In September, we deployed a major upgrade to our HTML sanitizer (which interprets formatting tags) and introduced new features to collections! We also made a variety of fixes across different areas of AO3, including clarifying some confusing language and making new site elements translatable as part of our ongoing internationalization work.

Special thanks and welcome to first-time contributors brooke x, Jamis Gelvin, katieyang, Kylia Miskell, ömer faruk, Samridhi, and Yanpei Wang!

Credits

• Coders: Bilka, Brian Austin, brooke x, Jamis Gelvin, katieyang, Kylia Miskell, Jo Kingswood (Littlelines), ömer faruk, Potpotkettle, Samridhi, sarken, weeklies, Yanpei Wang
• Code reviewers: Bilka, Brian Austin, Hamham6, irrationalpie, redsummernight, sarken, ticking instant, weeklies
• Testers: Allonautilus, ana, Aster, Bilka, Brian Austin, Lute, lydia-theda, megidola, ömer faruk, Pent, Sam Johnsson, Sanity, sarken, Teyris, therealmorticia

Details

0.9.427

On September 5, we deployed some improvements to get our HTML sanitizer up to date for HTML5 and fix a number of tiny but annoying parser-related bugs.

• [AO3-5801] – We changed the sanitizer and parser to use Nokogiri’s newly available native HTML5 features.

• [AO3-3282] – If your summary or notes had formatting followed by blank lines, extra blank lines would appear each time you edited those fields. Now the spacing stays the same, like it’s supposed to.

• [AO3-4599] – We prevented the parser from modifying the formatting inside of <pre> tags, since that defeated the point of marking text as preformatted.

0.9.428

On September 8, we deployed a lot of changes by first-time contributors. If you’re interested in contributing code to AO3, check out our GitHub Contributing Guidelines.

• [AO3-5552] – We removed some unused code as well as the tests for it.
• [AO3-7110] – We fixed an automated test for the database data we use for development, which was failing intermittently.
• [AO3-6921] – We made it so the commas used in series browser page titles are now translatable.
• [AO3-6924] – The browser page title translations for some user-related pages (e.g., the Change Password page) were in the wrong place, so we moved them to the right locale file.
• [AO3-7089] – We cleaned up some duplicate code in our automated tests.
• [AO3-5769] – We updated the phrasing of the text you see when you hover over the “Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings” icon in the work blurb.
• [AO3-6581] – We changed the title on the page that lists works you’ve marked for later to “Marked for Later,” so you don’t get it confused with the overall history page.
• [AO3-6914] – We clarified the error message site admins may see when updating language codes.

0.9.429

On September 15, we did a small release to improve the technical implementation of how certain AO3 pages are accessed.

• [AO3-5953] – Some actions, such as marking a work for later or switching back to the default site skin, could be performed by simply visiting a URL. That isn’t great for a number of reasons, including security, so we’ve updated those actions to use more standard routing.

0.9.430

On September 26, we moved collections to Elasticsearch and added collection tags and better filtering options when browsing collections.

• [AO3-6026] – We added collections to Elasticsearch for better filtering capabilities, made it possible to tag them, and also automatically added tags to existing collections.
• [AO3-3748] – We changed the Collections page to also list subcollections, not just top-level collections.
• [AO3-7122] – We updated the default value of two database columns in the collections table to work better with Elasticsearch.

0.9.432

On September 28, we made two more changes as part of our collections upgrades as well as a few low-impact updates that were easy to get done at the same time.

Additionally, our deploy script accidentally bumped us a release ahead and skipped 0.9.431 so this ended up being released as 0.9.432 instead!

• [AO3-7141] – When we moved collections to Elasticsearch, we inadvertently started sorting items on users’ Collections pages and collections’ Subcollections pages by date. We’ve changed the sorting back to alphabetical order.
• [AO3-6133] – The service we were using to deploy code to our testing environment will be discontinued in 2026, so we switched to using GitHub Actions instead. This switch also brought us some sweet speed improvements and better integration into GitHub and Jira, so it’s a win all around!
• [AO3-7117], [AO3-7118] – Our friendly dependency updater bumped the version of two GitHub actions.
• [AO3-4698] – We added a missing hyphen to the browser page title for the New Challenge Sign-up page.
• [AO3-7123] – We added the ability to filter for collections based on whether they are marked as multifandom.