AO3 continues to grow and pass new milestones. This year alone, we celebrated having nine million users, one million Mandarin Chinese fanworks, and 15 million fanworks—have you ever wondered how we keep up behind the scenes?

One of the places your generous donations go to is our Systems committee, who have been hard at work upgrading the servers that power AO3’s database and search systems, to keep up with the ever increasing amount of users and activity.

Systems maintains the infrastructure to support the OTW’s projects, as well as internal systems. This includes our three server racks, numerous servers, and networking equipment, which can be seen below. Our all volunteer team regularly monitors our servers and responds to outages as quickly as possible to restore service, in addition to performing routine upgrades and maintenance to ensure the OTW’s projects remain available. They also occasionally publish postmortems and presentations about AO3’s infrastructure on their AO3_Systems AO3 account.

We’ve prepared various donation gifts for this Drive as well! As usual, we have our US$45 sticker set. At the US$75 level, we have this year’s pin (the AO3 logo in disguise as a butterfly!) and a new spinning keychain with the AO3 and OTW logos. This month, we have also replaced our old duffel bag with a water bottle + pin combo.

If you want a gift but don’t want to donate all at once, you can also set up a recurring donation and save towards the gift of your choice. Simply select the gift you prefer on the donation form, and if you choose to not donate for the gift in one sitting, it will automatically get set up as a recurring donation. Those of you in the U.S. might also be able to double your contribution via employer matching: contact your HR department to find out if this is an option for you.

A donation of US$10 or more will also allow you to become a member of the OTW. OTW members have the right to vote for the Board of Directors—the OTW’s governing board. You have until June 30, 2026, to become a member if you would like to vote in next year’s election, which will be held in August of next year.

While we hope that many of you will take this opportunity to donate and join the OTW, we’re grateful for the support of all members of this community, in all its many forms! Whether you create, share, comment on or kudos fanworks on AO3; edit Fanlore; read Transformative Works and Cultures; or spread information from OTW Legal, you all help shape the OTW and its projects every day. We are grateful for your time, energy, and engagement!