Yuletide chat reminder

Banner by caitie with 'otw chat' at its center and emoticons and other symbols in word bubbles surrounding it.

Just a reminder that Open Doors will be holding two public chats on Campfire (the online chat platform the OTW uses) for Yuletide participants. The first will be on April 26, 4pm UTC (what time is that in my timezone?)

Anyone who has questions about the process is welcome to join the Open Doors team at those chats, and we’ll do our best to answer you. We would also like to direct Yuletide participants to our announcement post as it has been updated with information about the import of comments. Please read the section beginning with Edited to say as we will NOT be able to add backdated comments to works after the import in May.

For those Yuletide participants who didn’t want to wait for us to import your fic to AO3 for you, Open Doors would like to encourage you to add your works to the Yuletide subcollections they belong to. It’s not required, but it’d be great to keep things together! And it would make our upcoming import of the old Yuletide archive run that much more smoothly. To add multiple fics to a collection at once, here’s how:

  1. While logged into your account, hover over your pseud and select “My Works”.
  2. From that page, click “Edit Works” (to mass edit works).
    Select all the story titles that you want to transfer into a given collection. Click “Edit”.
  3. In the second section of this page is the option to “Add To Collections”. Type in “Yuletide” followed by the year (e.g., “Yuletide 2008”) or “New Year’s Resolution” followed by the year (e.g. “New Year’s Resolution 2011”) and it should be appear in the autofill. Note: Don’t change anything else, or it will overwrite what was originally on the story.)
  4. Click “Update All Works” at the bottom.

For a visual view of the above steps we have a few slides to help.

If you have questions, or want to know how Open Doors can help your archive, shoot us an email through our contact form.

2014-04-25 admin
Event, Open Doors
  1. liviapenn commented: Instead of a gif, if there are going to be visual instructions, could you make it a video (because videos can be paused, so the user can go at their own pace), or at the very least, a series of still screenshots? (Screenshots that show the *entire page*, not just a small segment of the page.) Then the user could go at their own pace. This gif moves *really* fast for an instructional gif-- it's just really hard to parse. And I appreciate that you were probably trying to keep the file size small, but the movement is very jerky, and it makes it hard to figure out whether the page is scrolling or we're on a new page. It really doesn't help me understand the process at all.
    • Claudia Rebaza commented: Thanks for the feedback. Yes, there are definitely limitations with gifs since it's a tradeoff between file size and content, and you have good points about how videos would provide an easier way for viewers to follow along. I have passed this along. There are some other gifs that have been prepared (for different issues) which will be posted in the next few weeks, but we can look into preparing some guidelines for content that considers the length of the tutorial and thus how effective a particular visual aid will be.
      • liviapenn commented: Are there any actual plusses for using looping gifs to give visual instructions, rather than a series of still images? Especially given that many users prefer to avoid rapidly flashing/stuttery gifs and that this can be an accessibility issue? I am just really puzzled by this choice-- I don't see any reason to prioritize using gifs rather than still images. Please reconsider using gifs for instructions in the future.
        • Claudia Rebaza commented: I think that it's likely because of software that people have available to them -- many people are able to create animated gifs whereas having a video program may not be to hand. But you're also right about flashing-type images, we'll keep that in mind.
          • eruthros commented: I would really strongly prefer that you do not use flashy gifs as a substitute for instructional video, both for the reasons Liva noted and because they are an accessibility problem (see the Web Content Accessibility Guide especially point 2.2.2). If you do use them, I would appreciate it if you indicate their existence somewhere in the text, preferably far above the gif itself. This post doesn't do that, so the gif is a surprise when I scroll down. It bothered me when I first read the post.