Along with the increase in donations the OTW received during our April drive, we also got new people in as members of the OTW! As a result, we wanted to provide an update on how you can stay in touch with the OTW, whether it’s to contact us directly or just keep up on news from the OTW at large or its projects.
Official vs. Unofficial Accounts
Many people choose to subscribe to OTW news through either their social media accounts or through feed readers. There are some important differences to these choices, though, which can affect both the news you receive and how you can get in touch with us.
We list all our active accounts on the OTW homepage at transformativeworks.org. However, sometimes fans have set up feeds, or even unofficial accounts, on the same platforms we use. Unofficial accounts sometimes make that status clear and sometimes they don’t, but they generally have someone running them. On the other hand, feeds are like television broadcasts — they are automated, the information only stays up temporarily, and you can’t contact us from those accounts.
Official accounts are individually posted to by the Communications Committee, and we receive comments and questions submitted to the OTW through those accounts. So if you’re in doubt, please check the account you’re following compared to the accounts listed at the link above. If you’re not subscribed to one of those, you are not following an official account.
Contacting Us
If you want to get in touch with us, you can also use our Contact Us page. If you’re not sure who to direct your question to, try Communications, and if we don’t have the answer we can send your message on to the OTW section that can help you.
The OTW can be contacted in all of the following languages: Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish.
Finding Information
Another drawback to feed accounts is that due to the limited time that posts appear on them, they are not searchable. If you would like to find previous news posts from the OTW, you can visit our homepage and use the searchbox in the upper right corner.
Alternately, our OTW Pinboard account provides tagged, searchable bookmarks to all our news releases and posts on OTW News, as well as from Fanhackers and more recent news from AO3. The brief format of the site allows you to easily scan everything under a particular tag, such as all news from a particular project or anything put out by a particular committee.
Access to Our Accounts
We are aware that people are often blocked from accessing our sites, whether it’s a social media account or the OTW website itself. This is one of the reasons why we maintain official accounts in multiple locations.
While for many these restrictions may be due to local blocks from a school or business, China’s firewalls block Facebook, Twitter and Google domains, in favor of homegrown social networks Renren, Weibo, and search engine Baidu. In 2012, Russia accidentally censored all of LiveJournal by blocking LJ’s IP address. Various other countries block one or another social media site or domain such as Turkey and Vietnam. However, sometimes firewalls allow filtering for specific topics and words rather than necessarily blocking entire websites.
If you are unable to follow us at one platform, hopefully another one of our sites will be available to you. We are always examining additional locations for official accounts in order to best reach fans, and you are welcome to send us suggestions. Although current staffing or workloads may prevent us from expanding in the near future, we will keep requests in mind as part of long-term planning.
Promoting us!
We’ve had a few questions recently about promotional graphics and other ways to promote the OTW. You can find those under our “How to help” section on our website. We’d like to review and add to what’s there, so if you have any ideas about content you’d like to have available, particular sizes, etc., let us know!
And don’t forget, you can always share the OTW video as well!