Archive of Our Own ^beta

We've been really busy in AD&T working on getting our next deploy ready. Thanks to a huge effort from everyone on the team, we expect to be ready to roll our new code out tomorrow! There are 93 issues in the new deploy! :o

Meeting highlights!

Tag sets

We're currently working on some new tag functionality for challenges, creating more flexibility for users to create sets of tags so they can, for example, create a list of Asian-source fandoms for a challenge. We spent lots of time in this meeting discussing how we can use the functionality provided through tag wrangling, which creates relationships so that, for example, the Archive knows that 'Hermione Granger' belongs to the 'Harry Potter' fandom, while still allowing users to create tag sets which include tags that haven't yet been wrangled by our awesome tag wranglers. We think we have come up with a solution which will combine the best of both worlds; we need to talk to the Tag Wrangling Committee to check out how it will work from their point of view, and then we hope to include this functionality in a mini-deploy coming up soon.

Skins functionality

We've had quite a few requests for the ability to include images in public skins. For security reasons, we can't allow images which are hosted on other sites, but when we begin hosting fanart we may be able to host images for skins. However, this would bring its own legal and content issues, so we have passed the issue over to our Legal and Content Policy teams to discuss.

Browsing enhancements

One of the things that's been high on our to-do list for a long time is improvements to our browsing system. We're aware that our current browsing filters leave quite a bit to be desired - the volume of works on the site has somewhat overwhelmed the design. One of our AD&T co-chairs has recently started work on this problem, and is busy coming up with some new designs for us to try out. Go go Elz!

Next deploy

The next deploy is scheduled for Monday 11 July, 2011. It will include a whole bunch of things including our new prompt memes functionality, new embed options to include embeds from CriticalCommons.org and Vidders.net, fixes for the annoying problem preventing some people from posting multichapter works, and much, much more. We're really proud of how much work has gone into this deploy!

News from our sub-committees

• Coders have been really busy finishing up the code for the new deploy. They've been working hard on fixing bugs found during testing, and have also been participating in our great new training tutorials. Recent training included awesome sessions on JQuery and CSS by AD&T member Ana!
• Testers have been working triple time to get everything in our giant deploy tested. Longtime tester XParrot has stepped up to become Testing Co-lead and has been working really hard on the issues for the new release - yeay XParrot! \0/

News from our sister committees

• Support have been working hard to keep up with the volume of Support requests, and have been giving some feedback on the new Support Board as senior coder Sidra works on it.
• Tag Wrangling have been wrangling hard, and giving feedback on the new tag sets functionality as it develops.

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

This meeting round-up by Zooey

We've had a busy month in AD&T! There have been several exciting code developments, and because life events for our team have prevented us sticking to our planned monthly deploy schedule, we've built up an impressive 98 issues for our next deploy! This is giving our testers plenty to work on!

Highlights!

Prompt memes

There's been tons of work going on getting our new prompt memes feature ready for primetime. Cesy, who has been coding the feature, has been hard at work polishing it up and fixing bugs. Our trusty team of testers have been trying out the feature on our Test Archive and finding all the little glitches, and our valiant volunteer Seph took on the task of writing a tutorial on the new feature. \0/ If you're curious about the kind of work that goes into creating a feature like this, check out Cesy's post on Coding prompt memes. We're really exciting about launching this feature!

Training and mentoring

We've been working on our training and mentoring procedures to make it easier for volunteers to join in and develop their skills. Cesy has been leading setup sessions for beginners, helping people get to grips with the tools we use and starting them out on a few bugs. We've embarked on a new series of training events focusing on different aspects of coding: Ana kicked off last Saturday with a fantastic introduction to XHTML, CSS and Javascript. We're also considering ways of enabling more one-to-one mentoring for coders.

The great work of our training team is already bearing fruit: new coders Tel, Laura and karen88 have been getting stuck in! We always welcome new volunteers, and the great work of our training team makes now a great time to get involved. If you're wondering how our coders go about their work, check out Enigel's post on the Day in the life of a coder.

Support board!

After lots of work by the Support team brainstorming requirements and putting together a design, senior coder Sidra has begun work on a dedicated AO3 Support board! Currently we use a third-party tool, 16bugs, to manage our Support requests, but it doesn't have the functionality we'd like. The new Support board will be entirely hosted on the AO3 and will enable all users to post responses to bugs - taking some of the pressure off our regular team when it comes to common problems - as well as providing a whole bunch of tools to help us manage the bugs. Now that we have such a big and active userbase, it's difficult for Support to keep up, so we're all REALLY excited about the new functionality.

Translation and internationalisation

Lots of work is going into making the Archive more usable to international users! Rebecca has been working closely with International Outreach and Translators as she continues to develop the functionality for translating the Archive interface - this is one of our core aims for the Archive and we're really pleased to see it finally coming into being. Meantime, new coder Tel has been working on improving the functionality for translated works and bookmarks of translated works on the Archive. Stay tuned for these improvements in the coming months!

Next deploy

The next deploy is scheduled for the weekend of 2 July (all being well). It will include prompt memes, a new autocomplete, the trial version of RSS subscriptions to tags (we're trying it out on the F/F tag to see how much load it places on the site), and lots of bug fixes!

News from our sub-committees

• Coders have been working hard committing code for the forthcoming GIANT deploy! They've also been running and participating in our new training sessions - everyone is learning a lot!
• Testers are busy on the epic task of testing out all the new code for the forthcoming deploy. They've been especially busy testing out the new prompt memes feature and giving feedback to improve it - challenges functionality is particularly hard to test because it involves so many different components (setting up a challenge, having people sign up, filling prompts, etc). Prompt memes include some anonymity features which need to be tested especially thoroughly - we want to be sure that anon features behave predictably for users.

News from our Sister committees

• Support have been working like heroes on keeping up with the steady stream of support requests. They've also been working with AD&T to finalise the plans for the forthcoming new Support Board - everyone is VERY excited about this!
• The Tag Wrangling committee has been working on the tag-related FAQs for the Archive, with the aim of making it easier for users to use tags and clearer how wranglers work on tags in the background. These changes will be reviewed and updated on the Archive soon. They've also been discussing how to handle original characters and fanon names for unnamed canon characters. If you are interested in wrangling, check out the list of fandoms without a wrangler to see if there's anything you can help with. Unassigned fandoms right now include Merlin RPF, Weiss Kreuz, and Pirates of the Caribbean.

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

This meeting round-up by Zooey

AD&T has been a little bit quiet for a while, as quite a few members of the committee have had a busy and/or turbulent couple of months. However, we've still been working away, and there is some exciting stuff on the horizon!

Highlights!

The AO3 is growing!

We've seen a massive expansion in user numbers over the last couple of months - 1,394 new accounts were created during April (up from 897 in March), and at peak times we had over 1000 new works being posted each day! We're really happy to see more fans joining the Archive - and we're thrilled that our shiny new servers are keeping up with all this work! We welcome readers as well as creators - if you've been wondering what the AO3 has to offer you, check out our recent post on Cool account features on the AO3: the readers' edition!.

Retiring OpenID

When we launched the Archive, we offered an OpenID option as an alternative to using a password. For various reasons, this isn't working out too well for us, and we're planning to retire OpenID account logins. If you want to know, check out our post on the future of OpenID on the AO3.

Prompt memes coming soon

This is a project that coder Cesy has been working on for a while, and we're super excited to see it coming to fruition! The new feature will make it possible to run a prompt-based challenge on the AO3! It includes anon options so that it's possible to run kink memes and other similar challenges - no more combing through multiple comment levels to keep track of your favourite prompt fills! More news coming soon.

Dark Agenda and new tag options

We've been discussing some other enhancements to our challenge feature with the mods of the Dark Agenda challenge. As part of this discussion, we've been brainstorming ways to offer more functionality on tags, so that it's possible for challenge owners (and other archive users) to create groups of tags for a specific purpose, e.g. to make a list of all fandoms which include chromatic characters. We think we've come up with a design which will give users more flexibility and take some of the load off our hardworking tag wranglers! \0/

Trial of Subscriptions RSS!

Since launching the first part of our subscriptions feature, we've had lots of requests for subscriptions via RSS. We're pretty keen on this idea ourselves, and in our next deploy we'll be trialing the feature by creating an RSS feed for works posted in the 'F/F' category - we've picked this because there is a steady stream of works posted each week under 'F/F', but not so many that we risk melting the Archive (at least, so we hope!). If all goes well, we'll roll out more tag subscriptions in the future.

Expansion of valid CSS for skins

When we first put out our skins, we erred on the side of caution and as a result, our parser didn't let through a lot of valid CSS. The parser will be updated in the next deploy, after which you should be able to use many more CSS features.

We're all going on a bug hunt!

AD&T member Ana is delving into the thickets of our current Support requests to identify some of the most problematic and recurrent bugs showing up for our users. He'll be compiling a 'hitlist' for coders to help them prioritise bugfixes. The good news is that so far, it looks as though the work we need to do to fix our more annoying bugs will also help us prepare for some of our new features. For example, we need to refactor the code that deals with posting new works in order to offer our planned new options for multimedia works, but this will also help us get to the bottom of the bug some users have reported with posting new chapters. Some bugs are trickier than others to squash, however, so we thank users for their patience while we work!

Next deploy

We interrupted our monthly posting schedule because so many of our team have needed to take a hiatus over the last month or so. The next deploy is scheduled for the end of May, and will include the new prompt code, the trial version of RSS subscriptions, and fixes for some of our more annoying bugs.

News from our sister and sub-committees

• Coders have settled into using our new version management system, Git, and have been working on a whole range of issues. There's been some great work on Cucumber tests - essential to the overall health of the site - and Enigel has taken up her trusty sword and plunged into the javascript thickets to deal with some of our bugs and continue our transition to jQuery! We're also debating the pros and cons of using some new coding tools: HAML, SASS andd Coffeescript (readers who have experience of these, let us know your thoughts!).
• Testers have had a quietish period, as we hadn't deployed any new code to our Test Archive for a while. We've now started work on the next deploy, so the team is getting stuck into work again. We've also welcomed two new testers: velocitygrass and Zebra.
• Support Committee have been working incredibly hard trying to keep up with the deluge of work. Lots of new users means lots more support tickets, so turnaround is slower than usual, but the team is doing an amazing job working through it all. If you're interested in joining Support, volunteers are always welcome!
• The Tag Wrangling Committee and their team of trusty wranglers have been working hard as always, keeping the tags ordered and useful for everyone. The TW Committee have been discussing the idea of the new tag sets options with AD&T. Wranglers have also been working closely with Support to address user questions on tags and fix the odd snag.

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

This meeting round-up by Zooey

We held our first AD&T meting of the new term on 22nd of January! The meeting was chaired by Elz, who is co-chairing this term along with Amelia.

We welcomed a whole bunch of new members along with several returning staffers. We have people who've been on AD&T for four years, and others who only joined the OTW a couple of months ago. One of the things we want to try to do this year is give people slightly more defined roles within AD&T, so that we can make the best possible use of everybody's talents. We're excited to be bringing some new people and skillsets on board.

2010 reviewed

We looked at back at our achievements from 2010, during which we rolled out icons, metatags, a new tag wrangling interface, all new archive CSS, username editing, challenge signups, assignments and matching, archive skins, work skins, advanced search, downloads, video embeds, sharing code, and kudos, among other things, and upgraded to Ruby 1.9, Rails 3, Unicorn and Nginx. We're proud of what we achieved and we're looking forward to seeing what we can get done in 2011.

News from the hiatus

We discussed everything that happened over the break, including the way we managed the work associated with hosting the Yuletide challenge, what we did well and what we can learn for next year. Yuletide a lot smoother than 2009, but there are still some improvements to be made.

New servers!

We have new servers arriving soon! You can read more about them in our New servers announcement and Meet the Machines. We'll be moving over to the new servers next week, and we'd love you all to join in helping us name them! Watch this space for more news.

Changes to our coding process

We're planning to move our code versioning system from subversion to git. This will make it easier for new coders to join, easier for coders to keep going without being hindered by code freezes, and easier for testers to have a regular schedule. We're hoping to deploy our current release in the next week or so, and then we'll move over.

Other business

We also decided on a few design queries, to clear up some old issues that were no longer relevant and to improve the layout of kudos.

News from our sister and sub-committees

• Coders are getting to grips with git in preparation for our move to the new system.
• Testers are getting starting with the first round of testing for the year, and getting stuck into some new training.
• Support have welcomed a bunch of new members and they are trying to catch up with answering ALL the tickets (there is a backlog from the hiatus - apologies if you have been waiting a little longer than usual for us to get back to you.
• Tag wranglers have been reviewing the wrangling team and making sure that all the fandoms on the Archive have some wrangling love.

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

This meeting round-up by new AD&T staffer Cesy!

All the latest news on the Archive of Our Own! Cake, servers, and Rails 3!

We all still had slight cake hangovers at this meeting after our wonderful party to celebrate our servers' first birthday!

Baby servers are one - our birthday party

Thank you to all the Archive users and volunteers who came along to our birthday party to celebrate the first anniversary of our servers of our own! It was an amazing party full of squee, virtual cake, fannish chat and amazing creativity - check out our round-up post for more details of all our party hijinks! Since the party our users have been busy - we now have over 107500 works hosted on the Archive and over 9496 users!

We really appreciate all the lovely feedback we receive - thanks to the many people who take a moment to drop us a line via our Support form or leave us a comment to let us know the things they are enjoying. This project is the hard work of lots and lots of volunteers, and it's a huge boost when people let us know our hard work is appreciated!

Forthcoming changes - Rails 3

There'll be a longer gap than usual before we release any new features, as the next task our coders will be working on is the upgrade to Rails 3 (the framework the Archive runs on). This is a big job which will affect all the code in the Archive, so we're pausing work on new features to allow this to take place. We think that the shiny new features in the last release make up for a little pause!

News from our sub-committees and sister committees

• Coders are working on all the tasks necessary to upgrade to Rails 3 - writing more automated tests, updating our documentation, and figuring out the actual changes that will be needed in our code base.


• Testers are updating documentation about regression testing in readiness for the Rails 3 upgrade. Regression testing involves working through every aspect of the site to check that everything is working right and looking good (automated tests help to check these things, but for big changes there is no substitute for real people testing!)


• Tag wranglers have been thinking about ways of making our wrangling system easier for users to understand and keeping up with the many new tags being added to the Archive by our new users!


• Support have been working hard to keep up with lots of Support requests from new users. They're doing a fantastic job, but there is a higher volume of requests than usual, so please bear with us if it takes them a little while to get back to you.

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

In a crazy break from tradition we held out meeting on Sunday this time, to allow me (AD&T's dedicated chair) to regather my brains after a week spent travelling and mostly offline.

Server birthday - party plans!

Last meeting we were looking forward to our plans for buying new servers. This time we were looking back - to the moment one year ago when we bought the first Servers of Our Own! Yes, the Archive's servers will celebrate their birthday on Monday 13th September! We're incredibly proud of everyone in the OTW and of fandom at large for making it possible for fandom to own the goddamn servers!

We'll be holding a party to celebrate all this fannish awesome - watch out for more details shortly! We hope that lots of you will show up to celebrate the wonderful things that you have made possible.\0/

We've got some extra special Archive tweaks planned to celebrate our servers' birthday - we decided to hold on the (VERY SHINY) new code we've been working on to make some final polishes so that we can deploy a really special release as our birthday gift to fandom.

Next deploy - PARTY GIFTS

As we reported in our last AD&T update, our next release will be chock full of delicious features! After many user requests and much anticipation, we'll finally be rolling out Skins and Mobile Exports! We know we're going to make lots of people happy with this release - not least us!

In order to spiff up the new code and make it extra shiny, we've held onto it and put some additional polish. We're currently putting the finishing touches and testing to within an inch of its life, ready to deploy the new code just in time for the beginning of the 13th of September (somewhere in the world *g*).

AO3 Search Plugin

A while ago, our fabulous user Punk created a search plugin for Archive users. She's updated it to give better results - download it from the AO3 page at the Mycroft Project. If you were using the old plugin, you'll need to uninstall that before installing the new one. Thanks, Punk!

Terminology change - pairings to relationships

We're changing the name of the field currently known as 'Pairings' to 'Relationships' to reflect its purpose more clearly. If you're interested in reading more about how and why we made this decision, check out our post on the Anatomy of a Change.

News from our sub-committees and sister committees

• Coders have been working hard to get our last-minute improvements in before the birthday celebrations.


• Testers have welcomed a new team co-lead, Kylie, and have been working to ensure that all our last-minute code is truly as shiny as it should be.


• Tag wranglers were super-active as usual, and in addition to their regular business were responsible for spearheading the change from 'pairings' to 'relationships'.


• Support welcomed a new commitee chair, Megan Westerby, and worked on some policy and long-term planning, while keeping up with their great work supporting our users on a day-to-day basis.

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

This meeting was small but perfectly formed, with quite a few of our members off on other business or pleasure.

Plans afoot - new servers!

The most exciting thing on AD&T's agenda this month was our meeting with our fantastic Systems committee to talk about upgrading the servers for the Archive! Although we bought our existing servers less than a year ago (their birthday is on the 10th September!) the Archive is already growing beyond their capacity - we now have more than 8000 users, who create more than a thousand new works each week! In this month's meeting we discussed what kind of setup we want to move to and set the process of getting quotes in motion - so exciting! The new servers will remove one of the main obstacles in the way of hosting fanart on the Archive, so we're extra excited about having this in sight. \0/

Next deploy - shiny new features!

Our work testing the new code on our Test archive is continuing, and we hope to deploy these new features to the real Archive by the end of August. This is going to be an awesome release with some hotly anticipated features!

Mobile Exports

Yes, you read that right, the forthcoming release will introduce the option to download works to enjoy offline on a variety of mobile devices! You'll be able to export works in mobi, epub and pdf formats! Lots and lots of users have asked for this feature, and with mobile devices like the Kindle getting ever more affordable we think this feature will be useful to lots of fans! A very special thank you to the lovely Meri_Oddities and Melina, who gave a little inducement to our coders to move forward on the plans for this feature in the form of a generous donation to the OTW and invaluable technical assistance. Their support made us very happy, and we know the results will make our users happy too!

Skins

Yes, we've been babbling about these for some time now, and they are really on their way! We're jazzed about them both because we know fans love pretty customisation, and because they make it MUCH easier to cater for people with specific viewing requirements such as low contrast or large fonts. Accessibility is really important to us and we're happy to be able to introduce this feature.

Invitations on the Archive!

We'd like to remind everyone that the Archive is very much an open party! We're still invitation only, as we need to monitor the number of new users in case of unexpected problems, but everyone who joins our invitations queue wll receive an invitation, usually within a few days. In addition you can share the love by going to the Invitations tab under your user home and requesting some invitations to give out to your friends. If you want to run a challenge or move a larger community to the Archive, feel free to make a request for a larger number of invitations - just let us know what you want them for. We'd love to see a more diverse range of fandoms on the Archive - there are now over 5000, but some are definitely better represented than others!

News from our sub-committees and sister committees

• Coders are fixing bugs in the new code as our testers find them, writing automated tests, and trying to sneak other new features in under the nose of their chair *g*. They've also welcomed several new coders and run some fabulous training to help other coders develop,


• Testers are working on our new set of code on the Archive, and thinking about the epic tasks ahead when we do our big upgrade to Rails 3.


• Tag wranglers have been putting together new policies on terminology (there'll be a couple of changes in upcoming releases), talking about better handling for tags in challenges, and generally being busy.


• Support have been busy busy bees as usual keeping up with a host of user queries, from problems with sign-ins to help on running challenges.

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

This isn't so much a meeting update as a general round-up of news from AD&T, since the writing up of reports, er... got away from me a little. But that means it is an extra tasty update!

Recent updates

We deployed new code to the Archive at the end of May - see the exciting list of new features in the Release 0.7.5. This release includes our new advanced search and a revamp to the HTML parser - this stuff was tricky to test and we're proud that the small amount of support requests suggests our testers did a great job of catching all the bugs!

Coming soon - Skins!

We're currently testing some awesome code on our Test archive. All being well, the next deploy will include the long-promised Archive Skins feature - you'll be able to choose from a range of lovely skins created by Archive staff, and create your own custom CSS. We know that lots of people have been looking forward to the opportunity to make the Archive look exactly the way that they want, and this will soon be possible! We're looking forward to seeing the beautiful designs people come up with. So exciting!

Rails upgrade - Faster! Better! More sparkles!

Our next big code project is to upgrade Rails, the application framework the Archive is built on. The latest version of Rails, v. 3.0, has lots of neat new features which will enable us to write much cleaner, faster code. In preparation for this change we have been writing lots and lots of automated tests, which will help us ensure we haven't broken anything in the move.

Refactoring - Code makeover

As we develop more automated tests and get ready to upgrade our version of Rails, we are also refactoring our code. Refactoring involves rewriting the code to make it much neater, more efficient and more beautiful. It's something which is necessary in all programming, but it's particularly important in a big project like ours with lots of contributors: by refactoring the code to make it more elegant, we make it easier for other people to work on it and smooth out any of the lumps and bumps which may have sprung up. Refactoring also improves the performance of code, and it's an important foundation for the next wave of development on the Archive.

Internationalisation on the Archive

We had a very exciting and productive conversation with the International Outreach Committee about the features the Archive needs in order to serve the fannish community internationally. All the work we have been doing on writing automated tests and refactoring will help a lot with developing our international features - we had to retire our old interface for translating the Archive because it caused some major performance issues, so we want to be sure that the new one we are planning will work smoothly. In addition to translations, we've also been discussing ways of improving our system for indicating the language of a work, browsing for works in particular languages, and setting useful defaults for language options. We're very lucky to have a brilliant International Outreach team who help us to see all the angles for our international membership - it's something we try to consider at all times, but it's very helpful having a team who are dedicated to this aspect of our work.

Introducing the new Tag Wranglers committee!

As most users know, the tags are the Archive are managed and organised by our behind-the-scenes team of dedicated and awesome tag wranglers. Until recently, tag wranglers were a subcommittee of AD&T, but there are now 133 volunteer wranglers working around the world to organise more than 99,666 tags, so it was high time for them to take on a more formal committee role. AD&T are very proud to see new committee chair Renay and her awesome team step out on their own: we'll be working closely with the new committee and we know that this change will help to ensure that Archive users continue to get a great experience.

News from our sub-committees and sister committees

• Coders are working hard on writing automated tests, refactoring, and getting ready for the Rails 3 upgrade.


• Testers are working on our new set of code on the Archive, and giving the new Skins option a workout!


• Tag wranglers have been adjusting to their new identity as a committee in their own right, figuring out some new policies, and generally being awesome.


• Support continue to do awesome work, answering most requests within a couple of days. They are a small but dedicated team and we value their hard work! (Don't forget that if you need a response from Support, you must leave a contact email address.)

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