues

See our Known Issues page. For the latest site status information, check our Twitter AO3_Status.

Yet another update from your tireless archive volunteers! James from our Systems Committee has been making adjustments behind the scenes to stabilize the servers and get the most out of our caching, and we've seen some good improvements there. At the same time, we've been working on improving or scaling back the areas of our code where changes will give us the biggest gains.

Filtering

In order to improve performance further, tag filtering on work listing pages is disabled for the time being, until we roll out our new system. You can read more about this change in our post on disabling filters. We know this is an inconvenience for many users, but the filters are really the 800-pound gorilla sitting on top of our database - the works pages are both the most popular and the slowest on the site, which is a bad combination. We've had plans to fix them for a while, and that's underway. However, we need a few more weeks to finish and deploy the upgrade, since it also affects our search engine and quite a lot of our code. Our top priority is to make sure works remain accessible to users, and that new works and feedback can be posted and accessed. Looking carefully at our code and our stats, we concluded that removing filtering was the best way to ensure these goals in the short-term.

You'll still be able to view all the works for a particular tag, view the works for a user or collection in a particular fandom, and use our search feature to refine your results. Our post on disabling filters includes some handy tips to help you find what you're looking for. We hope to have full functionality restored to you soon! As a bonus side effect of this change, we've been able to remove the 1000 work limit on lists of works. This is because without the filters we can rely on the pagination system to limit the amount that we retrieve from the database at one time. So, while you can't filter your results any more, you CAN go through and read every work posted in your fandom! We hope this will compensate a little for the inconvenience.

Work Stats Caching

We've also done more caching of work stats (all the counts of comments, bookmarks, hits, etc.), so you may notice that these update more slowly on index pages now. The information is all still being recorded; we're just waiting a little longer to go get the counts for each work to spread out the load.

People Listings

The alphabetical people listings on the People page weren't actually that useful for finding users, and they were another performance drain.

We've replaced the full alphabetical listing with a listing of 10 random users, and added emphasis on the search. Note you can use wildcards in the search, so if you're not sure of someone's name you can enter part of it followed by an asterisk to get similar names. For example, entering Steve* would get Steve_Rogers_lover, SteveMcGarrettsGirl, stevecarrellrocks, etc.

Invitation Requests

We've suspended user requests for additional invitations for now as well. If you need invitations urgently for a challenge or for an archive rescue project, please contact Support. We also fixed an issue that potentially allowed users to snoop for other emails in the waiting queue.

Thank you!

Thanks to everyone who has been working hard on these issues, especially James, who has put in lots of hours tweaking the servers, and Elz, who has been doing the heavy lifting on code changes. Thanks also to all of you for your patience and understanding while we work!

And finally...

The great news is that so far, this emergency measure does seem to be having a noticeable effect. Our server load has diminished dramatically since we deployed this change:

Welcome to our third Release in this week! Elz, James, and Naomi contributed code to this release, and Ariana, bingeling, Enigel, Jenn, and Kylie from our testing teams worked it over. Our sysadmins and coders have done more work to address the performance issues that have been affecting the archive as well as several other bugfixes.

PLEASE NOTE: in the name of drastically improving performance, this deploy may have a few side effects that appear at first to be errors or confusing! Please do read over these release notes and make sure that they don't cover a problem you are experiencing before you contact support.

Further efforts to battle the 502 errors!

This release includes caching of most pages for guests using Squid! Squid will serve up saved versions of pages without hitting our database or application, which increases speed and decreases server load for everyone.

The tricky part is making this work with all of the dynamic elements of the site: skins, content that gets updated by users, personalized messages, etc. We have decided to turn squid on quickly to keep the Archive running smoothly but we'll be working on finding the right balance between customization and performance as we go forward, so you may see some tweaks to different aspects of the site as we fine-tune this.

Current issues related to the caching:

• Site skins have been disabled for logged out users for the time being - if you rely on this feature for accessibility needs, please contact support and we will get you an account ASAP so you can use the skins again.
• Comments and kudos from guests may not show up at once for other guests. When a guest leaves kudos or posts a comment, they will see the comment/kudos added. If another guest then visits that same page (or the same guest reloads the page), however, they will see the most-recently-cached version, which may not yet show their comment/kudos count.
• Guests may occasionally see a stray error message or notice appearing at the top of a page that does not appear to be related to anything you've done. We are working to track all of these errors down but it is hard to be sure we've gotten them all. The messages should not affect using the archive.
• Hits that are handled by Squid (most hits from guests) will not appear in the hit count immediately. The hit counts will be updated once a day from the squid logs.
• Duplicate hits from the log files (for instance on page reloads by the same guest) will no longer be removed because of technical limitations, so hit counts may increase more quickly in some cases.

Squid will be enabled after we update the code, so you may not notice any changes right away.

For those interested in knowing more about Squid, see the detailed explanation below!

Changes to Subscription emails

We've gotten feedback about how people use their subscription emails and in response we have adjust the subject lines and message content to allow people to identify the content more easily. Emails will now contain subs of one type (author, series, or work) and the name/title of the first one in the subject together with the number of other updates.

Details

• Subscriptions:
• Email subjects will now say [AO3] instead of [Archive Of Our Own].
• Subscriptions will be bundled by type with subject lines of the form [authors] posted [first item] and [#] more, where first item will be one of: [Work Title], [Chapter Title] of [Work Title], [Work Title] in [Series Name].

• Performance:
• Skin chooser is turned off for logged out users.
• Nearly all pages will be cached for logged out users.
• Comment forms and other forms that are getting data for logged out users will have their details remembered in cookies and filled in by Javascript rather than remembered in the page.

• Bug Fixes:
• 500 errors were appearing on some work listings because of an interaction between caching and time zone conversion - this should be fixed now.

Details About Squid

Senior coder Ana has written up some helpful information about Squid for those who are curious:

"Squid is a really powerful tool that does a lot of things, but we’re using it primarily as one thing: a reverse-proxy cache. A reverse-proxy cache is a system designed to cache (that is, store copies of) web pages. It sits between users’ requests and the rest of the site and stores the responses to some requests so that instead of making the server build the page from scratch again, Squid can check to see if someone’s looked at that page recently and pass on the cached version. This is really useful when you want to send the same page to lots and lots of users because it means that instead of forcing the servers to generate the pages over and over, we can store a copy and give that copy out to everyone.

Of course, sometimes pages change: an author edits a story, or someone leaves kudos, so you don’t want to let Squid keep those copies around forever. Right now we let Squid keep copies for 20 minutes, and then it throws them away and gets a new one. This feels like the right balance between keeping things up to date, but not overloading the servers.

In addition, logged in users get customization on every page, in the form of the user bar at the top of the page if nothing else, which means that we don’t want Squid to store or give pages to logged in users. If it did, then every user would see the user bar for whoever made the request that Squid saved, and it would only change every twenty minutes.

This same principle holds true for all on-page customization (such as the skin-chooser), and finding the right balance between customization and cacheability (how suitable a page is for storing and giving out to everyone) is going to be an ongoing project as we try to weigh site performance against nifty features and information."

These release notes written and compiled by Ana, Claudia, Elz, Enigel, Jenn, Lucy, and Naomi.

Mini-release notes: Battling the 502s errors and responding to user feedback

Our coders and sys-admins have been working hard to deal with the performance issues we've been experiencing over the last few weeks. Releases 0.8.15 and 0.8.16, only a few days after deploying 0.8.14, see the introduction of several tweaks to our code and server setup that should help alleviate the site slowness we addressed in our recent post, AO3 performance issues.

New code by andreja, Ariana, Elz, Enigel, and Naomi. Tested by Elz, Enigel, Jenn, Kylie, Sarken.

Performance fixes

As noted on our Known Issues page, one of the major bottlenecks were tag listings for very popular fandoms, which would either load very slowly or throw up 502 errors. We've added caching for the first five pages of results - these will expire when a work using that tag is posted or revised, so the listings will still be up to date.

Another significant bottleneck were the bookmarks listings, both the main one and the bookmarks on tags. We've simplified the functionality, as we look into ways of reworking the bookmarks for a much better performance.

With the help of New Relic, a web service that monitors and analyzes site performance in great detail, we found another source of slowness: works with a large amount of (guest) kudos. Showing an updated kudos count for every work as it was accessed was putting an undue strain on the server, so for now the number of kudos on a work will be cached (i.e. not fetched from the database in real time) and only updated every five minutes.

As per a user suggestion (thank you, fydyan), we also looked into ways to prioritize certain user actions over others, so that trying to post a work or a comment would be less likely to throw up an error (potentially taking all input with it) than, say, accessing a user profile or browsing the site. Many thanks to Sidra from Systems for implementing this!

Invitation emails

We had a bug which was preventing notification emails for invitations being sent. We've fixed this bug, and the emails which were affected have been resent. This may result in some people receiving their invitations twice - invitations can only be used once, so please take note of the invitation code and don't pass the extra email along to a friend if it's a code you've already used!

Plans for our next few deploys

We're continuing to work hard on performance fixes and will soon be implementing much more caching across the site. We'll be posting with more details about this shortly.

We've had lots of feedback about our recent changes to notification emails. Unfortunately, we cannot roll back these changes for performance reasons (for more details see our post on Email changes and USER STATS!). However, based on feedback we've received so far, we will be adjusted the way subscription emails are batched and labeled, hopefully in the next deploy. Thanks for bearing with us while we work to improve this!

Details

• Bug fixes:
• Invite emails were not being sent; this has now been fixed and the delayed ones resent.
• The work count on the front page used to vary depending on whether the user was logged in; it now shows the total of all published works.
• Previewing a work before posting made the wordcount not show; this has been fixed.
• Improvements:
• Kudos counts on works are now cached, but will change when new kudos is added by logged in users. Guest kudos counts will update every five minutes. Thus it will cause less of a load on the database.
• Works listings under tags are now cached up to the fifth page. The listings will update when a work with that tag is posted or revised.
• We've removed the grouping of bookmarks by work. Also, before it was trying to get the bookmarks using tag synonyms, or bookmarks that were not using the tag directly. The main bookmarks listing now grabs the most recent public bookmarks on the site, and the tag listings show the bookmarks that are tagged directly with the requested tag.
• Text on the collections page has been changed to clarify what characters are allowed in collection names.
• Small change to text on the tag edit pages: the label for the synonym field was changed to "Choose an existing tag or add a new tag name here to create a new canonical and make this tag its synonym." for the sake of clarity.
These release notes written and compiled by mumble, Enigel, Jenn and Lucy.

Welcome to Release 0.8.14. Ariana, Elz, Enigel, Lal, mumble, Naomi, Sam J. and Sarken contributed code to this release, which was tested by our awesome testing team: Jenn, Kylie, Melanie, mumble, Sparkling Snowfall, Xparrot and Zebra. A special welcome to our new coders Andreja, Ariana and Lal, who already contributed their first bug fixes for this deploy and the next! \o/

Right on the heels of our April deploy come the changes to our notification emails and the stats feature that we had previously announced. We welcome feedback on both! You can comment here, on the announcement or, for those more comfortable with code branches and spec drafts, our Github wiki.

We also spent some time going through our bug tracker with a fine comb and flagging several older issues that had been lingering for a few months or years. Some of those had been magically fixed somewhere along the way, some weren't relevant to our current code base anymore, some simply needed a confirmation that the fix worked as well on the actual Archive as it did in our test environment. Consequently, 53 additional issues could be closed in this deploy cycle.

In our next deploy, we're hoping to introduce some major improvements to our search and browse system. These improvements should help us address some of the performance problems we've been experiencing recently. We'll be testing everything carefully to ensure that we don't make the Archive blow up, but if it all works out, that will be coming your way within the next month. We'll have a preview for you before it's released, so stay tuned for more news!

Highlights!

Stats page!

This deploy sees the launch of the first version of our user stats page! Senior coder Naomi incorporated several popular feature requests into this information-rich overview, and added a few more features based on the feedback you gave us when we posted a preview of the stats page. You can see your total number of subscribers, kudos, and hits as well as your total word count, and a list of your works sorted by hits, kudos, bookmarks, or comments. On top of that, all this information can also be broken down by year!

Please note that this feature is still in progress, and improvements and bug fixes are in the works. Due to the way subscriptions are currently handled, it's difficult to differentiate between subscriptions to a work and to the series this work is part of. Consequently, series subscriptions are not being counted right now. Please stay tuned for updates!

A note about referrer information: The next version of the stats page will include a short list of recent referrers for each work. If you're unsettled by the idea that an author can see that you linked to their work, for example in a Tumblr or Dreamwidth post, you can use a go-between like anonym.to to link to works on the Archive. The content of locked or filtered posts will obviously not be accessible even if the link to it is listed! Furthermore, the mere fact that you linked to a work in the past will not make your post show up in the referrers. Someone has to click on that link as well.

Batch emails!

We know that many of our users liked to receive kudos notifications in real time, as a little nibble of joy throughout the day or week. However, the sheer number of emails going out every minute was bringing our server to its knees, so we had to drastically cut down on our email traffic. :-(

As a result, kudos notifications will go out only once a day, and subscription emails (new works by an author, new chapters in a WIP, or new parts in a series) will be batched and sent out hourly. This will relieve the pressure on our servers and help ensure emails arrive in a timely fashion. We're open to feedback on this process, and are hoping that the stats page will at least partly make up for the change!

Tools for Open Doors staff!

Open Doors gets an arsenal of new tools to make the importing process smoother, such as the ability to resend notification emails for unclaimed authors, for users that accidentally deleted it the first time, or no longer have access to the email address registered with the imported archive. (Previously, manually transferring works to current AO3 users generated a co-author notice which in turn generated confusion; for new users, invitations to the Archive needed to be sent separately.)

The Open Doors committee will also be able to change the redirect URL for works on the imported archive's original site, which is handy for users who have accidentally deleted the imported copy of their works or want to redirect readers to an existing copy of the work on AO3. (This is an interim fix until the merge tool is developed, which will allow authors to pick one version of the work to keep, and combine hit counts and reviews of both works.)

Note: If this is something you want Open Doors to arrange for your Smallville Slash Archive imports, please use this contact form to get in touch. Make sure to include your AO3 username as well as links to your work(s), both here and on the original archive. Open Doors staff will take care of it!

Last but not least, Open Doors will also be able to quickly look up what works have been imported under a particular email address, and block works associated with a particular email address from ever being imported, at an author's request.

Known Issues

We're currently experiencing some significant performance problems. We're working on the issue - now that we have deployed the code from this release we're able to start testing the big changes to search and browse, which should help a lot. You can read more about the performance problems and what we're doing to fix them at our post on AO3 performance woes

See our Known Issues page for current issues.

Note: This page recently underwent a thorough update, as well as a restructuring of the available information for better scanning. We have added workarounds where possible and will keep adding information as it becomes available.

Release Details

Features

• Stats page
• Email batching
• Mass Import improvements

Bug fixes

• Importing
  • The code to manage redirects from imported collections to works on the Archive was optimized to better handle valid and invalid URLs
  • Tweaked the wording of emails sent out to authors whose works were imported by an archive mod, it's now clearer that initially restricted (members-only) works can be unlocked by the author or archivist
  • Trying to import a work with one or more chapters longer than our limit (500,000 characters in a chapter) caused imports to just fail - as a stopgap, the imported work is truncated and a warning message is added at the end
  • Some invitations to claim imported stories were not being delivered properly; these should now go out without a hitch
  • Stories by two co-authors should now import correctly: both authors should receive an AO3 invitation and be able to claim the story as theirs independently from each other

• Works & Chapters & Comments
  • On multi-chaptered works, the word count would include unposted draft chapters; this has been fixed to only count posted chapters
  • When previewing a new chapter, then going back to edit and post the chapter, the chapter would get stuck as a draft; this has been fixed
  • We've received some user reports about whole works being accidentally deleted instead of single chapters; we have now renamed the "Delete" button on work pages (which also appears when viewing a single chapter) to "Delete Work" to avoid confusion
  • The character counter for comments wasn't working when editing a pre-existing comment; this has been fixed for all form fields, including the text box for challenge instructions (where the counter wasn't working to begin with)
  • The links in comment notifications (to reply, to see the whole thread, etc.) were broken in various ways, this should be fixed now

• Skins & Cosmetics
  • On user pages, the link to the profile was in an easily overlooked position below the user name, it has now been moved to the sidebar navigation
  • One Point Faux skin: on user dashboards, the list of top five fandoms wouldn't show up in some browsers; this has been fixed
  • One Point Faux skin: on user dashboards, the text on the Bookmark button was greyed out to discourage clicking until implementation of this feature
  • One Point Faux skin: in the header, a | symbol was appended to the "Hi, example!" greeting, this has been taken care of
  • Reversi skin: on the Manage Chapters page, the chapter titles were white-on-white and thus unreadable; this has been fixed
  • When adding several works as an inspiration (e.g. for a remix or fanart), the list of "current parent works" was misaligned; this has been fixed (the same fix applies to a similar issue with works in more than one series)
  • On prompt meme dashboards, the "Manage Items" option would show up twice for maintainers; the unnecessary duplicate has been removed now
  • Updated the help text for searches by Date on the Advanced Search form to go with a recent bug fix
  • Renamed the "Full text:" label to "Any field:" (everything else on the form plus summaries and notes), as full work searches were disabled for performance reasons a while ago
  • Changed the wording of the "only available to registered users of the Archive" message (displayed to guests without accounts) to encompass all restricted works, not just stories
  • On the Preferences page, the text on the help pop-up explaining the "Hide the share buttons on my work." option was adjusted to match the wording of the preference

• Error Extravaganza
  • When trying to download a .pdf version of a work that hadn't been generated (yet), users would get an error 500 instead of seeing a helpful error message; this has been fixed
  • There was an issue with an old reference to Javascript code that would cause errors 500 when trying to access the tags index; this has been resolved
  • Subscriptions as well associations between a work and its author weren't properly removed from the database when a work was deleted - resulting, for example, in errors 500 when trying to manage subscriptions; this has been fixed
  • Trying to access the bookmarks index for a nonexistent (e.g. misspelled) user or tag, or dashboard pages for a nonexistent pseud or Collection would throw up an error 500; it now gives the proper error message

• Misc.
  • The login link in the header was unreachable in keyboard tab navigation, making it inaccessible for users of screen reader software; we apologize for this and will take even greater care about keyboard accessibility in future releases
  • The directory for work downloads (such as .epub and .mobi files) was organized by author only, resulting in a gigantic list of folders and potentially slowing down performance in the future; subdirectories have been added now
  • On the Abuse Report form, the "link to the page you are reporting" field didn't recognize https:// URLs as proper Archive links; the validator now allows those as well
  • Tidied up a small bit of code for gift exchanges and prompt memes
  • Added a note about recommended measurements (100x100px) to the icon upload form for user profiles

Welcome to Release 0.8.13. Elz, Enigel, Firewolf, mumble and Sarken contributed code to this release, which was tested by our awesome testing team: Enigel, Jenn, Kylie, Sarken, mumble, Xparrot, and Zebra.

This early release is brought to you courtesy of a bug which was introduced in the last release. Trying to post a draft without previewing would only save changes to the draft, not publish the work. Unfortunately, it interacted with other draft-related bugs and resulted in complications for several users. We're choosing to deploy fixes for these bugs early, and move other changes planned for April to the May release instead.

Highlights!

More informative page titles!

Did you ever bookmark a fandom or pairing tag only to have it show up in your Delicious or Pinboard account as "works index" without any information whatsoever? Do you navigate to a page and view the title only to see something like "Archive of Our Own » users show" and feel bemused? Bemusify no more, page titles have been added that are more meaningful! Most pages now display more granular information which will hopefully make for less bewildering bookmarks and easier browsing; some work remains to be done though. Please bear with us while we make sure that all pages have helpful titles and do feel free to point out anything that seems off to you.

Series subscriptions!

In response to popular demand and following subscribe to user and subscribe to work in progress, we have added subscribe to series so you can keep up with those lovely, long series. You can find the Subscribe button at the top of all series pages. The current release will not trigger an email notification if an already-posted work is added to a series, however. This will be fixed in the next code push.

Note to authors: Your series will show up as a work in progress until you edit the series information and tick the "This series is complete" box at the bottom.

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page for current issues.

Release Details

Features

• Page titles have been updated to show more meaningful information!
• You can now subscribe to a series as well as users and works! \o/
• Tag wranglers can now mark and manage tags as unwrangleable!

Bug fixes

• Works
  • The character limit for chapters was interacting in unfortunate ways with the paragraph tags added by the parser, resulting in invalid works (that couldn't be bookmarked, for instance); this has been fixed by adding a buffer for HTML tags to the allowed chapter length
  • Trying to post a draft without preview wouldn't actually post the work, resulting in a work that only looked published; this has been fixed
  • The saved draft of a work would appear exactly like a published work to the author, potentially causing some confusion; a small notice banner at the the top now informs you that the work hasn't been posted yet
  • When commenting in view-full-work mode on a work with unposted chapters, the comment would get "attached" to the last chapter, even if it was still a draft; this has been fixed
  • On a pseud's work index, it would say "# Works found by USER", even though it was only a subset of works by that user; it now says "# Works found by PSEUD (USER)"

• Series
  • The option to add a co-author to a series was broken, making it impossible to have a shared series with another user; this has been fixed now
  • Trying to edit a series and going over the character limit in the Description or Note field would result in an error 500, this has been fixed
  • Before deleting series information from a work, the confirmation message would only say, "Are you sure?" which wasn't very clear; it will now clarify that the series will be deleted from all works (not just removed from this one)
  • When adding a new series to a work and using "Post without preview", the series would become visible to logged-in users only with no way for the author to lift that restriction; this bug has been fixed and only series consisting entirely of restricted works will themselves be restricted

• Frontend
  • Some pages, such as the Donation page and the FAQs were hard to scan; whitespace and formatting have been adjusted for easier processing
  • There were instances of text-transform and font-variant in our stylesheets that were deemed problematic from a translation perspective; these have been removed and all user content and site elements should now show up as intended
  • Some sections on several Archive pages didn't adhere to our standards for CSS classes, making them difficult to style in skins; those have been tidied up
  • The draft notice text on chapter drafts was obscured by a wonky line; this has been fixed
  • The explanatory text for the "Canonical" field on tag wrangling pages was missing a paragraph tag; it has been added now
  • The homepage was missing some landmarks (important for screenreader access); they have now been added
  • The stylesheet had an invalid cursor value for links; this has been fixed
  • The stylesheet links in the site header did not meet XHTML Strict standards as the tags weren't closed; they are now
  • Editing a comment and going over the character limit, the text field would shrink when clicking Update, making it difficult to edit the comment down to the proper length; this has been fixed
  • In the filter box on work pages, the arrow and filter names now trigger the pointer cursor, making it more obvious that they can be clicked to expand
  • The "hidden by admin" icon would not show up in the respective bookmark blurbs and help text box; this has been fixed

• Misc.
  • Previously it was only possible to add alt text and comments to a user icon; the same can now be done for a Collection icon
  • The edit/wrangle/works links on tag wrangle pages were set to open in a new window or tab; this has been changed so they open in the same window now
  • The text in password reset/generated password emails was missing a word; it has been added now
  • There was a small HTML error in gift notification emails; this has been tidied up
  • When creating an account and repeating the chosen password wrong, the resulting error message would be wonky in several ways; this has been fixed now
  • The deviantART importer (using expanded fav links, e.g. URLs in the form of /art/TITLE-12345) has been fixed to work with recent HTML changes on dA's end

Welcome to Release 0.8.12. Elz, Enigel, Jenny S-T, Naomi, Sarken, and Tegan contributed code to this release, which was tested by our awesome testing team: Jenn, Kylie, mumble, Sam J., Sarken, Xparrot, and Zebra.

Highlights!

Character and Relationship Feeds

After a trial run with the "F/F" tag and the subsequent offering of fandom feeds, we're now enabling feeds for (canonical) character and relationship tags (the same ones that show up in our browse filters). As before, you will see a "Subscribe to the feed" link on works pages for a character or relationship, such as Katniss Everdeen or Bunny/Wild Tiger. We'll be monitoring the performance impact of these and will be considering adding more feed options if everything is running well!

Editable Drafts

Before, it wasn't possible to save changes to work and chapter drafts without posting them, which wasn't ideal. We're hoping to flesh out our drafts feature more in the future, but for now, we've added an option to save changes to drafts after previewing them. Hopefully that's a start that we can build on in making the draft editing/posting workflow better moving forward!

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page for current issues.

Release Details

Features

• Enabled feeds for character and relationship tags

Bug fixes

• Works & Tags & Challenges
  • Finally made it possible to save edits to a draft without having to post the draft right away
  • Previewing a work would show the "Works inspired by this one:" line even if there weren't any, this has been fixed
  • The "Mark as Read" button was moved to the bottom of the work page
  • Links to non-fandom tags in work blurbs went to the /tag/xxx page (instead of tag/xxx/works) which didn't redirect properly for logged-in tag wranglers; this has been fixed
  • Gift exchanges which allowed optional tags to be used for matching were resulting in all users matching all other users, causing severe issues for several Challenges; this bug has been fixed

• Design & Display
  • Made the questions on FAQ pages stand out more for easier scanning
  • In the filter box on works pages, only clicking the arrows next to the Rating / Category / Fandom etc. headers would reveal all options; this has been fixed to expand the clickable area across the whole header
  • Fixed an issue with the gray preview box when adding and editing chapters
  • There were several issues with the edit page for a series, both visible and in terms of accessibility, it has been restructured and updated to follow the layout of the work edit page
  • Improved the tag list in work blurbs on static collection pages
  • On mobile skins, the sorting buttons for a user's works page were unclickable, this has been fixed and works can be sorted again on mobile devices
  • There were a few issues with the "Condition: " display when creating a skin with an option such as "IE6" selected under "IE Only" (or when creating a skin with no options selected), these have been fixed
  • Fixed a display issue with the chapter index navigation when viewing a work in chapter-by-chapter mode
  • The "New Pseud" button on a user's pseuds index would show up twice in Chrome, this has been fixed
  • When editing a multi-chaptered work, two drop-down menus to select a custom stylesheet would show up, this has been fixed
  • The download options navigation would overlap the other navigation buttons when Javascript was disabled, this has been fixed
  • There was an issue with erroneous commas popping up after tags in work blurbs, in IE8 and lower, this has been fixed--since the fix was done with jQuery it will only work when Javascript is enabled
  • The static error pages that would be shown in only the most obscure cases (such as 500.html) were given the look and feel of the Archive error pages

• Search
  • Made it possible to search for works by specifying a time frame in the form of "2 days ago" or "1 year ago"; previously it would throw up an error if not given a range in the form of "< 3 days ago”, i.e. “in the past 3 days” (Note that “x weeks ago” will search the entire 7-day-period given, and so on: “3 months ago”, if typed in today, will search the entirety of December)
  • The various search pages (Works, Tags, Bookmarks, Users) were linking to each other (or not) in an inconsistent and haphazard manner, they're now all interlinked
  • Excluded downloads, searches and external works from indexing by search engines
  • On the advanced search page, there was no actual help text for the "Bookmarked?" ticky, resulting in a 404 when clicking the question mark symbol; the appropriate help text has now been added

• Fun with Errors
  • Importing works from Fanfiction.net throws an error because they have blocked us from accessing he site - we've now added a custom error message so you can see what went wrong if you try this and it fails
  • Fixed a bug that could cause errors 500 on users' History pages
  • Fixed a bug that could cause an error 500 when trying to preview a work in very rare cases
  • Fixed some problems with fandom feeds that would result in errors if the feed was empty
  • Subscribing or unsubscribing from a user or work would result in an error 500 if the user had set their browser to not send referrer information, this has been fixed
  • Trying to access the /gifts page within a collection (without selecting a user to display gifts for) would result in an error 500, it now gives a more meaningful error message
  • Trying to access a comments index in the form of /works/xxx/comments would result in an error 500, this has been fixed
  • Trying to load the profile page of a non-existing user would result in an error 500, it now properly redirects to the home page with an error message
  • Trying to load a non-existing fandom page would result in an error 500, it now redirects to the /media page with an error message
  • Trying to access the requests summary page for a gift exchange with no fandom tags allowed would cause an error 500, this has been fixed
  • Trying to unsubscribe from a user or work without Javascript enabled would result in an error 404, this has been fixed

• Fun with Words
  • Changed the text of the invitation emails to encompass a wider variety of fanworks (not just fic)
  • Added podfic as a type of fanwork to the greeting on the homepage and invitation emails
  • The button on the edit multiple works page said "Update all stories", it now says "Update All Works" as it should
  • Fixed some mangled text in the help pop-up for public skins

Welcome to Release 0.8.11. Elz, erda, Firewolf, Jenny S-T, Naomi, Rebecca, Sam J., Sarken and tuff_ghost contributed code to this release, which was tested by our awesome testing team: Highlander II, hill, Irene, Jenn, Sarken, Sole, Kylie, Tai, Xparrot and Zebra.

Highlights!

Editing Multiple Works

This feature, accessible from the top right of your Works page, has been around for a while and in need of some loving attention for almost as long. Thanks to senior coder Naomi it is now possible to add or change meta information such as warnings and ratings, tags or authors all in one go. You can also lock all your works, or all your works in one fandom, to Archive members only, or add several stories to a Collection with one click. This feature also enables you to delete or orphan several works at once – please use with caution!

The page has been restructured to list your works by fandom, and you can select or deselect all works, or all works in one fandom, with the “All” or “None” buttons at the top, or next to the fandom name.

Please note that your edits will replace any already existing values! Whatever you type into the Additional Tags field, for example, won’t just be added to your existing tags, it will overwrite them. Please be careful when using this feature. If you leave a field blank or a box unchecked the corresponding information on your selected works will remain unchanged.

CSS Fixes

A big shout-out to our new design lead Sarken, who dug deep into our CSS code to tackle a whole load of layout and display issues. We do our best to support a wide array of browsers, mobile devices and assistive tech, with the main focus on accessibility above all else. Something that might look pretty in a browser might break access via screenreader, a bug fix that works in one browser might create more problems in another, and something that might look like an easy tweak might actually require non-trivial backend changes. We hope you’ll bear with us while we iron out any existing problems and further improve the skins feature, and welcome all feedback and bug reports through our Support form.

Linking to Works on FF.net

When you bookmark an offsite work or list it as the source of a remix or translation, we currently check to make sure that the link is actually active. Recently, this resulted in errors when trying to bookmark or credit a work on fanfiction.net, since they’ve blocked us from accessing their site. We’re now disabling the URL verification process for fanfiction.net links, so you should be able to credit and bookmark all offsite works again.

Email Queue

We currently have over 36,000 users, posting, editing and commenting on works, leaving kudos, signing up for challenges and generally keeping our servers nice and busy. Sometimes this leads to a large backlog of notifications waiting to be sent out and clogging up the pipes when people are waiting for account activation or password reset emails. Until we’ve put a more longterm solution in place to deal with the sheer volume of messages we’re sending out daily, time-sensitive notifications will be prioritized and sent directly to the front of the queue. We’ll be monitoring the effects of these tweaks on the email backlog.

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page for current issues.

Release Details

Features

• Fixed and enhanced the option to edit or delete multiple works at once (when editing please note the warnings before submitting your changes!)

Bug fixes

• Works
  • Fixed an issue where work titles with ampersands would display incorrectly in .epub downloads
  • Non-Roman characters were being turned into HTML code entities by the parser when trying to edit the work, this has been fixed – hurray! Apologies to those users who were inconvenienced by this bug.
  • Disabled URL verification for fanfiction.net so all offsite works can be bookmarked and credited again

• Collections & Challenges
  • Fixed an issue with erroneous Warnings and Ratings tags (such as “No Archive Warnings A”) showing up in tag sets and challenge sign-up forms
  • Did some back-end work on the code which generates prompt index pages to speed up the loading process

• Frontend & Design
  • The Help boxes across the site were unwieldy or inaccessible for users who rely on their keyboard for navigation; after some rewrites under the hood these issues should be fixed and the boxes should behave more consistently across browsers
  • Rewrote the way images (such as our warnings/ratings/completeness/etc. icons in work blurbs) are handled, hopefully streamlining page loads in the process (see CSS Image Sprites for more information)
  • Fixed the bottom pagination on the Inbox page (it was slipping to the side of the messages)
  • Made sure the “Notes:” header will only show up when notes are present
  • Fixed a display issue with the user name heading on the profile page
  • Fixed an issue with the size of the work text box when adding a new chapter
  • Fixed an issue with the size of the chapter title text field when posting or editing a chaptered work
  • The greeting in the header which is visible in some skins wasn’t linking to the user’s dashboard; it is now
  • Corrected the landmark text on the Popular Tags page (important for screenreader access)
  • Fixed a small issue with the pagination landmark on users’ Bookmarks pages
  • The “Most Popular” navigation item on the Tags page was displaying as plain text, it is now properly styled
  • The mobile stylesheet contained elements of the Slim Shaded skin, resulting in conflicts with other skins: this has been fixed
  • In blurbs without a summary the stats line and the edit buttons would be smushed too close, this has been fixed
  • Fixed a display issue with the chapter reorder buttons in various browsers
  • The button on Collection Rules pages said “en, Rules”, this has been corrected
  • There was an issue with text slipping under the user icon on Collection dashboards, this has been fixed
  • Got rid of double commas between maintainers in collection blurbs
  • Fixed a problem with the font in comment boxes interacting with browser default sizes for monospace font which resulted in very small text
  • Fixed a display issue with user icons on tag wrangler pages
  • Fixed a display issue with tables on mass-wrangling pages
  • Fixed a formatting issue with the action buttons on mass-wrangling pages
  • Fixed an issue with the Mystery Work icon when viewing a unrevealed work in your reading history
  • When hovering over the search field in the header, a small grey box suggesting some example search operators should pop up right below it; this was previously only working on Firefox and now works in Chrome, Opera, Safari, and IE 7 — it is, alas, still not working in IE 8 or 9.
  • Fixed a formatting issue with request/offer descriptions in Challenge signup tables
  • A bunch of small errors with work footers were fixed: lists of related series and lists of related works are now formatted consistently, and alignment issues with series information and “inspired by” links have been fixed. The changes mean you can now also style these elements with work skins.
  • Fixed alignment issues with the reordering buttons on the Manage Chapters page across a variety of browsers
  • Tweaked the way draggable list items (such as on the Manage Series pages) are displayed to make it more obvious what you can move around
  • Our CSS files were written with all definitions on one line, this was changed to pretty-print (more linebreaks and whitespace) for ease of use

• Tag Wrangling
  • Fixed a redirect issue where removing a tag from the mass-wrangling page page would load the fandom page, rather than returning to mass-wrangling
  • Fixed a display issue where subtags and synonyms on Tag Edit pages were incorrectly formatted, also added mass-removal checkboxes
  • Closed a loophole making wrangler comments potentially visible to non-wranglers; wrangler status will now be checked even if the comment URL is known

• Emails
  • Added a “support the OTW” link to the footer of all outgoing emails
  • Changed wording of the invitation email text to lessen the focus on fanfiction and further encompass all fanworks
  • Tweaked the email queue to prioritize account activation and password reset emails
  • Fixed an issue with 500 errors when clicking the account activation link

• Misc.
  • Fixed link to the volunteering form on the Donate/Volunteering page and changed wording from the potentially misleading “Donate”
  • Fixed a redirect issue when editing your profile, it now stays on the correct page after updating
  • Removed the option to sign up using OpenID as part of our process of phasing OpenID out
  • Added a character counter to the “Icon comment text” field on Edit Pseud and Add New Pseud pages
  • Prepared backend code for abuse reports and admin mailers for internationalization