Archive of Our Own ^beta

First fully-fledged AD&T meeting of the year! This week we got stuck into some of the issues carried over from last year, and started thinking about our major plans for next year.

Deploy schedule

Over the last few months, we've had a LOT of new code pushed to the site (you may have noticed *g*). We have two more big things in the pipeline (our front end review and a big enhancement for tags) and before those go live, we're taking the time to do a full regression test. This means that our testers will go through the whole site and check that everything is behaving as it should. Depending on how well this testing goes, we're planning:

• 14 February: deploy to Test - tags and front end code!
• 26 February: a second deploy to Test - more Collections code and a few more front-end tweaks
• 5 March: deploy to Beta

Planning for 2010

We've been brainstorming about all the things we'd like to do this year. This is a process we're continuing over the next week or so, but the number of things on out list is already reaching scary proportions. We'll be doing a dedicated post on this once we finish our list, but stuff we're definitely planning to do this year includes:

• More Collections and Challenges stuff: we have a lot more code to go in and are planning another couple of test cases to check it's all working out.
• Performance and efficiency: we know our code can get a lot faster, sleeker and more manageable, and we'll be doing some behind the scenes work on this.
• Search and browse: we REALLY want to improve our search and browse functions.
• Skins and viewing options: we've been promising them for a while, but we will get there!

Statistics!

If you'd like to see a few statistics on the Archive, check out our post on AO3 statistics: January/February 2010.

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. As a trial, we're opening comments on the mirrored versions of these posts (although we may switch back if it turns out to hinder things). Everyone is welcome to this party!

First Accessibility, Design and Technology meeting of the year! For those of you who are new to this party, AD&T is responsible for designing and overseeing software projects for the OTW, which at present means we are responsible for the Archive of Our Own. We had a great (and very busy) year in 2009, and we're looking forward to more great stuff in 2010. \0/

Our brilliant 2009 chair, Maia, has passed her shiny AD&T crown to me, Zooey Glass (so the meeting posts for 2010 will be from me). It's quite intimidating taking over from such a great chair, but she's sticking about and will be acting as our Release Manager (organising the release of new code onto the Archive), so she'll be helping to make sure her legacy is continued *grabs on tight*

This week's meeting was mostly to welcome the fab new committee. I'm happy to have lured back most of last year's members (one or two have stepped down to focus on other commitments), as well as four new people! Our introductions revealed a wide range of experience - fannish and real life - and a lot of enthusiasm. I feel privileged to be working with such a great team.

In order to reduce the pressure on committee members, we're having less regular meetings this year, so you'll be seeing meeting reports every other week instead of every week (we originally stepped up to weekly meetings when getting ready for Open Beta and, er, forgot to switch back). However, this doesn't mean we'll be doing less work - we'll be beavering away on our subcommittees and discussing things via email.

Even though we've technically been on break, it is hard to get AD&T and its subcommittees to rest! There's been some exciting coding work going on over the last months: lim has been conducting a massive review of our front-end code, bringing order where there was chaos and making sure it all validates. In the back-end, Elz has been working on some major changes for tag wrangling - faster! better! with metatags! It's not quite ready to go live yet, but we'll post more details when it is done.

Over the next few weeks, we'll be working out our priorities for 2010 and getting rolling with a new wave of work. AO3 2010: even more shiny to come!

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. As a trial, we're opening comments on the mirrored versions of these posts (although we may switch back if it turns out to hinder things). Everyone is welcome to this party!

Sat 11pm to 1am but I've been practicing staying up late (am a morning person usually) so was pretty easy on me. This meeting was about an hour of 'stuff wot we have to work on' and an hour of 'winding up the 2009 term'. Winding up was good fun; we had a chance to talk about what we liked in 2009 and what could be better - mostly we want to keep improving our communication, processes and knowledge transfer. Plus, you know, keep working on and improving the AO3 - we know it still has a long way to go!

AD&T Update: AD&T has now officially dissolved as a committee, the 2010 committee will form and meet on 30th January. *hands over sparkly tiara of chairness* We tried to avoid doing any more work in the last two weeks but didn't quite succeed.

1. 25 Dec 2009 Release 0.7.2.5 (5 items)
2. 25 Dec 2009 Release 0.7.2.6 (1 item) - quick performance fix
3. 26 Dec 2009 Release 0.7.2.7 (3 items
4. 31 Dec 2009 Release 0.7.2.8 (20 items)

Full Release History

Deploy Schedule: We've got a few things coming up, the deploy is tentatively scheduled for 16th January.

• Tag Wrangling: interface is no longer able to cope with the sheer number tags our wonderful users have been adding so we're sorting that out.
• Collections & Challenges: we built the bits that meant we could run Yuletide in an ad hoc fashion. Now we can start fleshing out the design and adding all the features it needs.

Wanted: people with JavaScript skills, people for the Support team, people with an urge to design the perfect search interface, and a plastic rocket.

If there are things you want to do/say - feel free to share either in comments, or by volunteering, or whatever medium you're comfortable with. You are invited to this party :)

7 am Sunday morning and I missed three meetings while on holiday. OMG people were busy in my absence; the Yuletide code drop got HUGE and a bunch of really cool changes got made. We started inviting participants for Yuletide and posting has been busy! We also updated the tag counts and simultaneously borked the Post New form but let us not speak of that (it's fixed now). In the meeting we mostly worked through a bunch of issues and tried not to generate anything new since we do want some time off over Christmas.

Succession planning: I'm stepping down as AD&T chair in 2010. I will continue to serve on the committee and help support the new chair - we plan to train up multiple people capable of coordinating a large open source project team (my successor is awesome by the way).

AD&T Update: We'll meet once more for the 2009 term - on 2nd of January - then break for most of January. We've not taken a break since January 2009 and we're in danger of melting the entire team into an exhausted (but very pleased) puddle.

For some perspective, we've been quite busy in the last few months:

• Release 0.7.0 Oct 17th (85 items)
• Release 0.7.1 Nov 07 (47 items)
• Open Beta Launch: 15 Nov (people: 347, fandoms: 668, works: 6,565)
• Release 0.7.1.1 Nov 22nd (46 items)
• Release 0.7.1.2 Dec 01st (14 items)
• Release 0.7.2 Dec 17th (78 items)
• Yuletide Participants Invited: 18th Dec (people: 2,648, fandoms: 3,775, works: 27,162)
• Release 0.7.2.1 19th Dec (11 items)
• Release 0.7.2.2 19th Dec (3 items) - five hours later
• Release 0.7.2.3 21st Dec (4 items)
• Release 0.7.2.4 21st Dec (3 items) - seven hours later
• Yuletide Posting Deadline: 21st Dec (people: 3,974, fandoms: 4,170, works: 31,550)

Deploy Schedule: None! We'll make plans when the committee starts up again in 2010 (if Yuletide needs us or if the whole AO3 borks we will respond as needed)

Support: Still operating over the break but please forgive minor delays

I am so proud of what we've achieved! I love the amazing people I am so fortunate to be working with and the community we are part of.

If there are things you want to do/say - feel free to share either in comments, or by volunteering, or whatever medium you're comfortable with. You are invited to this party :)

Samvara was enjoying the last of her vacation this weekend, so the meeting was co-chaired by elz and bingeling! This update brought to you by elz.

Deploy Schedule: We're pushing code out to be tested as quickly as we can with the plan to deploy before the end of the week. We'd like to get Yuletide users set up as soon as possible, but there's been an awful lot of code to verify, though the testers are doing a fantastic job!

Open Beta: Servers holding steady, although we're constantly looking for ways to improve performance and make pages speedier. The waiting time for new accounts is pretty minimal, so it's a good time to sign up or request invites for your friends.

ZOMG YULETIDE: Coming up very, very, VERY soon! The coders, testers and tag wranglers have been working hard to get everything in place, and support and communications have been coordinating with the Yuletide mods to hopefully make the process go as smoothly as possible for Yuletide participants. Stay tuned for Yuletide-specific posts on all frequencies!

Code: lots and LOTS of work going on with Collections and Challenges. The front-end coders (whose numbers have grown! \o/) have also been doing great work making the code more accessible and more compatible with Internet Explorer. And we're doing a lot of design and brainstorming for issues we'll tackle after Yuletide.

Stuff coming up:

Warnings: we decided on a new icon to differentiate works with warnings that are not provided from works with specific warnings attached to them. Look for that in our next release.

Tags: we're expanding the character limit to 100 and allowing a greater variety of characters in tags, which should make things more convenient for fans of non-English sources and pairings that involve more than two characters. We're also actively working on making changes to the Warning and Category sections of the posting form to increase clarity and usability and to better reflect the diversity of relationship types that works may include. (Better support for polyamory in 2010!) We also tackled, and will continue working on, how to improve the tag cloud and how to make the best possible use of our tag wrangling data when it comes to filtering and browsing.

If there are things you want to do/say - feel free to share either in comments, or by volunteering, or whatever medium you're comfortable with. We welcome your input. :)

While the fabulous samvara is still on well-deserved vacation, this week's update is brought to you by rustler.

Deploy Schedule: More Collections and Challenges code needed for Yuletide is heading for deploy shortly, as well as some more important fixes and enhancements.

Open Beta: Still good! Our servers seem to be doing fine and we're readying everything for the influx of new Yuletide users.

Code: Collections and Challenges, bug fixes, and IE optimization are still at the forefront for our coders. Our testers and tag wranglers have been very busy behind the scenes, coordinating with the coders to get crucial pieces in place.

Invitation Schedule: We're maintaining the 30/day rate for issuing new invitations for now, while Support catches up with current requests, and fixes go in which should anticipate many of the most common Support issues before more new users run into them.

Stuff coming up:

Collections and Challenges: Yuletide is coming! The time is growing near and the Collections and Challenges code is being put into place to provide Yuletide a comfortable new home.

Warnings: We've received a lot of feedback about our warnings and tag systems, and have some changes and clarifications on the way. Be on the lookout for a special post on this important topic soon!

About the Support Team: Our brilliant Support team deserve a massive shout-out for all their hard work helping people out with the Archive. They've been doing their best to answer support requests speedily and have done a great job keeping up with the work generated by Open Beta. They would love to welcome new people to the team: if you feel like you've gotten to know the Archive well and would enjoy helping other users, get in touch via our Volunteers' form. No experience is required, but you'll need to be a friendly and clear communicator.

If there are things you want to do/say - feel free to share either in comments, or by volunteering, or whatever medium you're comfortable with. We welcome your input. :)

Our fearless leader samvara is off on a fabulous holiday (we hope she's having a great time!), so we're sharing chairing duties amongst the rest of the committee. This week brought to you by zooey_glass.

Deploy Schedule: After lots of discussion about timing, we deployed release 0.7.1.2. This includes a few emergency fixes and the first set of the code for Collections and Challenges, which will be needed for Yuletide. Our team of Testers performed heroically to get all the issues included in this update tested out so that we could deploy them to the live site *loves on testers*. Check out the Release Notes for R1789 for more info on what was included.

Open Beta: Still going well! We're excited to have seen the number of works shoot up to over 21,000 already!

Code: We've been focusing our energies on fixing bugs in our existing code and building Collections and Challenges. Our front-end coders are also working on making the site more compatible with Internet Explorer. We're holding off on adding other new features for now so we don't get all confuddled with Collections *g*

Invitation schedule: The number of people on the queue has now dropped below 300 for the first time! Last week we dropped down to issuing 30 invitations per day to give our Support team a bit of breathing space and prepare for Yuletide. We reviewed that again this week and decided that we'd stay on 30 per day now, since Support are still busy and the queue is going down.

Stuff coming up:

• Collections and Challenges: Most of our energies are going towards preparing for this at the moment *wibbles* Naomi has been hard at work coding Collections and Challenges, while our testers have started the first round of banging on things to see if they are working right.
• Speedy tag editing: Lots of people have asked for a way to quickly edit tags without going through the whole Edit - Preview - Post process. This is definitely scheduled as a future improvement, although not until Collections and Challenges is well out of the way.

If there are things you want to do/say - feel free to share either in comments, or by volunteering, or whatever medium you're comfortable with. You are invited to this party :)

7am Sunday to about 9:30 (sorry to everyone in Europe/UK who were at that meeting and thank you for all the highly productive not sleeping you are doing). We had a rather large number of issues to work through – mostly design questions collated from all the Support and Feedback we’ve received plus some Tag wrangler questions.

• Deploy Schedule: Release 0.7.1.1 is on Beta now and it’s mighty fine if I do say so myself. The amount of coding and fixes that got created since we launched Open Beta is remarkable and they all got tested in time! The next deploy date is subject to change but will be within the next two weeks and will contain some of the code for Collections & Challenges (and a couple of fixes, if I put the kibosh on them I'll get pilloried :p).
• Open Beta: Still ticking along nicely.
  • Code: we’ve fixed a lot of the most urgent problems and are quietly working on designs for half a dozen of the less urgent ones. The longer term changes will be for early 2010 though, we’ve only got 5 weeks left of 2009.
  • Invite schedule: we slowed to automatically issuing 30/day so as to give Support a chance to catch up (in preparation for bringing in Yuletide authors) and we’ll leave it on that for the week of 22nd – 29th Nov then re-evaluate again.
• Stuff coming up:
  • Yuletide: importing the Yuletide user table and inviting those users. I’m with astolat on this one *runs around in terrified circles*
  • Passwords: we’ll add password validation for people updating their email addresses
  • Tag display: a maximum of 12 tags display on the works blurb, we’ll increase this and add a 'more...' option to display all
  • Chapter numbering: we’ll give people the option of overriding the automatic numbering for those who write prologues and epilogues

If there are things you want to do/say – feel free to share either in comments, or by volunteering, or whatever medium you’re comfortable with. You are invited to this party :)

Previous posts on Dreamwidth (bysamvara the 2009 committee chair) and the Organization for Transformative Works website (by the Accessibility, Design & Technology committee)