Archive of Our Own ^beta

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

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

Highlights!

Fandom feeds!

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

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

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

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

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

Subscriptions to individual works

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

Importing features for Open Doors

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

Improvements to our HTML parser

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

Known Issues

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

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

See our Known Issues page for other current issues.

Release Details

Features

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

Bug fixes

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

Welcome to Release 0.8.9.2. Elz, Enigel, Firewolf, Jenny, Naomi and sarken contributed code to this release. We're especially excited to welcome a first commit from Firewolf, who recently joined us for a coding internship \0/. The release was tested by Jenn_Calaelen, Tai , XParrot and Zebra. This is a small release, mostly fixing a few urgent bugs.

Highlights!

Rich text editor (mostly) fixed

A number of users have experienced problems with the rich text editor failing to load. We have now fixed this issue; however, we're still working on another bug with the rich text editor. So, most users should be able to use it without problems now, but if you're using Opera 11 or Internet Explorer 9, it will load but not let you actually edit. :( We're sorry about this - we're working to fix the bug completely.

Temporary authentication problem

A user alerted us to an authentication bug! We're happy to say that we were able to fix the issue within a few hours of it being reported and as far as we are aware no users were affected. Thanks to the user who let us know about the problem!

Fixes for collections and challenges

This deploy includes a bunch of fixes for problems which were making life difficult for challenge owners and participants. Thanks to those affected for their patience - we know that bugs in challenges are particularly annoying since most challenges are time sensitive, and we do our best to fix them speedily.

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page.

Release Details

Features

• Added a page letting people know how they can support the Archive! :D
• Comments are now paginated, 20 to a page, so if you're reading a work with a lot of comments they won't take forever to load.
• User inboxes are now paginated, 20 items to a page, so they won't take forever to load.

Bug fixes

• The rich text editor now works again for most browsers (sadly we are still dealing with issues in certain browsers).
• Fixed a bug with user authentication which would have made it possible for people to edit tags on works they didn't own.
• Chapter navigation is now styled in the same way whether you're viewing a full work or chapter-by-chapter.
• Fixed a bug causing lots of excess white space on wrangling pages.
• Collections and challenges
  • When a challenge allowed category, rating or warning tags in signups, trying to edit your signup gave a 500 error. This is now fixed
  • Going to the index page for a collection with subcollections gave a 500 error. Fixed!
  • The 'pinch hits' and 'open' sections of challenge assigment pages will now load.
  • Pinch hits now show up on challenge assignments lists (so mods can tell whether pinch hitters have posted or not).
  • Pinch hits which have been fulfilled (or formally defaulted) now no longer show up as an option when you post a new work.
• Inbox, comments, kudos
  • After you comment on a chaptered work, you will be redirected to your new comment and (if you are viewing chapter-by-chapter) to the chapter you were on, instead of being bumped back to the beginning of the work.
  • After you leave kudos, you will be redirected back to the page you were on instead of being bumped back to the beginning of the work.
  • You can now reply to comments on a chaptered work with javascript off (before, clicking reply redirected you back to the first chapter).
  • If you filter your inbox and then reply to a comment, when you're redirected back your filters will be preserved.

Tests

• The test for kudos has been refactored.

Welcome to Release 0.8.9. Elz, Enigel, erda, Jenny S-T, lim, Lucy P, Naomi, Phoenix, Pixel, Rebecca, Sidra and sarken contributed code to this release, which was tested by our awesome testing team: sarken, via_ostiense, Jenny S-T, Rebecca, Enigel, phoenix, Kylie, Irene, Jenn_Calaelen, Bridget, Zebra, Tai, linbot, mumble, XParrot, alasen, Naomi

Highlights!

Site Design Overhaul

The Archive's look has changed a lot, whoa! The amazing lim has completely overhauled our CSS and HTML.

A big reason for this change is to make it much easier to write skins for the Archive. This is important not just for people who want to use skins, but because it will enable us to make a variety of skins ourselves for different uses (even for users who aren't logged in!) and also allow us to keep developing and improving the Archive's interface in future without breaking skins all over the place.

If you want to update your existing skin or are interested in making new skins, you may want to start by browsing the new Archive default skin (it's broken down into lots of different modular parents, making it easier to see what each bit does). We'll shortly be posting a list of the new skins with some info on what they all do!

Accessibility

Another crucial reason for the change has been to improve the accessibility of the Archive. Among the changes we have put in:

• Autocomplete now using ARIA managed focus, making it accessible to more screenreaders.
• ARIA roles have been expanded throughout.
• Lots of forms have been chunked up into fieldsets, making it easier to do a task at a time.
• The dashboard has been reorganised and chunked into different sets of tasks.
• Tables have been ruthlessly eradicated where inappropriate and remaining ones have been made accessible.
• Lots of instructions have been rewritten using simpler, shorter sentences.
• Labels have been made more consistent.
• Extensive landmarks have been written throughout
• All form elements should now be labeled and/or titled for screenreader access.
• Buttons should be easier to mouse to for people with lower mobility.
• A user icon is now in the header which you can always click to to get home, for more visual/spatial users.
• All navigation jumpable to with headings and roles.
• A bunch of other small tweaks have been made to make the Archive more customisable and more amenable to being viewed with unusual browser settings.

We continue to actively seek input from readers and users with any accessibility problems! If you are browsing with assistive devices and something doesn't work for you or is frustrating, please let us know. We know you probably hear this a lot, but we hope the work we've already done will demonstrate that accessibility is a genuine concern for us. We might not always get it 100% right, but we'll keep working to improve.

Skin Parents

You can now chain together multiple skins by making one skin the parent of another. This is particularly useful if you want to replace instead of override the archive site skin, because you can use parts of the default skin as parents of your own skin, and only replace the parts you need to change.

IE-Only Skins and Media Type Skins

You can now create skins that just have overrides for Internet Explorer, which will be loaded up using conditional comments. So if you're making a public skin that you would like IE users to be able to enjoy also, you don't have to put in hacks -- just put the IE fixes in their own skin, and put it into your list of parents.

You can also now make custom skins for different media types -- for instance, for "speech" to be loaded up only by screenreaders, or "print" to be loaded up only for printing, or "handheld" to be loaded up for small-screen mobile devices.

Tag Sets

Before this release, if you were running a challenge and wanted to restrict your participants to picking from a particular set of tags, you would put those tags into your challenge settings. No longer! You will now put the tags into a tag set instead.

Tag Set Features:

• Reusable across multiple challenges.
• Shared with other users.
• Take nominations which you can then review.
• Let users see your tag set in progress during nominations or not as you choose.
• Can include tags that haven't been wrangled (this means you can use brand-new tags, or tags which suit your own challenge's preferred terminology).
• Let you specify which fandom character and relationship tags belong to (which will make those options get loaded automatically in the signup form for your participants).

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page.

Release Details

Features

• Design overhaul
• Tag sets
• News posts can now be tagged and filtered by tags & language
• Comments on multi-chaptered words now include information which chapter the comments was left on, to avoid confusion in "view full work" mode
• Added security measures to the login process: after 50 failed login attempts, the account will be locked down for 5 minutes

Bug fixes

• you can now delete a work without Javascript enabled, huzzah!
• fixed a bug that would display works as incomplete even after the last chapter was added
• there was a bug where deleting a work with a lot of chapters would take too long or time out, this has been fixed
• fixed broken links in the sitemap
• fixed several bugs and workflow isses with the new autocomplete functionality after feedback from tag wranglers
• when posting a work, tabbing into the fandom field would enter the first autocomplete suggestion that would come up, this has been changed to leave the field blank when tabbing further
• added author information to the body of feed items for tag subscriptions (so they wouldn't only show up in a byline like the author of a blog post)
• fixed the character counter for the Notes fields on the "post new" form
• bad class names in work skins (e.g. names containing special characters like $) would be stripped from the skin but left intact in the work body, this has been fixed
• added a link to the FAQ item about importing from the "import new" page
• after a failed import, the error message would stick around when going to another page, this has been fixed
• more automated tests

• Admin:
  • notice banners for admin announcements can now include links and basic formatting tags
  • made the links to translations of news posts visually clearer
  • fixed an issue with notifications for comments on news posts being sent out twice
  • made sure that comments marked as spam by an admin are not visible to users anymore

• Bookmarks:
  • fixed the display of "most recent bookmarks" for a work on the bookmarks index
  • fixed a bug that would lead to unexpected behavior when trying to bookmark a work in IE 9
  • the help popup for the bookmark symbols didn't work on the main bookmark index, this has been fixed

• Challenges:
  • the list of open challenges now exludes moderated and closed collections
  • brought some misleading timeframe information (such as, "SIGNUP PERIOD IS OVER") in line with actual start and end dates
  • you can now sign up to a challenge with multiple requests without Javascript
  • fixed a bug where drafts of an assignment would show up as the title of a posted work for the challenge mods
  • pinch-hitters now receive an email notification of their assignment
  • fixed a bug that would allow you to create subcollections in a subcollection (potentially breaking things) and made the error message clearer
  • added a link to the "Manage Items" page from challenge options to make it more obvious that you can reveal stories one by one
  • tweaked collection settings into a more logical order (compulsory items first)
  • deleting a signup from the My Signups would redirects to the Collection profile, it now redirects to the /signups page for gift exchanges or the prompt overview for memes

• Prompt Memes:
  • added an option to give prompts a title; this can be turned on by the prompt meme owner by allowing/requiring a title in the request settings and affects the prompts overview and the list of assignments when posting a new work
  • you can now see the number of total prompts in a meme on the Collections index and
  • fixed a bug where posting to fill a prompt would persistently try and fill all prompts by that user (if you claimed more than one), leading to wonky results

• Downloads:
  • ampersands in work titles and work content would lead to missing characters in .epub files, this has been fixed
  • fixed a problem with .epub files for works with very long chapters; made sure that they're split into small enough chunks to work with all e-readers

• Lots and lots of display fixes:
  • made the site, especially the posting interface, more usable in IE 6 and up
  • fixed several alignment and spacing issues across browsers
  • fixed some bugs where HTML code would show up as text
  • generally prettied things up

Welcome to Release 0.8.8! Many thanks to everyone who helped with this release: Bingeling, Elz, Enigel, Erda, Jenny, Karen, Laura, Lucy, Mumble, Naomi, Rebecca, Sidra, Tel, and Velocitygrass contributed code, which was tested by our awesome testing team: Jenn, Kylie, Seph, Tai, Weimar, xparrotx and Zebra. This release required extra attentive testing because we were making site-wide changes to all of our Javascript code - we did our best to review everything across a variety of browsers and operating systems, but let us know if you spot any problems.

Highlights!

Performance

A few days ago, we gave a run-down of some of the challenges we've been facing with performance on the site. The coding team and the systems committee have been brainstorming ways that we can make things better, and we've started by moving some our most read- and write-heavy operations off our main MySQL database and to a system called redis, which allows for very fast reads and writes as it stores information in memory. Additionally, you may have noticed that we were up and down a bit this weekend - we were moving things around and also doing some tuning of our main database. Right now, the database is the primary bottleneck for our system and the reason you may run into 502 errors, so we're hoping that all of this work pays off in greater stability and fewer errors for users. Apologies to those of you who got stranded in the middle of multi-chapter works! As fellow fans, we understand exactly how inconvenient that is. And special thanks and ALL the cake to Sidra and james_ from Systems, who did great work getting everything back in order!

Javascript changes

When we started coding the archive, a Javascript library called Prototype was the standard for Ruby on Rails, and Rails had a lot of built-in helpers that utilized it. Over time, Rails has become more flexible about allowing you to switch libraries (and has even switched defaults itself), and we've been interested in making the jump to jQuery ourselves for a while now. Enigel from our coding team finally finished the epic work of migrating everything over! This was a big undertaking, but it's also a big help to us going forward, in terms of volunteer skills and available resources. And if you're a jQuery wizard who'd like to help out, there's never been a better time to volunteer! (hint, hint)

Filtering improvements

One thing that's been requested a lot is the ability to only view completed works when you're searching and browsing, and we've finally enabled that. (It may take a little time for our search index to catch up with it, since that takes a good bit of time to finish running.) It's also now possible to filter by language more easily, and to sort works by the date they were first added to the site. We'll be continuing to improve our browsing interface in the next few months, but we hope the new features will help you find what you're looking for!

New icon color for Teen-rated works

In response to user feedback, we changed the color of the Teen rating icon so that it's no longer the same as Mature; if you're browsing on a phone or a small screen, the letters can be a little tricky to make out. If you're not a fan of the new color, we have a site skin that you can use to restore the original orange icon.

No more 500 errors on downloads

One of our most pernicious bugs has been the error that you get if you happen to be the first person to download a work in a particular format. We believe we've resolved the problem there! It's a tricky one, so please do let us know if you run into any similar errors.

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page.

Release Details

Features

• Switched to jQuery from Prototype for all Javascript-related functionality
• Searching and filtering by WIP/Complete
• Seaching and filtering by language
• Sort by Date Updated/Date Added
• New icon color for Teen-rated works
• Optimized the History feature that keeps track of all the works you've viewed and allows you to mark works to read later

Bug fixes

• Admin:
  • the interface to update the Known Issues was broken and has now been fixed
  • improvements to the Admin banner feature, for users with and without Javascript

• Accounts:
  • there was a loophole where you could join the invite request queue even when it was temporarily turned off, this has been fixed
  • changed the error message wording for problems when activating a new account
  • added a link back to "Edit My Profile" from the "Change Password" and "Change Email" pages

• Works:
  • trying to download a work for the first time would throw up a 500 error while the file was being generated in the background, this has now been fixed
  • trying to approve a related work from the link in the notification email would sometimes give an error 500, this has been fixed
  • you can now assign a language to an external work, especially helpful when you're posting a translation of said work

• Collections & Challenges:
  • tweaked the listing of Open Challenges: a gift exchange will appear if the "Signup open?" box is ticked and it falls between the "Signup opens:" and "Signup closes:" times given by the owner; prompt memes will show up in either case
  • added options for owners and moderators of a challenge to delete prompts and edit challenge signups if necessary
  • the option for Challenge owners to download signup data has been adjusted to produce .csv files (although these are tab-separated rather than comma-separated) instead of potentially broken .xls files. (Please note that you might have to tell your spreadsheet program that this is a tab-separated file before viewing.)
  • changed wording on settings button from "Submit" to "Update"
  • there was a bug that would cause bookmarks of unrevealed works to disclose information, this has now been fixed: bookmarks will default to the "Mystery Work" blurb if the work hasn't been revealed yet
  • the "Add to Collection" button was broken and has now been fixed
  • when creating a challenge and selecting Gift Exchange from the dropdown, this selection would not be retained if you ran into an error (e.g. because of missing information) and had to submit the form again, this has been fixed
  • the page title on static work pages now reflects the title, fandom, and author of the work

• Prompt Memes:
  • fixed the issue with autocomplete not working beyond the first prompt form in a signup
  • fixed capitalisation in prompt meme signup wording
  • when editing a prompt meme signup, you will see a list of jump links at the top of the page to quickly get to the prompt you want to edit (especially helpful if your signup consists of twenty prompts); you will now find a brief summary of your tags beside each prompt and a helpful button if you just want to add another prompt
  • the link to the list of prompts is now visible in the navigation for logged-out users as well; the list of claims is still only accessible for logged-in users
  • added pagination links for long prompt lists
  • tags in the prompt overview are now a comma-separated list instead of one-per-line
  • added a link to the prompt overview to edit a single prompt without having to open the whole signup
  • when signing up for a prompt meme, you can pick one of your pseuds to sign up with under "General Information"; there was a bug where this section would show up even if you only had one pseud, this has been fixed
  • when creating a challenge, there's a section referring to assignment notifications; this has been reworded to only apply to gift exchanges and not prompt memes
  • improved caching of information in prompts and signup overviews

• Comments:
  • the character counter now works when posting and editing a comment
  • the link to leave a comment from within a downloaded work or a static page in a collection was broken and has now been fixed

• Tag Wrangling:
  • there was a rather thorny issue with tag relationships and filters (for example, when a tag's "synonym of" relationship was changed, it wouldn't always show up in filtered work lists for the new tag), this has been fixed
  • fixed a bug that prevented the autocomplete help from popping up in Meta Tag fields

• Misc.
  • some unused code has been tidied up to speed up URL routing
  • fixed the issue where only the first frame of an animated icon would display
  • removed obsolete "Limited CSS properties" text from the skins form and fixed a dangling sentence fragment in the help box
  • in the post new/edit work form, the text box to create a new series was misaligned in IE7, this has been fixed

Thanks to mumble for compiling the list of fixes and new features and to Lucy who normally writes up our release notes but is currently off celebrating her birthday! --Elz

Over the weekend, we deployed version 0.8.7.6 of the Archive, which includes a couple of urgent fixes that couldn't wait until the next update. In particular, the issue with password resets (where new passwords said they were expired) has been resolved. If you were having trouble with that, clicking through the password reset once more should clear it up.

We also fixed some issues with the autocomplete: it should now be working in Internet Explorer 7 and, if a new tag is marked canonical by a tag wrangler, it should now be swiftly added to the autocomplete options. In reverse, removing the canonical status from a tag was also affecting similar tags (they wouldn't appear in the autocomplete anymore), this has also been fixed.

There were also a few issues related to the new prompt meme feature, such as a too-persistently cached table of prompts and a few leftover references to gift exchanges, all of which have been fixed. Development on prompt memes is still ongoing, so if you notice anything weird or buggy, feel free to send us feedback.

Welcome to Release 0.8.7.4, up from 0.8.6. Cesy, Elz, Enigel, erda, mumble, Pixel, shalott, Sidra, Tel, Laura and velocitygrass contributed code to this release, which was tested by our awesome testing team: Cesy, mumble, Rebecca, Tel, xparrot, Zebra, Zooey. Life has been particularly demanding for members of our team over the last couple of months, so we delayed our planned monthly release. We're proud of how much has been achieved despite the many other things which were demanding our attention!

Highlights

Prompt memes!

We're really excited about the latest addition to our challenge and collections code - you can now run prompt memes on the AO3! The new feature comes with lots of handy features to make it easier to keep track of prompts you've posted or filled, sort prompts and fills, and manage whether the challenge is open or closed. Read more in our prompt memes tutorials: Setting up a prompt meme challenge and Participating in a prompt meme challenge.

Subscriptions feed - trial version

We've had a great response to our author subscriptions feature, and we're keen to expand it! Our eventual plan is to include subscriptions for all kinds of things, including fandoms, particular tags, and individual works, but we need to roll this out slowly in order to test how much load it puts on the site. The next step is to offer subscriptions via RSS feed: we're trialling this in this release with an Atom feed on the 'F/F' category tag. You can subscribe to the feed using your favourite feed reader (we've also created syndications on Livejournal and Dreamwidth). We picked this tag because it has a regular stream of works posted each week, but not so many we risk breaking the Archive. Do subscribe to the Atom feed at http://archiveofourown.org/tags/116/feed.atom and try it out. Comment to this post if you have feedback!

Enhancements to our importer - imports from LOTRfanfiction.com and The Twilight Archives

In the wake of the purchase of LOTRfanfiction.com and The Twilight Archives, we know that some fans with works on those archives are keen to back their work up elsewhere. In order to make this easier, we've added those sites to our custom importer. Simply paste the url of the first chapter of your work from those archives into the import form, and the importer should be able to pull down all the chapters along with your summary and most of your notes as well as some tags, and it will also make a note of your read count. (As always with the importer, we recommend reading over the results before posting, though!)

Note that this upgrade should also work to import multiple-chaptered stories from ALL efiction-based archives, although the story formatting won't be as accurate as from these two specific archives. We'll be working on more improvements to efiction archive importing in the future.

New tag autocomplete

The autocomplete has been retooled to solve several bugs and (we hope) significantly improve performance and response time. The main visual difference you'll notice is that when you are entering information into an autocomplete field (for instance when you're putting in the fandoms on a story you're posting), each tag you enter will show up above the entry field. You can double-click on the tag to edit it, or click on the 'x' to delete (similar to the way it works on Delicious).

Email improvements

We've started work on improving the automated emails sent out by the Archive (for example, for subscriptions). In this release, we've just included better contact information in emails, but we're working on improving our support for text-only emails and spiffing things up generally. If you have thoughts about what you'd like to see us do in this area, comment on this post.

More CSS options!

When we launched our skins feature, we erred on the side of caution, so a lot of valid CSS wasn't allowed through. We've now expanded the options, so you should be able to use most valid CSS.

Squashing the extra pseud bug

Quite a few people were affected by a bug which was preventing them removing pseuds from a work - trying to switch to using a different pseud instead resulted in both pseuds showing up. We've fixed that now! It won't retrospectively fix affected works, so you'll still have to go back and remove the unwanted pseud on those.

Fix for chapter posting problems

We've had a number of reports of problems posting, editing or deleting chapters. We believe that these problems were caused by issues with Javascript - we've now fixed chapter posting so that it will work even if Javascript is disabled (or otherwise disrupted). We hope this will have solved all the chapter posting issues, but if you're still encountering problems, do let us know! (We're still working on deletion without javascript.)

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page.

Release details

Features

• Prompt memes!


• Better autocomplete!


• Trial run for RSS tag subscriptions!


• Introduced notice banners for non-intrusive and easily-hidden admin messages


• Added a separate page under your profile options to change your email address


• Tweaked the My Related Works page to separate translations from remixes, first in a series of planned improvements to the work relationship functionality


• Added a line about contacting support to the footer of all Archive notifications, e.g. in case you think you've received an email in error, and a Challenge profile link in assignment emails if you'd like to contact a Challenge maintainer


• Series information now appears in the work blurb


• Added the option to post-without-previewing when adding and editing chapters


• Enabled support for more CSS options, such as various CSS3 properties that were previously not allowed in Archive and Work skins


• Added a "Header color" and an "Accent color" option to the Archive skin wizard (the accent color will affect the background of the Dashboard menu box, the work blurb box on single work pages and the box containing your pseuds on your profile page)


• Added a link to the RSS feed for admin posts from the News page


• Added vidders.net and criticalcommons.org to the whitelisted domains for video embeds in works and the ability to include an offsite player from Google for audiofics

Bugs

• Admin:
  • Fixed drag-and-drop rearranging of items in the Archive FAQ
  • Fixed a bug where admins wouldn't get notified of new comments on blog posts
  • Fixed a bug where admins would get an ugly error page when trying to open the Support and Feedback page


• Collections and Challenges:
  • Previously, only owners of a challenge could access the signup form when the challenge was closed (e.g. for testing purposes), this has now been extended to moderators
  • There was a bit of borked HTML in some mod-side challenge notifications, this has been fixed
  • Tag links in assignment emails have been changed to link to all works with that tag, not just works in the collection (which will often be empty at signup time)
  • Signup summaries on the My Signups page are now sorted by date, newest at top
  • Improvements to the code for revealing works in a Collection one by one
  • Fixed a backend bug relating to challenge signup notifications
  • Added a help pop-up to the Challenge name field
  • Removed the yuletide2010 controller, which introduced the static browsing feature for busy challenges and has since become obsolete


• Works:
  • Changes in Livejournal's code temporarily broke importing from LJ, this has been fixed
  • The word count would be off for languages using non-Roman alphabets, we have now taken first steps to displaying correct word counts for all languages (more work will be needed for Chinese, Japanese, and Thai)
  
  
  • Trying to post a new chapter would lead to a 404 error when Javascript was disabled (and sometimes when it wasn't), this has been fixed now
  • Fixed a bug that prevented users from deleting or changing the pseud on a work
  • Changed chapter and series drag-and-drop reordering to be done with jQuery, made sure the chapter/work numbers get updated instantaneously
  • Fixed a bug with publication dates in epubs (the download date would get inserted instead)
  • Fixed a display bug that would cause really long stats lines (Published, Completed, Words, Chapters, Comments and so on) to run over the work blurb lines
  • Fixed a timezone issue where the publishing date on a work page would sometimes be different from the date displayed in the work blurb (used in search results, tag pages etc.)
  • Fixed the help pop-up text for posting a new chapter to say that a title isn't required for chapters
  • Rewrote autocomplete code for entering tags, fixed several bugs in the process


• Bookmarks:
  • The "View most recent bookmarks" button on the Bookmarks page resulted in a list of *all* bookmarks for a work, with slightly broken CSS; this has been fixed on both accounts
  • If you accidentally inserted too many commas in the 'Your Tags' field when bookmarking a work, you'd get a 500 error, this has been fixed


• Comments:
  • Since the parser adds HTML tags to user input, comments that stayed within the character limit would sometimes still turn out to be too long after submitting - and thus get eaten; now an invalid comment will be returned to the user for possible corrections
  • The bottom 'Read Comments' button when viewing an entire work would direct back to the first chapter when Javascript was turned off, this has now been fixed


• Fun Errors:
  • Trying to use an already redeemed invitation would give a 500 error, this has been fixed
  • Logging out while on your My Skins page would give a 500 error, this has been fixed
  • Empty search results or empty query parameters in URLs would result in ugly errors, this has been fixed
  • When creating or editing a skin, using certain special characters like [ or ( in the 'Allowed Value Autocomplete' field would sometimes cause a brief error 500, this has been fixed
  • Fixed a problem with 422 errors when trying to create synonymous tags in the Tag Wrangling interface
  • Fix for the password reset functionality (now there's an error message if the new password isn't actually saved)
  • Fixed an issue with Rails that prevented users from browsing the Archive on a Playstation Portable
  • Fixed an issue where the importer would break off if the source contained the special character number 0


• Misc:
  • Special characters like " would be turned into their escaped versions (" and so on), breaking some more advanced CSS options; this has been partially fixed, although > < are currently still being stripped.
  • Removed a note about performance issues ("As of 18 November 2010...") from the Support and Feedback page
  • Fixed the "last viewed" time display on the reading history page
  • Removed a stray colon on the Advanced Search page
  • Tidied up the help pop-up for the Archive skin wizard
  • When a user changes their email address, a notification is now sent to the old email address registering the change.
  • Added a link to the TOS FAQ from the Archive FAQ
  • Changed wording in the "Hide freeform tags by default" option in the Preferences to "additional tags"
  • Lots of refactoring and bug-fixing work for automated tests

Welcome to Release 0.8.6. Cesy, Elz, Enigel, Pixel, Rebecca and Sidra contributed code to this release, which was tested by our awesome testing team: Enigel, erda, hill, Jackie, Kylie, mumble, Seph, and xparrotx. This release required extra attentive testing because we are rolling out a big new feature - subscriptions!

Highlights!

Subscriptions

Yes, after many requests and three years on our roadmap, we have finally released the first version of subscriptions! We know our users (and our staff) have long wanted some way of keeping track of their favourite creators on the AO3. Now you can subscribe to users and receive an email notification when they post a new work, or when they add a chapter to an existing work. To subscribe to a user, just go to their user profile and select 'Subscribe' (see the Subscriptions FAQ for more information).

This is only the beginning for subscriptions! We wanted to start small, because subscriptions have a big potential impact on performance (which is why we had to wait for the new servers before we could even think about them). Once we have seen how the alpha version of subscriptions works, we plan to roll out more features: subscriptions to tags, to specific searches, RSS feeds, and more! We're super-excited about rolling out the first of this functionality!

Challenge request lists

Gift exchange challenges often like to post the list of challenge prompts or requests at the end of the challenge, so that people can write extra treats for participants. Now you can do this on the AO3 at the click of a button - mods simply enable the option in their challenge settings, and the list of prompts will appear under the 'Requests Summary' for that challenge for users to browse.

We're currently putting the finishing touches on some more features for challenges... stay tuned in the next release for more cool stuff! You may notice 'My Claims' showing up on your user home - this is for the forthcoming features and is not yet active.

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page.

Release Details

Features

• Subscriptions YEAY
• Challenge request lists
• Additions and fixes for the skinning wizard
• New procedure in case of forgotten password: Currently you receive an email with a new password that you can use to log into your account. To prevent others from resetting your password for you, we will now send you a temporary password that you can use within seven days. If you didn't request a new login, just ignore the email - no changes to your password will be made.

Bug fixes

• Searches containing a slash were broken, this is now fixed
• fixed a problem where a work would behave as if locked to archive users if, for example, imported without preview
• There was a problem with works being incorrectly counted as WIPs, which had to do with the way the position of the existing chapters was evaluated, this has been fixed (by simply counting the number of chapters instead)
• The somewhat buggy reordering of chapters has been fixed as well (this means you cannot create a chapter 3 if there is no chapter 2 - it will be automatically counted as chapter 2, unless and until you post a chapter 2 again, in which case all subsequent chapters will be reordered accordingly.)
• Collections and challenges:
  • fixed individual revealing of works in a collection
  • fixed broken tag links (e.g. for fandoms or relationships) in challenge assignment emails and signup details
  • set challenge assignments to be generated in the background (similar to the matching process) to minimize server load
• There was a problem with the "cancel" function when deleting comments (the comment would get deleted anyway); this has been fixed
• Made sure that a problem with posting a work would lead to a proper error message (and not just make the posting quietly fail)
• Semi-fixed a display bug for fandom pages in Internet Explorer 6 - we're doing our best to continue supporting this browser for those people who have no other options
• Systems:
  • updated Rails to 3.0.4
  • moved from delayed jobs to resque for background tasks such as sending out emails, generating matches in a gift exchange and creating assignments (as delayed jobs was quite broken)
  • deployment process maintenance to make sure the servers can communicate properly amongst each other
  • made sure you can save a work when our search engine, Sphinx, is down (causing problems before because saving a work involves letting Sphinx know it exists)
  • the current release number can now be found in the footer (replaces the revision number)

Welcome to Release 0.8.5. Normally in this introduction, we'd also be telling you which revision the Archive was on, but we have recently changed the way we manage our code and deploy process, so this information is no longer relevant. We'll just be using release numbers from now on!

New coding and deploy methods!

We used to host the Archive project on Google code, where we managed our version control with Subversion. This worked fine when we were a small project, but as we have grown and welcomed more developers into the fold we needed something a little more flexible. Subversion is great if you want to add ALL THE CODE to the live site at once, but if you want to skip some additions (for example, because someone has committed code that's not quite ready for primetime), things get complicated. So, we're moving to a new tool, git, which allows for lots more flexibility and makes it easier to collaborate, and we're hosting the project on Github. You can see our new otwarchive project on Github.

This means a lot to coders, but not so much to users - with one important exception! Because git makes it super-easy for us to pick and choose what we want to put on the live site, we'll no longer have to wait for different projects to be ready. Instead, we're moving to a regular monthly deploy where we push out the stuff that is ready, while keeping the other projects going in their separate git homes (known as forks). So, you'll be able to expect a new code deploy at the end of each month. Remember, you can follow our Twitter feed AO3_Status

Highlights!

Challenge improvements

Challenge mods often want to reveal the list of prompts/requests at the end of the challenge so that participants can write extra gifts. Now they can! The prompts are hidden by default - once mods have chosen to make them visible they are browsable. There is currently a known issue which means that the link to view the prompts is visible even when the prompts are not - this will be fixed next month!

Importer improvements

Stalwart coder Rebecca is continuing her work on our import function. She's made some further improvements to imports from the Yuletide Treasure site, and continues to review this functionality. We currently have specialist support for Livejournal, Dreamwidth (& other LJ clones / forks), DeviantArt, Fanfiction.net and Yuletide Treasure, along with general support for other sites. As always, we welcome feedback about the import function via our Support and Feedback form.

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page.

Release Details

Features

• Tag wrangling: Added a note to comment emails for tag wrangling to make it clear the comment is on a tag.
• Tag wrangling: Changed the order of 'Character' and 'Relationship' on the New Tag page to reflect wrangler workflow
• Upgrade: Switched to the latest version of the will_paginate gem (this should have no effect on what users see)
• Changed order of categories on Media page so that 'Uncategorized' always comes at the end

Bug fixes

• Admin features: Fixed admin permissions so admins can edit user emails and change user roles on the Archive
• Importer: Changed error message for failed imported to read 'work', not 'story'
• Importer: Improved imports from Yuletide to strip headers correctly
• Importer: Improved imports from Yuletide to work with New Years' Resolution stories
• Importer: Fixed error message for attempted imports from Google docs (currently not supported) so that it gives a proper error message instead of just giving an error 500.