Archive of Our Own ^beta

This month, we're all about the history on the Archive of Our Own and sister site Fanlore! During our April Showers challenge, we're encouraging all fans to document their fannish history (recent or long past). Maybe you have zines which have been sitting in a drawer for the past 40 years, or maybe you have a bunch of things you've posted to your LJ in a fannish frenzy over the last few months - either way, if you have yet to upload it to the AO3 we'd love to see you share (and store) it here. While you're at it, why not record some of the awesome community or fannish controversies that have made your fandom what it is on our sister site Fanlore.

April Showers is an open call for folks of all fandoms - if you have unarchived fanworks or untold stories we want to see them! We're highlighting a few fandoms that we think are currently underrepresented and need a little love (you can keep track of our daily picks on our Twitter @ao3org). The daily picks so far:

Star Wars - Use the Force to preserve your fannish history! Check out the Star Wars works on the AO3 and Fanlore's Star Wars page.

Sailor Moon – Fighting evil by moonlight? Share the love by daylight! There are awesome Sailor Moon works on the AO3 and history on the Fanlore Sailor Moon page.

Figure Skating RPF – Preserve your fannish triple axels for posterity! 6.0 for the AO3's Figure Skating works and Fanlore's page.

The X-Files – The fic is out there! See the evidence: X-Files works on the AO3 and X-Philes history on Fanlore.

Diana Wynne Jones - Love the many worlds of Diana Wynne Jones? Celebrate the inspiring influence of this late, great and much-beloved fantasy writer: Diana Wynne Jones works on the AO3 and the DWJ fandom history on Fanlore.

Mass Effect - Game on: check out Mass Effect works on the AO3 and histories on Fanlore.

In addition to contributions in all these awesome fandoms, we're been excited to see people taking the opportunity to dig out other things in their back catalogues during this challenge. Check out the works on the AO3 tagged April Showers challenge - so far c. 30 fandoms are represented!

Have you uploaded works for the challenge or added something to Fanlore? Comment to this post with links!

We have, courtesy of time passing and the lovely Elz who has magical powers over the AO3 database, some delicious statistics to share with you.

The short version: Commenting is increasing and kudos is popular. :D

The kudos feature was introduced in December 2010 (15th December to be precise) and we're delighted to see it being used with enthusiasm. In fact, 62,742 kudos were given over the course of March, and over 200,000 have been left since the feature was introduced. Hurrah!

There was some discussion of how kudos affected commenting (and if it did at all) so we've done some digging and here are our observations.

• Works are being added at a steady rate. These works are from existing Users (steady growth) and also from new Users (erratic growth as new Users tend to upload their back catalogues when they create their accounts). Since we invite people at a steady rate the erratic growth gets 'smoothed' (at present this number is set to 50 per day and there are 97 requests in the queue).
• Comments are being added at variable rates. The rate of commenting over the last year was reasonably steady until December 2010 where it rose sharply – we attribute this to Yuletide. Once the Yuletide MADNESS was over, the rate dropped back down to something resembling 'normal' levels.
• Kudos is being added at a steady rate. The amount of kudos added is exciting! It's probably a bit early to be making assumptions about what 'normal' kudosifying looks like but look at that little yellow line shooting up!

Total Comments, Works and Kudos added starting from April 2010

*This is not the Total Works in the AO3; this is one year's data.

'Total' charts are great for looking at broad trends, but not so great for looking at more subtle differences so next we looked a little more closely at what happened month by month.

• Commenting closely followed work posting for most of 2010 with a positive orgy of commenting in December and January. Yay! After January commenting did not quite return to previous 'normal' levels and there are now more comments being made.
• Kudos per month started high and stayed high but with big swings. This probably reflects how easy it is to give kudos – at least we hope so! In this chart the kudos looks a little bit less like a rocket trying to reach escape velocity and we can't wait to run stats for April -will it zig or zag?

Comments, Works and Kudos added per month starting from April 2010

*I suspect the December figure should be higher, given Kudos was introduced in the middle of the month.

'Monthly' charts lets us see comparisons a bit more clearly but 'more comments are being made' can be refined even more if we look at ratios.

• Comments per work has been steadily growing; in fact it appears to have more than doubled in the past year
• April 2010 - 0.80 Comments per Work
• March 2011 - 1.79 Comments per Work
• Kudos per work has now reached 7.31 and almost 4 times as many kudos are given as comments.

Ratio of Comments, Works and Kudos added per month starting from April 2010

It's interesting to observe that the 'Yuletide bump' in the Totals chart says more comments happened in January than December. The Ratios chart tells us that this may be true but the most comments per work happened in December. i.e.: Commenting in December was less prolific but more intense.

We're excited to see that both comments and kudos are continuing to rise on the AO3 - we hope this will continue!

This post written by the lovely Maia :D.

We just deployed new code to the Archive of Our Own and it includes USER SUBSCRIPTIONS!

Many moons ago, when astolat first suggested the idea of a fan-owned archive, she collected ideas for what features it should have. Many wonderful ideas were proposed, but one idea was repeated again and again - some way of subscribing to favourite authors or fandoms and keeping track of new things posted. Everyone wants a handy reading list, right? So, when the first roadmap for the AO3 was drawn up, subscriptions were there front and centre. We figured they should go in early on - originally we had them at number seven on our Archive roadmap, before collections and challenges.

Then, well, we started coding. And subscriptions turned out to be tricksy! The code to actually make them work isn't so bad, but they are hungry beasts when it comes to performance. We worked hard on performance, but it took us a while to get right. We ran Yuletide 2009 on the Archive and the servers groaned and cried. We spiffed up our caching and upgraded to Rails 3 (which brought performance benefits) but by then fandom had been busy filling up the servers and code improvements were no longer enough. Then fandom came through in a BIG way during the OTW's funding drives, and we bought shiny new servers! Subscriptions were so close we could taste them! Our users could taste them too - the number of support requests asking about the feature grew and grew.

Once the new servers were installed, we were finally able to deal with the performance demands of subscriptions. A few more bumps with delayed job (which used to deal with email queues before the mighty Sidra slew it and replaced it with resque), and we were finally there! Our wonderful coder and AD&T co-chair Elz took the plunge!

So, we're totally jazzed to announce the alpha version of subscriptions - you can now subscribe to a user and be notified by email whenever they post a new work or chapter. In the future we'll be spiffing this up further - RSS feeds for particular tags are the next thing on our to-do list, and further down the line we hope to include more fine-grained personalisation and more features. But right now, we are EXCITED, because we can finally stop checking user pages obsessively and just lie back and let our favourite authors come to us. HURRAY!

If you'd like to let people know they can now subscribe to you on the AO3, copy & paste the below handy dandy code and replace YOUR USERNAME with your username and YOUR FANDOMS with the names of the fandoms you post works in (thanks astolat for this snippet!)

I'm at <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/users/YOUR USERNAME"><img alt="favicon" border="0" src="http://archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico" /></a><a href="http://archiveofourown.org/users/YOUR USERNAME"><strong>YOUR USERNAME</strong></a> on the AO3. Subscribe to me - fandoms in the immediate queue include YOUR FANDOMS! (You'll need to log in to see the subscribe button.)

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)

Happy April! Thanks to everyone who made our March happy with donations to the OTW! We hope we'll have an equally happy April with our April showers challenge!

Here at the Archive of Our Own we love seeing the numbers of works and fandoms grow! Since we entered Open Beta in November 2009 we've added 7567 fandoms and 148,092 works - we love being able to come to the AO3 for a quick fix of all sorts of fannish love! However, there's a whole host of fannish deliciousness which hasn't found a home here yet. There are tons of wonderful Sailor Moon fanworks out there, but only 174 Sailor Moon works on the AO3. The X-Files had a thriving fannish community on Usenet back in the day, but only 1088 X-Files works have made it over to the AO3. Figure skating RPF has a lively presence on Livejournal and elsewhere, but there are only 288 Figure Skating RPF works to be found on the AO3. We love the way fandom has found a home in all sorts of places - each fannish community has its own culture and its own hangouts - but we also want to help ensure that all that fannish awesome doesn't disappear when sites go down.

This is where our April showers promotion comes in! For the month of April, we hope you'll shower the Archive with your old works! If you have works sitting on a harddrive, buried in your old emails, tucked away in a box of zines in your basement, or filed away on your Livejournal, now is the time to upload. You can use our handy import feature to grab them easily from elsewhere on the web (many thanks to coder Rebecca who recently spiffed up the importer to make it work better), backdate them to show when you first wrote them, and use our pseuds feature to post them under your old fannish names (mulder4eva1993, anyone?).

Fandom isn't just about the fanworks, but about the awesome culture surrounding them! If you'd like to document your fandom in other ways, why not add something to our sister project Fanlore? You could create a profile of an awesome fan from your fandom, add details of the great fandom debates you have seen, give details of the major archives and challenges, or just add in a few characters' names. Record your history for fans of the future!

We'll be highlighting a different fandom for importing love every day of April! Follow our Twitter @ao3org to check out the fandom of the day! (You can also add works in fandoms not on our list - the more the merrier!) Tag your uploaded works April Showers Challenge - at the end of the month we'll round up all the works with this tag and post stats on how many were uploaded for each fandom.

We kick off today with an oldie but goodie - Star Wars! Use the force, fandom!

April showers of fannish love! Bring us your history!

The AO3's parent org, the Organization for Transformative Works, is running its biannual membership drive!

If there’s one thing we know in fandom, it’s how to craft a good story — in words, in pictures, in sounds, in all three and more. We know that a good story involves showing, not telling, and we believe the OTW shows its members, year-round, the good works and good will of the many staff and volunteers who are devoted to communicating our core message: that fanworks are transformative and transformative works are legitimate.

But we're going to ask you to bear with us for the next week as we come right out and tell you about what we do, why we do it, why we need your help, and how you can support us. The best way to support the OTW is by becoming a member. If you haven’t joined yet, or if it’s time to renew your membership, or if you can spare a little more to keep us running, now is the best time to donate. Why? Because while the cost of an OTW membership will always remain low, for the next week — the length of the March Drive — we're offering special OTW premiums, and making them available at lower donation levels than ever before. Check 'em out. Tell us what you think.

There are other ways to support the OTW that we treasure dearly. Volunteer opportunities are available across all of our projects. We always welcome new perspectives, fresh enthusiasm, and eager minds.

Another way to help is by spreading the word about the OTW's mission and projects. The collective creativity of fandom is powerful — it's what binds our communities together, and it's what created the Organization for Transformative Works. This week, use that creativity to share the story of the OTW. Please support us using your words, your images, your multimedia, and your voices. Share the story of the OTW.

Transform the world; transform our future; transform the OTW.

Now that the Archive of Our Own is humming along on new, more powerful servers (thank you, fandom!), members of the Archive team have begun fleshing out a list of concrete and not-so-concrete tasks needed to make fanart hosting a reality!

As with text-based works, support for fanart will be rolled out in phases, starting with the most basic uploading functionality and gradually adding more features until we can make the Archive a place as uniquely accommodating for art as it is for text. As one of our first steps, we're working on a roadmap to outline those phases — however, fanart is far from the end of the story (so to speak!). While we'll be starting with fanart, we're trying to come up with a design that will cater to many media types and cross-media works, building up gradually until we can meet as many needs as awesomely as possible. To help us get started, we've been brainstorming posting needs for various media, based in large part on the input we received from fanartists last year. We’re considering the needs of art, fic, filk, sequential art, cosplay, cookery, and crafts, among others (video hosting is part of the separate Torrent of Our Own project) — but while we keep the bigger goal of multimedia support in mind, fanart will be the first step down that road.

This is a huge project that will involve restructuring our backend databases to accommodate different work types as well as designing and building user-friendly interfaces for posting and browsing. There are many questions that need to be explored — such as how tags and thumbnail images will work, what the file size limit should be, and what file formats will be supported, to name only a few. We're also particularly keeping in mind how to accommodate sequential art — one of the things that came across strongly in last year's feedback was the need to make it easier to post, browse, and navigate sequential art. We're working on ways to make that a reality: we want to make sure that people can post transcripts, page easily, and post in a variety of layouts, including left-to-right, right-to-left, and vertical.

Throughout this process, we’ll be working in cycles of design, coding, and public feedback. Eventually we'll be asking for fanartists to volunteer as beta testers. We're also always on the lookout for experienced or newbie coders who are interested in working on the AO3, whether on the back-end functionality (Ruby on Rails) or the front-end style (CSS and JavaScript). If you're interested in volunteering for the OTW in any capacity, get in touch with our Volunteers and Recruitment Committee.

Fanart hosting on the AO3 has been a long time coming, and there’s a lot of work still ahead to make it a reality. We’re excited to have reached the point where we can begin planning and building in earnest, and grateful to all the fans who have donated their time, resources, energy, and ideas to help us get here. Thank you, and stay tuned for exciting things ahead!

Fanart by AD&T member bingeling of our beautiful storage server, which will be used to host fanart in the future!

It's time to name the AO3 servers! We had a whole host of wonderful nominations, and our nominations committee have spent many hours collating them and whittling them down to a shortlist. We're excited by the fannish diversity represented in this range of names.

Voting will be open until 22 March 2011, and we'll announce the winners shortly thereafter.

Feel free to campaign for your favorites -- everyone is welcome to vote! Cast your ballot at transformativeworks.org.