Welcome to the January-February Newsletter! We hope you had a good holiday season and are having a happy new year! Despite the term break in December, January was busy busy busy with upgrades and releases for all. February is also turning out to be a big month with releases, spotlights, tag wrangling fixes, and header posts galore! Here’s what we’ve been up to:
All the Archive news that’s fit to print!
2012 was full of Archive milestones. In November we passed the 500,000 work mark in 10,000 fandoms. In December, the Archive passed 100,000 users. Check out this post for further milestones that we passed in 2012.
Tag Wrangling shared their process for wrangling Additional Tags and why Additional Tags are not as un-wranglable as one might think.
Mini-Release 0.9.4 went live with a small number of bug fixes. We were also very happy to bring back invitation requests in December. Release 0.9.5 and its redux went off without a hitch.
Fandom Tags are now alphabetized regardless of articles. Wranglers now have the ability to assign a sort name different from a display name, making it easier for us to wrangle and browse fandoms!
We recently posted a Spotlight on Systems Committee. If you’ve ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes to support the technical systems of the Archive, read all about it here.
AD&T are hard at work on a redesign of the site header. Check out our little preview and tell us what you think.
And finally, the Board approved meta hosting on the Archive. Please see this post for details on how this decision affects you, the Archive, and the Archive staffers.
Adventures with Support
Things are keeping busy in the Support world. We’ve got a new co-chair, and the training is letting us solidify all of our training. We’re looking forward to a solid year with proactive communication with both our fellow committees and our users!
Open Doors Update
Open Doors is still working toward an automated import for the 852 Prospect Archive and recently held two open house chats (read more here). In the meantime, we’ve opened up manual importing by inviting all 852 Prospect authors to the Archive. Check out Open Doors’ post for further instructions on manually importing works from that particular Archive.
AD&T Committee business of note
We’re excited about the upcoming year and are looking forward to everything we’ll be sharing with you. On a more serious note, we recently reviewed our emergency plan in the event that our site is compromised and requires an emergency shutdown.
Support Committee business of note
Support will be hosting a Live Chat February 23rd-24th, from 4pm to 4am UTC (What time is that for you?) As Support, our function is to help users with bugs and issues, and pass reports on to our Coders and Systems team, who actually keep the place running. So, if you have questions or comments about AO3 or OTW policies, good or bad, Support Chat isn’t the right place for them. If you do want to talk to someone about policy issues (meta on the Archive, philosophical issues with the tagging system, category change, etc.) we can direct you to the appropriate admin post or contact address so you can leave feedback directly for the people dealing with the area of your concern.
Tag Wrangling Committee business of note
We’ve clarified some major weirdness in our guidelines regarding AU tags and inconsistencies regarding the canonicals for Original Characters in Relationship tags.
Apologies
We’ve had some scheduled downtime during the past couple of weeks. Each time was for two upgrades and some site maintenance to build a better Archive. Apologies to anyone who was inconvenienced by this! We also received reports from some users that Avast was sending out malware warnings when users tried to access the Archive. The cause of this malware warning was external and no cause for alarm.
Questions? Comments?
We welcome feedback from users! If you have questions or comments, feel free to leave them in the comments of the latest news post, or send in a Support request (if you’re reporting a bug, please send that to Support, as they’re super efficient – comments on our news posts sometimes get overlooked).
Mirrored from an original post on AO3 News.