Archive of Our Own ^beta

11pm to 1:10 am for me but I was pretty wired so getting tired certainly wasn’t an issue. We’re all pretty wired, this weekend was the Open Beta deploy. The code is in and it hasn’t broken anything (yet) so this was our last Open Beta planning session. We care a lot and it was reflected in the passionate discussion about timing (when do we launch, when do we tell people things - see below), scale up (how many people can we take and how fast - we don’t know but we’re going to find out… cautiously!) and method of distributing invitations (invitation queue signup versus giving invite codes to existing users - we favour the invitation queue signup because it is democratic). *grins* We’ve actually been having variations on this discussion since May but it’s taken on a whole new dimension of urgency.

• Deploy Schedule: the AO3 has been updated to revision 1692 (Release 0.7.1) and is looking pretty fine. Release Notes are up if you want the details and the next deploy is in two weeks.
  • Collections & Challenges: astolat has been working on phase one which is core stuff to enable us to import works and authors into a ‘Collections’ skeleton for Yuletide.
  • Deleting chapters with comments: Right now if you do this you lose the comments, we’re putting something together that will give you the choice of moving the comments to a different chapter or deleting them.
• Open Beta: ‘Mid November’ = Next weekend. OMG! It’s been creeping up on us for a while and we think we’re finally ready. What this means is we’ll be poking the AO3 during the week and if we don’t see anything alarming (we totally reserve the right to pull the plug if we hit a nasty surprise) we’ll do a number of things:
  • Communicate: We’ll put up a post with exact details one day before we launch so people know when we’re turning the invitation queue on.
    • We are conscious the timing may disadvantage some people and we've tried to pick a time that is as fair as possible. I understand we can't possibly meet everyone's needs, and for that I am sorry. I do want to assure you the people who made this decision are from a variety of places in the world and this isn't a decision we take lightly.
    • The post will go to all the OTW mirrors at the same time (Web, DW, LJ etc.), so no need to mercilessly refresh the AO3 ;)
    • If you are unable to join the queue because of the timing, a friend can add your email address to the queue for you.
  • Launch: We’ll turn on the invitation queue and make an announcement on all mirrors. This will make a link on the front page visible; it will read ‘SIGN UP NOW’ and it takes you to a page where you can enter an email address.
    • Invitation codes: we will issue a small number of invitation codes to Closed Beta users in recognition of the constant feedback, the helpful suggestions, and the patience with funky code and constant redesign.
    • Invitation queue: we will make the invitation queue location available to members of the OTW (past and present) for 24 hours prior to publishing it publicly in recognition of the people who may not have been able to give their time, but supported the organisation as a whole to make this day possible. We do not expect this to clog the queue.
  • Add users: We'll monitor performance as a result of the first round of invitations being taken up and we'll make decisions about how many to add and how fast to add them based on what we see.
  • Hyperventilate: (that’s one of my tasks)
• Stuff coming up: Open Beta!

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)

Sunday 7am! I chaired AND wrote up the minutes this week *is grown up* I'm kinda seeing the next two weeks as the calm before the storm. We want to get everything as polished as possible, create as little new work as we can and concentrate on making sure we're ready for Open Beta. We've put time into building up the Support team, getting in as many critical fixes as possible, building the Invitations code, making the FAQ more comprehensible, making the News Posts so we can communicate and I'm feeling weirdly erm... not flat, but not in an energy spike right at this moment - it's probably because I don't have anything specific to stress about... yet *grins*

• Deploy schedule: Deploy to Beta still on for 8th November (Release 0.7.1) - it was going to just be the invitations code originally but we've snuck in a bunch of fixes too.
  • Fixes: link in TOS, lots of IE7 stuff including nested bulleted list styling for meeeeee (yay cesy!), some Importer fixes, increase of character limit on Notes field, autocomplete on tags, html link in emails from admin comments and MORE.
  • Invitations: Works! My first invite queue invite emails turned up - it's down to 25 on Test (we've used up all our secondary, tertiary and err quaternary? email addresses faking up an invite queue) - which is exciting!
• Open Beta: Mid November.
• Stuff coming up:
  • Allowed html: we're cleaning up the help on this to make sure they are all consistent (works, notes, summary, comments etc.)
  • Permalinks: we've a very reasonable request for them on works and we think it's a good idea.
• WANTED:
  • JS Coder: We need a person with JavaScript skills. We need you for IE7 optimising and in general. We can offer a community of passionate coders, the fannish level of engagement of your choice and an opportunity to lose valuable sleeping hours in good company - what's not to love!

OTW-All-Org Meeting

Monday 7am! I was kindly allowed to steal the first slot so I could report for AD&T then drift in and out as I made breakfast and dressed for work. I want some sort of permanent internet connection implanted so badly.

The Board has welcomed two new members, had an election, a fundraising drive and a baby. Hah, no-one multi-tasks like these women. Web are cross-training and documenting (activities dear to my heart), VolCom are doing admin and preparing for 2010 and looking for people, Translations are looking into international outreach *loves*, Systems are SO BUSY! Open Doors gave out 41 Archive invites and screencapped ~60 websites as part of finding new homes for Geocities users and archivists. *moment of silence for the animated gifs* Legal is waiting on a ruling on our DMCA proposal and Journal is 'chugging along, getting ready for No. 4' which in no way describes their awesome. Finance is handing over from Susan to our incoming Treasurer Sheila (who says 'we're just cruising along, being...you know...financial. \$/'). Elections didn't get to run an election but we have two, count em TWO new Board members as does Docs... well, two new members. Docs doesn't have a private Board that I'm aware of although they are a stealthy, ninja committee who are everywhere so who knows?. DevMem are justifiably proud of the results of the fundraising drive and are busy planning for the future *loves* I kind of need a lolcat to appropriately celebrate them. Comm is continuing to spreads words - mine as well, it's ever so slightly intimidating :p

• People wanted: *puts on OTW Committee Chair hat* the OTW needs people, particularly the Volunteers Committee (VolCom) and the Wikimittee; Translations and Finance would also love to welcome new volunteers. Some of our people have been serving on committees for two years now, we have knowledge and skills we'd love to share - and we need ongoing support to keep the committees rolling. If you've got skills, or passion (because we can teach the skills!) we'd love to hear from you.

If there are things you want to do/say - feel free to share either in comments, or by volunteering, or by messaging 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)

Sat 11pm meeting. I was sick and slept instead but had peppered the agenda with comments and the latest schedule updates (hopefully coherent ones) and sent out a plea for someone to chair the meeting. The lovely bingeling came to my rescue and stalking the transcript after says they don't need me at all :p

• Deploy schedule: Next deploy to Beta currently scheduled for 8th November (Release 0.7.1). Also I gotta stop saying 'push it back' when talking scheduling because it doesn't mean the same thing to all of us and I should know better :(
  • Admin News Post comment email: the link in the email doesn't work, we've put the underscore back in the right place for this deploy.
  • AO3 Logo: Temporary logo is on Test. Official Logo competition deferred until we can recruit someone to run it. Heh, the front page in Test is currently displaying: "Latest work: This is a story with very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very verylong title" *loves on testers*
  • Autocomplete: Stopped working for the Post New form when entering tags. We've got a fix for that - it's on Test - and can I just say rustler is awesome :)
  • Invitations: the code is on Test (yay elz!) , it can do all sorts of things. I turned the invitations queue on and off, entered some email addresses into the queue, checked my predicted invite time and bounced around excitedly. I also issued invite codes to my user account, sent them to other testers and generally poked things. It still needs some enhancements (this is the first version of a whole new feature and a big piece of work) but we're very happy with it so far.
• Open Beta: Mid November. We think we can squeeze the planned stability period (where you deploy code then stare at it and wait for it to explode) down to one week . We wanted two but that was when we were doing one deploy containing EVERYTHING rather than splitting it into 0.7.0 (on Beta now) and 0.7.1 (coming to Beta soon).
• Test Team: Are amazing! A piece of work we do after a code deploy is to go through all the issues and confirm that the changes got deployed and are working as expected. That means they do all the testing/verification they did on Test again on Beta (except without creating junk data). There were 89 in total (there were 90 but one fix failed testing) and we're already down to only 39 waiting for verification.
• Stuff coming up:
  • Admin Stats! Yes, I know I'm the only one who cares but OMG I care a lot! *cradles the JQuery plugin tenderly*
  • Languages: We're at the point where we can talk to the Translation team about what languages to add so that people can specify what language they are posting in.
  • Notes: *grins* Yes, you may have 5k character Notes, we're extending the limit.
  • Task Queue: We're conscious that one of the first things you do with a shiny new account is import your back catalogue of works, this hasn't been a problem in Closed Beta because we add people in such small amounts. Performance testing suggests the AO3 can handle quite a lot before it slows down but we're looking at ways to make this not an issue. Long term we'll probably set up a task queue so you can start importing and it will import when it can if it can't straight away.

If there are things you want to do/say - feel free to share either in comments, or by volunteering, or by messaging 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 AD&T committee)

Sunday 7am for me and we didn't stop for 2.5 hours - see bingeling it's not just you :p We talked a lot about schedules, communication (especially Support and Tag Wranglers) and held us a workshop on some of the finer points of the Collections design - should they be bookmarkable (we think yes), should the description field be compulsory (we think no).

• Deploy Schedule: the AO3 has been updated and we're now on revision 1585 \o/ Our next deploy is planned for about three weeks from now and will contain the Invitations code and any fixes to existing problems that we can squeeze in - this is the Open Beta drop, we won't be able to add any more code before we launch.
  • AO3 Logo: We've agreed on a temporary logo. I think it's very pretty and it's certainly a lot better resolution than our poor little 'house' favicon. Our energy is pretty centered around Open Beta right now so finding someone to run a logo competition is going to have to wait - suggestions and volunteers welcome ;)
  • Filters: We're going to change the filers slightly, we'll change the Rating and Warning Category tickyboxes to radio buttons to reflect the fact that if you try to select more than one you always get zero results (can't be Rating=E AND Rating=T at the same time). This way, you can only ever pick one at a time anyway and will hopefully stop people having the frustrating experience of thinking they can have both then finding out they can't. erm, I really hope what I said made sense - poke me if it doesn't.
  • Invitations: I can see the code being added to our code repository in great big chunks and elz greeted me this morning with a design question. Yes, some of our features get developed when I'm half awake and half dressed - it's an excellent system I swear!
• Open Beta: Mid November. Our Support team are gearing up, we have plans, plan, plans and I'm only panicking every second hour :p
• Stuff coming up: Open Beta! Code Optimising, Yuletide importing (OMG)

Previous posts on Dreamwidth (bysamvara the 2009 committee chair) and the Organization for Transformative Works website (by the AD&T committee)