AO3 Support staffers are the people who receive your tickets through the Support and Feedback form and try to respond as soon as possible to register your feature suggestion, pass your bug report on to our coders, or do their best to help you out with a problem. However, when it comes to explaining how to do things or why something doesn’t seem to be working right, the formal back-and-forth emails of a Support request aren’t always ideal.
So Support will be holding an Open Chat session in our public chat room.
Unlike previous Open Chats, we’re trying a new thing this year. This chat will be focused on the Posting and Editing forms! We’ll have a walkthrough of tricks, methods, and known issues when adding your fannish creation to the Archive. Want some suggestions on how to add comments and notes beyond what the tags field will allow? Have a translation, or remix, or other creation inspired by an existing work? Are you posting to a challenge but never get it to work quite right? Are you wanting to post a work in a different language? Come find out how! (We’ll still have a few staffers around to answer some general questions, too.)
We’ll be available on Sunday, June 7, 16:00 UTC to 18:00 UTC (what time is that in my timezone?). If you can’t make it to this one, keep an eye out for future chat announcements.
If you’re having a problem using the Archive, want help trying something new, or would like an explanation of one of our features, please drop in and talk to us in person!
Some guidelines from Support, just to keep things running smoothly
As Support, our function is to help users with bugs and issues, and pass reports on to our Coders and Systems team, who actually keep the place running. This means that policy questions are way over our capacity. So, if you have questions or comments about AO3 or OTW policies, good or bad, Support Chat isn’t the right place for them. If you do want to talk to someone about policy issues, we can direct you to the appropriate admin post or contact address so you can leave feedback directly for the people dealing with the area of your concern.
Additionally, if a question looks like it might violate a user’s privacy to answer (if it needs an email address or other personal information, for example) we may not be willing to work with it in chat. In those cases, we’ll redirect a user to the Support Form so we can communicate via email.
We’d be happy to help you with any questions, and anything else you’re having trouble doing or would like to try doing with the Archive. And if you miss us and have any questions, you can always send us a ticket!