All the latest news from the Archive of Our Own below the cut! Mirrored from an original post on the Archive of Our Own.
This was a shorter meeting than usual, because we moved some meetings about to allow for the holiday weekend without messing up our schedule for the rest of the month. However, this team is so keen that we overran our planned hour!
Highlights
- We’re currently soliciting feedback from fanartists about what features they’d like to see on the Archive. If this is an issue you care about, please come and tell us about your dream Archive.
- We had a long and impassioned discussion about which things should be bookmarkable on the Archive, and decided that it should be possible to bookmark users and collections as well as works. (In the future, we’ll also be introducing ways to subscribe to different things on the Archive, but we think there is still a use for bookmarks.)
- We looked at a preliminary design for a ‘Light’ style on the Archive, which will let users strip out styling on other users works. When we get this working right we’ll be able to expand the styling options on the Archive, so people will be able to have their bright pink fonts without forcing them on other people.
Recent changes
We deployed Releases 0.7.3.5 and 0.7.3.6 on Sunday 11th April – check out the Release Notes for these. They included quite a few exciting things:
- First commits from coder Kendappa, who recently rejoined the project after a break. \0/
- Lots more code for challenges – it’s now possible to match up participants in a gift exchange challenge and have the Archive send out their assignments automatically! Anyone who has run a big challenge should be getting excited right about now! Remix Redux are trying out this code RIGHT NOW, and we’ll soon be posting a tutorial to help other people use this awesome new feature.
- The ability to list a work not hosted on the Archive as an inspiration.
Deploy schedule
We are anticipating another deploy today or tomorrow to fix a couple of bugs: there are currently known issues with adding co-authors (it doesn’t work!) and hiding/showing warnings (our caching is interfering with this feature).
We haven’t set a date for our next real deploy to Beta, but we expect it to be within a few weeks, as our coders have been very busy! People who don’t like getting email messages about our new releases will be happy to learn that one of the changes waiting to be tested is the ability to turn off admin messages – so you’ll be able to enjoy regular batches of new code without us spamming you.
News from our subcommittees and sister committees!
- Coders have been crazily active – after a couple of weeks in commit freeze (where we limited new code to things that were urgently needed for the upcoming deploy) they are back in force! We’re especially happy to be welcoming lots of new coders, who are already getting stuck in and tackling a few bugs.
- Testers put in some amazing work testing the massive amounts of new code relating to challenges. New testers Kylie and Tai pitched in to do lots of work on this, with the help of some awesome folk form other teams. Many fake challenges have been created, and many cracktastic assignments issued.
- Tag wranglers are still working on updating their policies, and working to keep up with the constant flow of new tags on the Archive. They are quiet but awesome!
- Support have been doing a great job responding to user problems and suggestions. They respond to all feedback submitted via our Support and Feedback form as quickly as possible. If you don’t hear back from us within a few weeks, it probably means that something has gone astray – if you’re concerned, please do contact us again.
- Systems do lots of work with a tiny amount of people! The lovely Sidra (who usually keeps the Archive running smoothly) couldn’t make the last deploy, so Arrow stepped in to help out – thanks, Arrow!
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.