At the start of the year, AO3 upgraded our library for managing pseud and collection icons. To follow that large effort, we deployed some smaller fixes and improvements while we worked to address some performance issues due to increased traffic. We also did some preparations for the next big Ruby and Rails upgrades.

Special thanks and welcome to first-time contributors Indes, Jeslyn See, John Mathai, and Sekoia!

Credits

• Coders: Amy Lee, Bilka, Brian Austin, Cesium-Ice, Indes, Jake Faulkner, james_, Jeslyn See, John Mathai, lydia-theda, mystyrust, Scott, Sekoia, slavalamp
• Code reviewers: Bilka, Brian Austin, james_, redsummernight, Sarken, Scott
• Testers: Bilka, Brian Austin, Deniz, Indes, Keladry, Lute, lydia-theda, megidola, redsummernight, Rhine, Runt, Sanity, Sarken, Taki, Teyris, therealmorticia, Vio

Details

0.9.388

On January 14, we migrated to a new library for managing icon uploads.

• [AO3-5843] – The browser page title of the Invitation Requests page is now — wait for it — “Invitation Requests.”
• [AO3-5578] – The library we were using to manage uploading pseud and collection icons, as well as skin preview images, was in maintenance mode and not getting improvements. Rails’ built-in solution, Active Storage, got a lot of improvements with Rails 7, so we switched to it.
• [AO3-6873] – The Elasticsearch version we were using wasn’t compatible with the newest Linux kernel when running in Docker for development, so we upgraded our development setup to a fixed version.

0.9.389

We deployed a fix for a performance issue on January 21.

• [AO3-6878] – By default, Active Storage tries to extract metadata from every uploaded image. We don’t need or want that behavior, and it was causing major strain on the database because we’d just reuploaded every icon on the site as part of our migration from Paperclip, so we disabled it.

0.9.390

On January 26, we deployed a number of small fixes and improvements to take it easy while we recovered from the Active Storage changes.

• [AO3-5977] – Admins who can access unreviewed moderated comments on works could see the “Approve All Unreviewed Comments” button even though they absolutely do not have the ability to approve unreviewed comments. We’ve hidden that button.
• [AO3-6238] – The “Random Items” button didn’t work on the collection’s homepage. We’ve now made it work, like on all other collection pages.
• [AO3-6378] – The browser page title when looking at all series by a pseud didn’t mention series at all. Now it does!
• [AO3-6874] – The browser page titles for the TOS pages and the TOS FAQ were missing the “| Archive of Our Own” at the end, so we added it.
• [AO3-6755] – We removed some unused stylesheets.
• [AO3-6871] – We updated one of our Rails dependencies to incorporate a small security fix.
• [AO3-5502] – We made the browser page title on the adult content warning page for chapters more informative.
• [AO3-6529] – It was possible to import a work from a URL on AO3, resulting in two copies of the work. Bookmarks are much better suited for saving other AO3 works, so we prevented importing works from AO3 and the error helpfully mentions bookmarking the work instead.
• [AO3-6587] – When our Policy & Abuse team edits a user’s pseud or profile in response to a ticket, they have to enter the ticket ID to authorize the action and create a log of the changes. To make it easier to copy and paste the ID from the ticket tracker, the field now accepts a leading #.
• [AO3-6774] – To make testing easier, we added a preview for the email that is sent when an admin manually grants invitations to users.
• [AO3-6848] – We also added a preview for the email sent when you’re assigned a request in a challenge.
• [AO3-6801] – We clarified the text of the error message banned and suspended users receive when they try to do something they’re not allowed to do (e.g., posting a work).
• [AO3-6862] – We updated the example URLs in some of our help text to use example.com, which is a domain that exists specifically for that purpose.

0.9.391

With our deploy on February 3, we prepared to upgrade to Ruby 3.2 and addressed some performance issues.

• [AO3-6882] – To prepare for upgrading to Ruby 3.2, we made it possible to run the Archive with both Ruby 3.1 and Ruby 3.2.
• [AO3-6889], [AO3-6890] – We added some gems to try to work around some performance issues.
• [AO3-6892] – We did a schema dump to capture what the current data structure looks like before we upgrade to Rails 7.1.
• [AO3-6897] – In an attempt to address regular database load spikes, we adjusted the schedule of a regularly running task.

0.9.392

In an attempt to address some more performance issues, we deployed a second release on February 3.

• [AO3-6898] – We disabled some functionality in Active Storage that may cause some threading issues, but allowed us to cache icons to reduce traffic.

0.9.393

And then, on February 4, we undid the change we made on February 3.

• [AO3-6900] – Our previous change led to some 500 errors related to missing pseud icons, so we took the change back out.