In June and early July, we updated the AO3 Terms of Service FAQ and made improvements all around prompt memes and gift exchanges. We also improved skin previews and the AO3 admin area, along with a few other small fixes.

Special thanks to the first-time contributors charliewhiskee, Gardin233, gemmie, lynn, Naomi Liu, sagittaerys (Olamilekan Aremu), Smaran Jawalkar, Soaphbar, and varram. Thank you also to notpies for alerting us to a security issue!

Credits

• Coders: Aya Sayadi, Bilka, bre-nana, caitlin, charliewhiskee, Danaël / Rever, David Bilsky/Ironskink, Gardin233, gemmie, KooShnoo, Ling-Yi, Luis Pabon, lydia-theda, lynn, Naomi Liu, nicolacleary, Pablo Monfort (VAIRIX), reader-dev-2026, sagittaerys (Olamilekan Aremu), Sarken, slavalamp, Smaran Jawalkar, Soaphbar
• Code reviewers: Bilka, Brian Austin, james_, lydia-theda, marcus8448, redsummernight, Sarken, slavalamp
• Testers: Bilka, Brian Austin, calamario, choux, Cocoa, Lute, lydia-theda, marcus8448, megidola, ömer-faruk, pk2317, Runt, slavalamp, therealmorticia

Details

0.9.482

Our June 8 deploy was themed around improvements to prompt memes and gift exchanges.

• [AO3-5713] – There was a tag set option that would prevent participants in a challenge from offering or requesting characters outside the tag set. However, this would only apply to the autocomplete suggestions, and not actually prevent someone from entering a tag manually and submitting that sign-up. Now the sign-up is actually checked against the allowed tags!
• [AO3-6084] – We now make sure no input is lost if you try and fail to submit prompts for a prompt challenge with a noncanonical tag. We also greatly improved the error message, so you can fix your prompts and try again!
• [AO3-6876] – Some special characters wouldn’t be displayed correctly in prompt titles; now everything is tidy again.
• [AO3-7182] – If a prompt had fills that were restricted to logged-in AO3 users only, guests could still see the blurb containing information about the work, even if they couldn’t access the work itself. Now everything is hidden from guests, as it should be.
• [AO3-7243] – We prepared three help pop-ups related to creating a work for translation.
• [AO3-7261] – It was previously possible to create a challenge with zero allowed fields for requests or offers, which would indeed make for quite a challenging sign-up process. If you try to do that now, we return an error message to ask for at least one allowed field.
• [AO3-7379] – There were no delimiters in the stats listed in collection blurbs (e.g., the number of works or bookmarks in said collection). You now get more readable numbers such as 11,111 instead of 11111.
• [AO3-7398], [AO3-7399] – The Challenge Sign-ups and Challenge Assignments pages now include your username in the browser page title.
• [AO3-7406] – Moved the gift exchange mailers to a separate file.
• [AO3-7407] – Added an anonymous CSS class to work, series, and bookmark blurbs of currently anonymous works and series.
• [AO3-7494] – Work skins are only meant to apply to the section of the page containing a work, its title, and its notes, but certain combinations of styles sometimes allowed skins to break free of that area. We’ve made some adjustments to keep them contained.

0.9.483

On June 17, we deployed a Terms of Service FAQ update and made some improvements to skin previews as well as pages used by admins.

• [AO3-4274] – If your work is a remix or translation of another work, and that work is deleted, the Notes section will now say, “Inspired by a deleted work.” (You can edit your work to remove the association, if you want.)
• [AO3-6218] – To help troubleshoot problems with challenges or assist in cases of abuse, AO3 admins from our Support and Policy & Abuse committees can now access pages in a collection that are usually only accessible to owners or mods of that collection.
• [AO3-6765] – Made some changes to the message you get when previewing a site skin to make it more helpful!
• [AO3-7397] – You used to be redirected to a random tag page to preview a skin. We’ve now designated a specific page for this preview, since redirecting to a random page can be unreliable.
• [AO3-7366] – Changed which page AO3 admins use to edit work tags and language.
• [AO3-7413] – The browser page title and the page heading for external bookmark creation now match.
• [AO3-7456] – Updated the Terms of Service FAQ. You can view the differences here.
• [AO3-7447] – We improved the wording of the Content Policy notice on the work posting form.
• [AO3-7453], [AO3-7454], [AO3-7450] – Updated the Policy & Abuse Confidentiality Policy link in our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, and added a link to the Fannish Next of Kin FAQ item to the Terms of Service.
• [AO3-7474] – Updated the faraday gem to address a security issue.
• [AO3-7476] – We fixed that text-only bylines sometimes contained raw HTML.
• [AO3-7488] – We no longer submit comments that are already deleted or considered spam to the spamchecker when manually marking comments as spam from the console.
• [AO3-7478] – We made it impossible for admins to enable a language for our future translated interface if we don’t already have some emails available in that language (since translated emails will come first).

0.9.484

The July 6 release included more improvements for AO3 admins, most notably the ability to preview and save drafts of news posts such as this one!

• [AO3-2782] – We now make sure tag wranglers can’t assign themselves non-canonical tags.
• [AO3-4989] – Deleting a bookmark would redirect you to the first page of bookmarks, even when the deleted bookmark was on a different page, or you had applied filters to your bookmark listing. We now make sure you’ll stay right where you are.
• [AO3-5696] – We added another check before we send out subscription emails, which means people who are subscribed to the orphan_account will not receive a notification if a user adds a chapter to a work previously co-created with the orphan account.
• [AO3-6779] – If a Policy & Abuse admin previously corrected the language on a work, that change would be recorded as tag edit in the admin area’s activity logs. Now it is correctly considered a language edit!
• [AO3-7250] – Conversely, an admin’s cancelled or invalid attempt at editing a work’s tags (such as trying to perform an operation that results in an error message) would be logged, even though the work remained unchanged. That’s also fixed now.
• [AO3-6960] – Admins with posting privileges can now preview a news post or save a draft, like it’s long been possible for creative works on the Archive. Yay!
• [AO3-7242] – We prepared four more work creation related help pop-ups for translation.
• [AO3-7421] – We fixed that the CSV export of gift exchange sign-ups could contain unescaped special characters in the sign-up titles.
• [AO3-7493] – In addition to checking an account’s age (i.e. how long ago it was created) to determine how many comments that account can be allowed to leave in quick succession, we now also consider how many comments that user has left previously.
• [AO3-7496] – We updated the net-imap gem to address some security advisories.
• [AO3-7498] – We made sure that one of the dependencies of our automated tests can’t update without our approval.