This was a well-attended meeting – after a few meetings where real life took various members of the committee away, most of us were back together this week.
Meeting highlights!
Upcoming design changes
We’ve got various sections of the site queued up for design work – navigation, the home page, fandom landing pages and news posts, among others. Some of these have been on the back burner for a while, but we’re making progress and some of the designs are almost ready for the committee to review. We’re pretty excited about the new designs, which should make the site a lot more usable as well as prettier!
Challenges and Collections
Our Collections and Challenges task force recently met up to work on plans to improve all the stuff we learnt from Yuletide 2009, Remix, Yuletide 2010, Final Fantasy Exchange and other challenges. Maybe this year will finally be the year there won’t be any panic in the run-up to a big challenge? (We can dream!) Work on tag sets for challenges is progressing – this will make it possible to run nominations for multifandom challenges on the Archive.
Site security
Our security task force gained a new member and is reviewing ways of improving site security. One area where we’re planning improvements is site login – we’ve asked our Systems team to get us an https certificate so we can introduce https secure logins.
Coding Open House!
Have you ever fancied coding for the OTW or wondered what it is we do? AD&T member Jenny will be hosting a public chat on coding, introducing Ruby on Rails and the setup for our coders. All are welcome! The chat will be held on Saturday, 27 August at 04:00 UTC (what time is it in my timezone?) in OTW’s public chatroom on Campfire. The chatroom can be accessed at https://fanarchive.campfirenow.com/e79cc.
Next deploy
We’re working towards another deploy, which will take place as soon as we can get it ready. It will include more accessible Javascript (yay for jQuery) and several performance improvements that should reduce the number of 502 errors, as well as the usual list of minor bug-fixes.
News from our sub-committees
- Coders have been working like crazy! Enigel has done awesome work updating all the JavaScript on the site and replacing uses of the Prototype library with another library, JQuery. This work will help fix some niggling problems, and lays the foundations for some accessibility improvements – soon, users without JavaScript will be able to delete!
- Testers: There’s tons to test in this deploy – particular thanks to Kylie for organising parties, and X-Parrot for testing so much.
News from our sister committees
- Support are still working hard at keeping up with tickets, and providing feedback on the new Support Board as coder Sidra works on it. They are pleased to welcome new staffer Yshyn to the team!
- Tag Wranglers keep a-wrangling! They are always pleased to welcome new wranglers – fandoms currently in need of love include Weiß Kreuz, Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter – Laurell K. Hamilton and Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger.
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!
This meeting round-up by Jenny S-T & Zooey
Mirrored from an original post on the Archive of Our Own