Posts in Newsletter

I. APRIL’S MEMBERSHIP DRIVE April’s Membership Drive ran from April 24-27 and raised $362,171.85 USD across 9,702 people in 87 countries, with 8,035 donors choosing to become OTW members. Thank you so much for your support! This year, the April Drive spotlighted Accessibility, Design, & Technology (AD&T) and their behind-the-scenes work in developing, updating, and maintaining the AO3’s software and infrastructure. If you’re familiar with coding and would like to help improve AO3, contributions from the community are welcome; for details, check out AO3’s Software Contributing Guidelines and other documentation at our GitHub repository. All contributors are credited in AO3’s release notes which detail recent… Read more

I. AO3 IS EXITING OPEN BETA In early April, we announced that AO3 is exiting open beta! AO3 has grown and changed a lot since open beta launched in 2009! We’ve gone from 347 users to over 10 million and from 6,598 works to over 17 million. We’ve also introduced many features in that time, including the tag system and tag wrangling, additional privacy settings that allow creators to restrict their works or comments to logged-in users, downloads for offline access to fanworks, and more. Since AO3’s software has been stable for a long time, this change is mostly cosmetic and doesn’t indicate everything is… Read more

I. INTERNATIONAL FANWORKS DAY On February 15, Communications coordinated many International Fanworks Day (IFD) activities, including a Feedback Fest highlighting fanwork recommendations, an editing challenge in conjunction with Fanlore, and an IFD Discord server with games and chatting. Additionally, Translation helped make IFD materials available in 22 languages. Thank you to everyone who joined us in celebrating! II. ARCHIVE OF OUR OWN In February, we celebrated AO3 reaching 10 million registered users! \o/ Accessibility, Design & Technology (AD&T) focused on some important upgrades and bug fixes, including upgrading to Ruby on Rails 8 and improving the collection revealing process. They also published release notes for… Read more

I. AO3 STATISTICS ROUND-UP 2025 was a busy year for AO3! The site continued to see rising traffic, with Communications publishing an update on AO3 statistics from 2020-2025. In December, Support received 3,589 tickets, totaling to over 40,000 tickets received in 2025, an all-time high. Meanwhile, Policy & Abuse (PAC) received 6,357 tickets in December, totaling approximately 47,500 tickets in 2025. Check out PAC’s pie chart for more details. Pie chart of the approximately 47,500 Policy & Abuse tickets submitted in 2025, divided by type of complaint. These categories reflect the subject of the complaint, and (with the exception of Offensive Content), do not indicate… Read more

I. SPOTLIGHT ON FANLORE In November, Fanlore ran the Fanlore No Fault November challenge: a catch-up event for earlier badges editors missed! The challenge ran from November 16 to 30, with many editors participating and earning badges from previous months. Curious about editing Fanlore? Check out the New Visitor Portal and Tutorial for getting started! II. ARCHIVE OF OUR OWN On November 14, we celebrated AO3’s 16th anniversary! \o/ Accessibility, Design & Technology continued to prepare emails for translation and improved how the download and chapter index menus behave with each other on smaller screens. AO3 Documentation updated the Contacting the Staff FAQ. Open Doors… Read more