At the Archive of Our Own, we have lots of opportunities to witness the transformative power of fandom. The Archive is full of the evidence of fannish creativity, with over 152,000 works in 8,219 fandoms at this writing. You can explore the world of the supernatural with works about zombies, vampires, and witches; look into your favourite characters’ souls with works about telepathy or spirit animals; or chill out with works on swimming, board games, or tea. We’re still developing our support for multimedia, but you can already find fanart, fanvids, and filk through the Archive. (Optimus Prime compels us to add there is also Transformers.)
The wonderful energy and creativity of fandom is also expressed in the Archive itself. All those weird and wonderful tags are managed by our awesome team of tag wranglers, who work in the wrangulator to order them all. Our brilliant coders, testers, and designers keep on honing old features and adding new ones, while our dedicated Support team keeps on making sure that users are able to enjoy those features.
With all that energy and change, it’s been a busy 6 months for the AO3! We upgraded the site’s framework to Rails 3 — a massive undertaking which required us to overhaul ALL the code! We introduced CSS styling for works — a long-requested feature — added options to leave “kudos” and share works via HTML c&p or Twitter, introduced video embedding, and made more improvements to challenges and collections. Last but not least, we bought some new servers! (Names to be announced shortly — as voted for by you!)
All of this extreme awesomeness is made possible through the generosity of fans, who donate their time to work on the Archive and their money to pay for our servers, hosting costs, organisation tools, and all the other things we need. The AO3 is funded via our parent, the Organization for Transformative Works — if you can, we invite you to give time, donate, spread the word, or become a member during this month’s membership drive! There is much more awesome to come: we’re working on fanart and multimedia, subscriptions, translations, and much, much more, and we know that there is a whole wonderful fannish world beyond the Archive which may need a home. Give now to help ensure we can continue telling cool stories and transforming the AO3!
Optimus Prime says repost this graphic by copying the text below the image and pasting it into your journal or website!