Archive of Our Own ^beta

The Archive of Our Own is thrilled to announce that it is now home to 3 million fanworks! This amazing accomplishment could not have happened without the support and engagement of you, our incredible users.

A bit of history about the Archive:

• The idea for a fan-owned archive was first suggested in May 2007
• The Archive of Our Own went into closed beta almost a year and a half later, in October 2008
• A little over a year after that, in November 2009, AO3 entered open beta, where anyone could request an invitation and make an account
• Before open beta, there were 347 user accounts and 6598 fanworks from 674 fandoms
• Two days after open beta started, there were 1076 user accounts and 9506 fanworks from 886 fandoms
• The millionth fanwork was posted to AO3 on February 15, 2014, just under four and a half years after going into open beta
• The two millionth fanwork was posted to AO3 on December 20, 2015, less than two years after reaching one million fanworks

And now, less than a year and a half after reaching 2 million fanworks, we're celebrating 3 million! The past decade has been an incredible journey, and the AO3 has grown more than we ever could have hoped back when it first started.

Help Us Celebrate

It's the people who make the Archive of Our Own what it is. Our more than 1 million registered users--and countless unregistered users--are some of the most enthusiastic and passionate folks around, giving so much of themselves in the works, comments, and kudos that they share. So we want to hear your stories. What does AO3 mean to you?

You can share your answer in a word. You can share it in an essay. In a drawing. A song. However you want to celebrate your experience, we want to know about it. Leave a comment or use the hashtag #myAO3 on social media so we can hear what you have to say.

Three million thank yous to everyone who helped the Archive get to where it is today!

We will be deploying a major improvement to the potential matching code for challenges and gift exchanges shortly, and want to give a quick overview of how this could affect any exchanges you may currently be running.

• If you have sent assignments out, no worries! The new code will not affect you at all.
• If you have not run matching yet, please hold off on doing so until the new code is deployed! We will be announcing the code release here on AO3 News in the next three days.
• If you are in the middle of making assignments -- that is, you have already run matching, but have not actually sent out your assignments -- you will need to do one of two things. Either:
  • Send out assignments before we deploy the new code, or
  • Wait until the new code is deployed, then re-run matching.

Please note that if you choose to wait until the new code is deployed, you will unfortunately lose the existing assignments, including any ones you may have edited by hand. You will still be able to re-run your matching, taking full advantage of the new improvements, and then re-do any manual edits that need to be made.

If you have invested a lot of time in hand-massaging assignments and do want to send your assignments out before we deploy, please contact Support by October 8 with the name of your collection and an estimate of when you expect to send out assignments. We would like to release this code, which will significantly improve matching, as soon as possible, while also trying to give everyone who is in the middle of assignments enough time to finish the process.

The changes we have made to the code are completely on the back end and will not only eliminate the (recently implemented) limit on potential matches, but will also make matching run much faster and more smoothly going forward! Thank you in advance for your support and assistance as we prepare to release this upgrade.

We’re adding a new functionality to the Archive! To date, only work creators have been able to add their works to collections. With an upcoming code release, collection owners and maintainers will also be able to invite works to collections!

For Collection Owners & Maintainers

The new code will allow collection owners and maintainers to add works to their collections by visiting the work, selecting the 'Add To Collections' button at the bottom, and entering the name of the collection.

If the work's creator has chosen to automatically allow their works to be included in collections, then the work is added to the collection -- no further action needed!

If the creator hasn't chosen to automatically allow their works to be included in collections, a request will be sent asking them to approve or deny the addition of their work to the collection.

After inviting a work to a collection, maintainers will be able to see its status in the collection's 'Manage Items' page. While the request is pending approval, the work will show under 'Invited'; once approved, the item will move to the 'Approved' section. If the item is rejected, it will show under 'Rejected'.

For Work Creators

Work creators can fully control how to interact with this new feature. Checking the 'Automatically agree to your work being collected by others in the Archive' option in Preferences will allow works to be added to collections directly without approval. A notification will let you know when your work(s) have been added to collections.

If that preference is not checked, you will receive an email asking you to approve or deny the invitation.

Please be aware that these approval request emails fully respect the 'Turn off emails from collections' setting. If collection emails are turned off, but you don't allow your works to be automatically added to collections, you will not receive approval request emails and will need to periodically check your 'Manage Collected Works' page to approve the addition of your works to collections. Similarly, if you have collection emails turned off and do allow your works to be automatically added to collections, you will not receive an email when one of your works is added to a collection.

Creators can review and respond to invitations through the 'Manage Collected Works' page. This page is linked in the approval request email, and is also available in the 'Collections' section of the Dashboard sidebar. From there, you can approve or reject invitations, and review previously approved or rejected invitations.

As always, if you have any questions or experience any problems, please contact our Support volunteers, who will be glad to help!

The Archive currently offers a few ways to control how other people interact with your works: you can choose to only allow comments from signed-in users, or you can make your work only accessible to signed-in users to begin with.

However, to counter cases of severe harrassment on the Archive (including abusive comments from throw-away accounts created to circumvent the anon restrictions), we are now introducing a way for creators to review any comments before they appear on their works.

(Please note that this feature is undergoing testing, and all screen shots are approximate.)

What this means for creators

Once the feature is deployed, creators will be able to turn on comment moderation for new or existing works in the Privacy section of the posting and editing form.

Enabling comment moderation on a work will prevent new comments from appearing publicly unless they are approved by the creator. If the creator has comment notification emails enabled, they can access and review individual comments directly using the links at the bottom of the email. Creators can also review all comments on a work by accessing the work and following the "Unreviewed Comments (#)" link in the work's navigation.

Each unreviewed comment will have options to Approve or Delete. Note: Abuse personnel will have access to this page, so you can alert them to harrassing comments via the abuse report form without having to approve the comments first.

Once approved, comments will be publicly available on the work. Approved comments cannot be unapproved, but they can be deleted. Comments posted by the work creator will be approved automatically.

Creators can also turn on comment moderation for multiple works at once with the mass editor, which can be accessed using "Edit Works" link on their dashboard.

What this means for commenters

The comment form will display a notice informing commenters if comment moderation is enabled on a given work.

Commenters will be able to enter their comment as normal. After the comment is submitted, a message will inform the commenter that the comment has been received and will not appear on the work until the creator approves it.

Commenters will receive email copies of their comments if they have that preference enabled. They will be able to access their comment using the "Go to the thread" link included the email.

More improvements to come

Our Abuse team works hard to clean up abusive comments when they are reported and to take action against users involved in harassment, but they are limited in what they can do, particularly against users who are willing to go to the trouble of creating throw-away accounts. This change will enable creators to control comments on their own works, preventing abusive comments from ever being seen.

We will be introducing some further features to help users and our Abuse team deal with harassment and spam: allowing users to reject unwanted gifts, making it possible for Abuse to delete all of an account's works at once (to more efficiently remove spam), allowing Abuse to mark works as spam/not spam, and improvements to the Report Abuse form.

We hope these features will help the Archive be a safer place for users to enjoy posting and consuming fanworks.

Here at AO3, we've been looking into getting some paid coding help for a few years, to work on projects that are larger or more time-consuming than our volunteers are able to tackle in their spare time, and also just to help with the backlog of work and offer some extra assistance. We had a contractor take on a few small projects last year, but to outsource work on major projects, you need to be able to form longer relationships.

Today we're excited to announce that thanks to user donations, we've been able to contract an experienced programmer for several months' worth of work! \o/ And she isn't just an experienced Ruby developer — she's a Ruby developer who has been working on the Archive since 2008! Since she's familiar with all the nooks and crannies of our infrastructure, it will be easy for her to jump right in on major projects, like the much-needed update to our searching and filtering code. After that, it's onwards to back-end improvements, code cleanup, and other long-awaited projects like site internationalization.

Our new contractor is starting work next week, and we'll have a preview of her work on the searching and filtering code soon! Thanks to all of you for the donations that have been keeping the site running and are now enabling us to make it even better.

Today the OTW turns 8 years old. The organization and its projects have accomplished a great deal during this time, all of which has been made possible with the donations of our supporters and the many hours of work from our thousands of volunteers over the years.

This month we'll see another milestone: Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) will be releasing its 20th issue. We hope that its readers, contributors, and our many visitors will take the time to help us celebrate!

• On September 13th, we'll be posting a feature on TWC's Symposium section
• On September 15th Issue 20 will be released
• On September 17th we'll be posting some reflections from contributors to TWC

We'll be wrapping up on September 19th, when we'll host a live chat with four contributors to TWC who have been involved with the publication from its early days. Edited to add: The transcript is now available

• Lucy Busker is a writing professor at Parkland College in Illinois, USA. She was the founder and site maintainer of the original Fanfic Symposium, and the owner of the Fanfiction Critic's Association mailing list. Her recent interests include gender in children's media, including a strange fascination with her daughter's Barbie movies.
• Cathy Cupitt has been an active member of fandom since the late 1980s, first writing fanfiction for Lotrips. She's been a writer, reccer and vidder in Stargate: Atlantis, Torchwood, Supernatural and Teen Wolf, among others. She has a Doctorate in Creative Arts, and is currently a Research Fellow for the National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education at Curtin University in Perth, Australia.
• Amanda Odom has served as an instructor at several institutions, including the University of South Alabama, the United States Sports Academy, and Front Range Community College. She has also worked as an editor. She loves finding connections between the characters in comics, video games, books, and movies and the people who write and read them.
• Dana Sterling has published a romance novel under a nom de plume, and teaches writing at Oklahoma State University's Institute of Technology in Okmulgee, Oklahoma. She studied journalism, and previously spent 20 years as a reporter, editor and broadcaster. She has been a fan of comics, Star Wars, Stargate, and The Lord of the Rings among others.

The chat will be held in the OTW's Public Discussion Chatroom on September 19th from 14:00-16:00 UTC (what time is that in my timezone?)

We hope you'll join us! And if you have any questions about the event, leave them here.

Until recently, if you were browsing or posting works in Brazilian Portuguese or European Portuguese, your only option was a generic "Portuguese" language. Answering several user requests, and after consultation with OTW Translation's Brazilian and European Portuguese teams, we have decided to change this setup.

The "Portuguese" language has been split into two languages for posting to the AO3:

• European Portuguese, labelled "Português europeu"
• Brazilian Portuguese, labelled "Português brasileiro"

To minimize the tidying-up work, both Translation teams have done their best to identify existing works in the previous "Portuguese" tag that belong to either language. During the migration, Accessibility, Design & Technology coders moved works according to this classification. If you have previously posted a work in Portuguese, please double-check that it's properly classified. You can change your work's language by selecting the "Edit" button at the top of the work page and choosing the correct language in the "Choose a language" dropdown menu.

We hope this will increase the site's usability for our Portuguese-speaking users. Our translation teams are also hard at work on the Brazilian Portuguese AO3 FAQs and the European Portuguese AO3 FAQs. Feel free to submit Support and Abuse tickets in either language, or just drop us a line saying hi!

The Archive of Our Own has a number of social media accounts to keep you informed. However, with all the different channels available these days, it can be hard to know where to turn. Here's a brief summary of the official AO3 channels and what you can expect from each.

Need help?

For questions or comments about the Archive, please contact us via the AO3 support form, which provides a direct line to our Support staff. The link can also be found at the bottom of all AO3 pages, under "Technical Support and Feedback".

Although we have made an effort to respond to people contacting us through the AO3's social media accounts in the past, there are numerous problems with doing so. Some channels limit us in how much information we can put into a reply, and others are too public to share sensitive account data. As a result, we'll be concentrating all our support efforts on the official contact form.

Support is able to assist users in multiple languages, thanks to help from our Translation committee! You can send your questions in العربية, Bahasa Indonesia, català, čeština, dansk, Deutsch, English, español, français, 한국어, italiano, magyar, Nederlands, polski, português brasileiro, português europeu, Русский, suomi, svenska, and 中文.

Please keep in mind that our Support team is staffed entirely by volunteers, so response times can vary. If you've included an email address in your message, they will get back to you!

Stay informed!

If you don't have questions and would just like to keep up with the latest Archive news, you can follow us on Twitter and Tumblr:

• @AO3_Status provides real-time status updates about downtime and other site issues.
• @ao3org and the AO3 News Tumblr share the latest Archive news, including information about site changes.
• @AO3_wranglers tweets the latest updates about changes to Archive tags.

(You can also stay up-to-date with our sister projects and our parent organization, the Organization for Transformative Works, through the OTW's other accounts.)