Hello and Happy Holidays from the AO3! This newsletter contains all sorts of fun facts and news from the past two months – read on for updates in the world of the Archive in November and December.
Cool stuff on the Archive
Filters are back and our Advanced Search form has been updated! Look at this post for details on how to use our new filters and Advanced Search form. Release 0.9.2 went live and included more than just tag filters; we were also able to deploy bookmark filtering, a new search form for works and bookmarks, and new index pages for works and bookmarks. Releases 0.9.3 and 0.9.3 Redux also went live and included a lot of bug squashing and fixes as well as the ability to anonymously comment on your own anonymous work.
We’re now issuing 750 user invites per day. Our queue is slowly but steadily decreasing. To those of you still on the waiting list, thank you for your continued patience!
Your Archive needs you!
The Content Policy Committee is working on changes to the AO3’s Terms of Service and would like your feedback on the proposed changes. The content change files are available at the above news post for your consideration. We welcome all feedback!
Bugs we’ve squashed
We’ve been keeping a close eye on performance after the release of the new search engine and filters, and we’re pleased with how it’s holding up: it’s a big improvement over the old system. We quickly located a bug causing tag wrangling changes not to propagate through to works and bookmarks properly, so tag wrangling was disabled while that was being fixed, and it’s up and running again now.
We also tackled a number of collection and challenge-related bugs – 36 of them in Release 0.9.3 alone! Special thanks to Scott in particular for doing a ton of work on those.
What’s up in the world of tags?
There’s been a few changes in the Marvel Avengers fandoms (some of the Archive’s most popular!) To prepare for the coming sequels, the Thor and Captain America movie fandom names have changed, to Thor (Movies) and Captain America (Movies).
Also, following the official material, the main metatag for The Avengers (2012) and the related movies is now Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Note that if you tag for any of the subfandoms (e.g. if you tag your work The Avengers (2012) or Iron Man (Movies) that the work will automatically appear under Marvel Cinematic Universe. You can also tag a work with MCU if you like, but it will filter the exact same way as a work tagged with only the subfandoms.
You may also notice a tag The Avengers – Ambiguous Fandom. This ambiguous tag is necessary due to the existence of two unrelated “Avengers” fandoms, the Marvel superhero team and the British superspy series, and includes all works from both these series. As with MCU, using this tag in conjunction with more specific tags won’t change where your work appears (and tagging with only this tag will make your Avengers movie-verse fic less likely for other users to find.) Generally, to make your works easier to find, tag with the most specific fandom (or fandoms) that apply.
For more information on the wild and wacky world of Marvel Avengers tags, please check out this informative post by one of our brave Avengers wranglers!
Adventures with Support
We’re still keeping up with support tickets, even in spite of the start of holiday absences. In fact, we’re about to hit our 10,000th ticket in our tracking program – that’s just about 3,300 tickets a year! Every ticket sent in with an email address gets an individual response, and even the ones without email are still documented as appropriate with other committees. We’re incredibly proud of our Support teams over the years and all they’ve done for the Archive!
AD&T Committee business of note
Thank you to all the coders, testers, and volunteers who helped us with Release 0.9.2 and 0.9.3! There’s been a ton of work going on behind the scenes, and we’re enormously grateful to everyone who’s been helping out, and to the tag wranglers for their patience while we’ve sorted out some bugs.
We’ve been cautiously optimistic about performance over the last month, and we’ve ordered three new servers that we’re hoping will help us to keep things running smoothly as we head into 2013. That’s enabled us to increase the number of invitations that we send out each day, which is helping to cut down the wait times significantly.
We’re working on one last release for 2012, which will be a small one, focused on bug fixes. There’s already code in the pipeline for the first release of 2013, and we’re looking forward to adding some long-awaited improvements and new features in the new year!
Tag Wrangling Committee business of note
Due to changes in the search engine with the main new filters deploy, tag wrangling was turned off for most of November. With the latest deploy, wrangling is working again and our wranglers have been busy getting all the new tags of the last month in order (our amazing volunteers managed to wrangle over 300 uncategorized fandoms down to less than 5 in a single weekend!)
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. Find related news by viewing our tag cloud.