The Archive of Our Own has had an exciting year. We bought shiny, shiny servers (of our own!) in September 2009, allowing us to move out of closed beta and share the wonderful fruits of our coders’ and testers’ labor with the rest of fandom! Since entering Open Beta on 15 November 2009, we’ve had a dizzying succession of exciting achievements!
To list just a few…
- We’ve introduced tons of awesome features, both big and small: the ability to backdate a work, new options for bookmarking and reccing, skins, mobile downloads, tools for running collections and challenges, and many, many more!
- We saw two successful challenges run as test cases for our collections code – Yuletide Treasure in December 2009 and Remix Redux in March 2010 – and saw many more wonderful challenges and collections set up home on the Archive, including the Final Fantasy fanworks exchange, the House M.D. Big Bang Challenge, and the LGBT fest.
- We celebrated the first birthday of the servers of our own with a party, cake and lots of fannish creativity!
- We helped set up two new committees in the OTW – Tag Wranglers and Support – who joined Accessibility, Design & Technology in managing the day-to-day work on the Archive!
- On 20 August 2010 we hit 100,000 works on the Archive!
- On 10 October 2010 (10/10/10!) we hit 10,000 registered Archive users!
- We add approximately 150 new users per week (and we have more requests that that – we have to add people slowly so the site can cope).
We have so many more exciting things planned, including art and vid hosting, subscriptions, improved challenge code, more options for bookmarking and reccing, private messages, and better commenting features.
All of this cool stuff is made possible by the collective contribution of fandom, which has come together to code, test, run systems, tag wrangle, provide user support, offer legal advice to help protect the fannish mission of the Archive, and support the AO3 financially through donations to the OTW. Our user numbers grow every day, and the servers of our own are already creaking under the weight of all that fannish passion and creativity. Thanks to the support of our members, we’re already able to commit to buying new, more powerful servers (our Systems committee are choosing them RIGHT NOW) – but we need your continuing financial support going forward to keep on extending our infrastructure, and to pay for bandwidth and hosting costs.
Make sure fandom can continue to own our own servers! Donate to the OTW now!