Over the past few weeks, we completed several important infrastructure updates including upgrading to Elasticsearch 8, finishing the transition to Rails 7.1, and migrating the bookmarks table to create room for more bookmarks. We also made some user-facing improvements, such as fixing various access and display bugs; clarifying some error messages, form labels, and page titles; and adding chapter numbers to comments in your inbox. Special thanks and welcome to first-time contributors Abhinav Gupta, hk-contribs, TemperedPetals, and Vemmy RM! We’d also like to thank Dhiraj Mishra for reporting a security issue.

Credits

• Coders: Abhinav Gupta, AliceLsr, Bilka, Brian Austin, calm, ceithir, Connie Feng, EchoEkhi, Hamham6, hk-contribs, kitbur, sarken, slavalamp, TemperedPetals, Vemmy RM, weeklies
• Code reviewers: Bilka, Brian Austin, ceithir, Coding-Hen, Hamham6, sarken, weeklies
• Testers: Bilka, Booksarelife, Brian Austin, Caitlynne, calamario, choux, Deniz, Keladry, LilyP, Lute, lydia-theda, Sam Johnsson, Sanity, Teyris, therealmorticia, wichard

Details

0.9.414

In the process of installing the new Elasticsearch servers, we upgraded to Elasticsearch 8 on June 24!

• [AO3-6259] – We upgraded the Elasticsearch gem to version 8.18.0.

0.9.415

On June 25, we finished off the last remaining parts of the update to Rails 7.1.

• [AO3-6894] – We flipped the remaining configuration values to use the new defaults from Rails 7.1.

0.9.416

Our deploy on July 1 updated older language on the work search and filtering forms from “Author/Artist” to “Creator” and added chapter numbers to comments in your inbox, among other improvements.

• [AO3-6050] – When accessing the Tag Wrangling page showing all relationship tags related to a character, tags would always be shown in alphabetical order, regardless of sort order. Now, tag wranglers can additionally sort through the tags by how many times they were used or by creation date.
• [AO3-6273] – Sometimes, when you used the “Post Draft” button on a draft, the word count of the publicly posted work would be blank. It should now always be the correct number.
• [AO3-6373] – If you blocked a user who had previously commented on your work, you could no longer freeze their comment. We fixed this, so you can now block users and freeze their comment threads in any order without problems.
• [AO3-6735] – We fixed that when you left a comment on an news posts with comment moderation enabled, the resulting comment email would incorrectly tell you that the comment was on a work with moderated comments.
• [AO3-6936] – We changed the browser page title on subscriptions pages to a format that matches other user pages: “username – Subscriptions | Archive of Our Own.”
• [AO3-6971] – We fixed an error that occurred if the “No Fandom” tag didn’t exist, for example in a development installation of the Archive.
• [AO3-7010] – Trying to access the chapter index of a work that’s both in an unrevealed collection and hidden by an admin used to result in an error 500. We’ve fixed that so it now results in a normal permission error.
• [AO3-7017] – If you knew the ID of a draft work or a work restricted to logged in users, you could access a few subpages of the work that revealed its title and blurb. Since that information isn’t meant to be public, we’ve once again restricted access to these pages.
• [AO3-7016] – We updated the gem we use to run database schema migrations of large tables.
• [AO3-5345] – Collection maintainers get an email notification if they run matching in a gift exchange and the sign-ups are invalid. We’ve improved the text of this email and prepared it for translation.
• [AO3-6541] – We changed the works search and the sorting and filtering options to use “Creator” instead of “Author/Artist” to match the terminology used by the rest of the site.
• [AO3-6750] – Comments in your inbox now include the chapter number, so you don’t have to follow the comment link to know where exactly it was left.
• [AO3-6807] – If you tried to use an invalid URL for an external work or in your collection sign-up, you would sometimes get a 500 error. We fixed that so now you will always get a proper error message telling you that the URL is invalid.
• [AO3-6999] – We removed some duplicate code for sending comment emails to admins.

0.9.417 & 0.9.418

On July 3 and July 4, we ran out of rows in the database table that stores bookmarks, so we had to move them to a larger table that can hold them all! Now you can once again add your own bookmarks to the 647 million we already have.

• [AO3-7031] – We migrated the bookmarks table to be able to hold more rows and then migrated all other table columns that refer to bookmarks to also support the larger bookmark IDs.

0.9.419

On July 12, we deployed an assortment of minor changes that included allowing the accent-color property in skins and clarifying some error messages.

• [AO3-6795] – When you were excluding a tag in a search and then made a syntax error when trying to filter those results, you’d get a 500 error. We’ve fixed this so it instead tells you that your query has a syntax error.
• [AO3-6989] – If you tried to view the pseuds list for a user who didn’t exist, you’d get redirected to the People Search page. That made sense in a way, but wasn’t terribly consistent with other nonexistent pages. Now you’ll get a 404 error instead, which makes it easier to check for typos in the URL you entered.
• [AO3-7007] – We fixed a 500 error when a guest tried to add a work to a collection by directly going to the “Add To Collection” URL.
• [AO3-7025] – We fixed a typo in one of the CSS properties in the Creating a Skin help pop-up.
• [AO3-7022] – We changed the default comment setting for news posts to “Only registered users can comment.”
• [AO3-5344] – We prepared the email that you get when your work is invited to a collection for translation.
• [AO3-7019] – You will now get an informative error message if you try to change your username to the same name as you currently have, instead of it silently doing nothing.
• [AO3-7033] – When you access a skin, the skin title is now part of the browser page title.
• [AO3-7041] – You can now use the accent-color property in site and work skins!
• [AO3-6852] – We removed some old unused scripts for testing gift exchange matching.