I. OPEN DOORS IMPORTS
Open Doors had a very active December and completed three archive imports, including the long-anticipated Star Trek archive The Kirk/Spock Fanfiction Archive, the Star Wars archive Elusive Lover, and the Chinese-language Prince of Tennis archive SpringFen. Check out the linked collections to read all of the imported works! Also in December, Open Doors announced the import of The 9 Forum, an archive of fanworks for the movie “9”.
II. AT THE AO3
Accessibility, Design & Technology had an eventful two months! It deployed some significant changes to our HTML parser, a ton of gem updates, and an update to Ruby 3.0, plus a few odds and ends. It also worked with Systems to find and fix some things that went wrong following the triple whammy of a Ruby update, a change in the Archive’s SQL software to MariaDB, and a hardware swap. Having three big changes close together made it tricky to pinpoint what was causing the slowness that resulted in issues with user histories, work and bookmark listings, and work stats not updating, but now AD&T has now ordered new hardware and modified the code to be more resilient in case we run into similar slowness in the future—and did it all without losing any data.
The AO3 Support team handled a massive influx of tickets these issues caused, but was glad for the support and patience of our users while we straightened things out. Speaking of increased ticket counts, Support received 18,248 tickets in 2022, compared to 16,162 in 2021. This was a reasonable 13% increase. Surprisingly, it’s only a couple hundred tickets more than 2020! As well, 1,774 of Support’s tickets in 2022 were in a non-English language. We give a hearty hat tip to both our multilingual Support volunteers and to the Translation volunteers who provided support!
Policy & Abuse hit a whopping 2001 tickets in December. It received a few more tickets this past year than expected, but having switched some of its categories over to our wonderful Support volunteers, PAC is now working on tackling what remains.
Meanwhile, in December, Tag Wrangling wrangled more than 380,000 tags across more than 55,000 fandoms—a little over 800 tags per active wrangler!
III. ELSEWHERE AT THE OTW
The Board of Directors held an open meeting on January 7th. Minutes can be accessed on the OTW website. If you’d like to attend future meetings, please feel free to join the official OTW Board Discord server.
Communications celebrated two social media milestones in the past two months. The OTW’s Facebook account passed 2,000 followers, and its Tumblr account passed 20,000 followers. Comms is finalizing preparations for International Fanworks Day (IFD) in February. Stay tuned for more information about how to take part!
Fanlore has also been hard at work preparing for its own IFD Fanlore Challenge, running from February 13-19, and for its themed Femslash February month on Twitter and Tumblr.
In December, Legal joined allies in sending a letter to United States government bodies opposing a treaty that has been proposed by the World Intellectual Property Organization. The treaty would require nations to enact laws that would make some fannish activities, including fan vidding, more difficult. In January, Legal responded to quite a few user queries about law and fandom.
The Board of Directors kicked off the new year with a public meeting, which was held on January 7th, while Finance completed the 2021 audit (to be published on the OTW’s website soon) and updated all the individual USA state filings that required the completed audit. It continues to work on the 2023 budget and the remaining bookkeeping from 2022.
V. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS
From 25 November to 24 January, Volunteers & Recruiting received 136 new requests, and completed 168, leaving us with 38 open requests (including induction and removal tasks listed below).
As of 24 January 2023, the OTW has 930 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below.
New Open Doors Volunteers: Elf and 1 other AO3 Fanzine Scan Hosting Project (FSHP) Volunteer
New Translation Volunteers: Anastasia Rey Reed (Translator)
Departing Elections Volunteers: 1 volunteer
Departing Open Doors Volunteers: 1 volunteer
Departing Support Volunteers: Zoë Renee
Departing Tag Wrangler Volunteers: Anggi, woyo, Glasses (all Tag Wranglers) & 10 other volunteers, 3 Supervisors
Departing Translation Volunteers: Elif Köylü (Translator), Laure (Translation Volunteer Manager) & 4 other volunteers
For more information about the purview of our committees, please access the committee listing on our website.