All the latest news on the Archive of Our Own! Our upcoming party, shiny features, and terminology changes. Mirrored from an original post on the Archive of Our Own.
In a crazy break from tradition we held our meeting on Sunday this time, to allow me (AD&T’s dedicated chair) to regather my brains after a week spent travelling and mostly offline.
Server birthday – party plans!
Last meeting we were looking forward to our plans for buying new servers. This time we were looking back – to the moment one year ago when we bought the first Servers of Our Own! Yes, the Archive’s servers will celebrate their birthday on Monday 13th September! We’re incredibly proud of everyone in the OTW and of fandom at large for making it possible for fandom to own the goddamn servers!
We’ll be holding a party to celebrate all this fannish awesome – watch out for more details shortly! We hope that lots of you will show up to celebrate the wonderful things that you have made possible.\0/
We’ve got some extra special Archive tweaks planned to celebrate our servers’ birthday – we decided to hold on the (VERY SHINY) new code we’ve been working on to make some final polishes so that we can deploy a really special release as our birthday gift to fandom.
Next deploy – PARTY GIFTS
As we reported in our last AD&T update, our next release will be chock full of delicious features! After many user requests and much anticipation, we’ll finally be rolling out Skins and Mobile Exports! We know we’re going to make lots of people happy with this release – not least us!
In order to spiff up the new code and make it extra shiny, we’ve held onto it and put some additional polish. We’re currently putting the finishing touches and testing to within an inch of its life, ready to deploy the new code just in time for the beginning of the 13th of September (somewhere in the world *g*).
AO3 Search Plugin
A while ago, our fabulous user Punk created a search plugin for Archive users. She’s updated it to give better results – download it from the AO3 page at the Mycroft Project. If you were using the old plugin, you’ll need to uninstall that before installing the new one. Thanks, Punk!
Terminology change – pairings to relationships
We’re changing the name of the field currently known as ‘Pairings’ to ‘Relationships’ to reflect its purpose more clearly. If you’re interested in reading more about how and why we made this decision, check out our post on the Anatomy of a Change.
News from our sub-committees and sister committees
- Coders have been working hard to get our last-minute improvements in before the birthday celebrations.
- Testers have welcomed a new team co-lead, Kylie, and have been working to ensure that all our last-minute code is truly as shiny as it should be.
- Tag wranglers were super-active as usual, and in addition to their regular business were responsible for spearheading the change from ‘pairings’ to ‘relationships’.
- Support welcomed a new commitee chair, Megan Westerby, and worked on some policy and long-term planning, while keeping up with their great work supporting our users on a day-to-day basis.
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.