All the latest news on the Archive of Our Own below the cut! Mirrored from an original post on the Archive of Our Own.
This was another endurance meeting, with the all-org meeting coming immediately afterwards, but we worked valiantly through our list of old business!
Highlights
- We talked about the next steps for fanart on the Archive, and started looking into server capacity. In the coming weeks we’ll be breaking tasks down into ‘stuff we can do now’ and ‘long term plans’.
- We got very excited about the new Vidding Roadmap and started talking about some initial plans for embedding vids on the Archive.
- We reviewed some proposed improvements to the way chapters are managed and the way works are marked as ‘in progress’ or ‘complete’. Coming soon – ways of marking sections in your work as prologues, epilogues, interludes, etc!
Upcoming cool stuff
- We’re currently working on more improvements to our HTML parser (that helps control the way your work looks in the Archive) – we’ve deployed a new version to our Test Archive and are testing it extensively to work out any bugs.
- We have a team working hard on developing a new Advanced Search interface, and we’re hoping to have the first part of that soon!
Vidding fundraiser!
Over on Dreamwidth, Collswan and a group of other vidding enthusiasts have launched the AO3 for vidders fundraiser. They’re raising money for the OTW to help support our goal of establishing a home for fanvids! \0/ (Money raised will not be specifically dedicated to one project – OTW finances are managed as a whole – but additional money in our pot makes it a lot easier for us to move forward with confidence on resource-heavy projects like hosting vidding). We’re really excited and pleased that people out there want to support our projects like this – drop by and check them out!
News from our sub-committees and sister committees
- Coders are taking advantage of a period without any urgent deadlines to work on some bigger projects, including the Advanced Search and new HTML parser. They’re also working through lots of smaller bugs.
- Testers are reading lots of works on our Test Archive in order to spot anything weird the new HTML parser is doing. It’s a hard job, reading awesome fic, but someone has to do it.
- Tag wranglers are working on a new policy for the names of book fandoms in response to user feedback. Our current system uses the author’s family name and the series name, e.g. ‘Rowling – Harry Potter’. Lots of users have told us they want to see the whole author name, and now we have longer tag limits this is possible, so we’re contemplating a switch. A debate is currently raging about the merits of Family Name, Given Name vs Given Name, Family Name, and other format details! Stay tuned for more news.
- Support have been working incredibly hard on a reduced team, as illness and real life pressures have taken a few people out of action. Our skeleton staff have consistently managed to keep the number of open bugs below 100 (this includes bugs which they have responded to but which need more work) – we think that’s pretty impressive!
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!
Mirrored from an original post on the Archive of Our Own, which is commentable with or without an Archive account.