Archive of Our Own

The Accessibility, Design and Technology committee oversees technology-related projects within the OTW. Currently we are responsible for designing and building the Archive of Our Own. Our regular meeting updates keep you informed about developments on the AO3!

This was our final meeting of the year: the OTW takes an end-of-year break during which committees dissolve and are reformed, and committee members take a well-earned rest! We've had an action-packed year, so we're all ready for a break (from meetings at least - a lot of our work goes on as usual). We'll resume in January - we don't take on any new volunteers during our hiatus, so if you volunteer between now and then (and we hope you will - as you can see below, there are several areas we're really keen to build up), you'll have to wait a little while to get started.

Meeting highlights!

Fandom landing pad!

AD&T co-chair and senior coder Elz has been working for a while on improvements to browsing on the Archive. One thing she's been working on is a new 'fandom landing pad' so that browsing to a fandom will give you the option to browse to some important areas relating to that fandom. In this meeting we previewed her new design - going to a fandom landing page will give you a list of pairings and relationships in the fandom, and a list of authors and artists who have created work in that fandom, along with some basic information about the canon source. It's not quite ready for primetime yet, but it's looking very nifty!

Issues for Love!

Issues for love are the requests submitted by users via Support. We try to work through a few of these each meeting: we're working on ways of making it easier for people to see what has been suggested and what has been decided about the suggestions, but for now we'll include a round-up of our discussions in our meeting updates. Note that a decision to implement something does not necessarily mean it will be implemented soon - we have many issues to work on and a limited number of coders! If you want to see the full (and lengthy!) list of things logged for coders to work on you can check out our Google Code Issues. If you'd like to adopt an issue, we welcome new coders!

• Request to add a setting to prompt-meme challenges to disallow anonymous prompts. This seemed like a handy extra feature without too much coding complexity, so we have logged it as an issue for a coder to work on.
• Request to add an option to hide 'Share' buttons on works to reclaim screen real estate. It's already possible to disallow use of the share button on your own works, but you still see the button. We sympathise with the desire to reclaim the screen real estate, but we decided that added a user preference to hide the buttons would add too much complexity (the more user preferences there are, the more complicated it becomes for people to figure out what they can set in preferences, so we try to limit the options to things where there is a lot of demand for a setting). Instead, we added some extra code to our buttons so that they can be selected with CSS, so that people can build skins which hide the 'Share' button (or indeed any other button).
• Suggestion for a 'challenge calendar' listing opening and closing dates for challenge sign-ups, and dates for assignments due, works revealed, authors revealed, etc, which can be opted in when a mod creates the challenge. We loved this idea, but it is fairly complex to implement. Our lovely co-chair Amelia has volunteered to put together a design, so this is something we'll introduce in the future - but probably not for a while.
• Request for a way to mark WIPs as abandoned, and a way to offer abandoned WIPs up for 'adoption' so that someone can finish them. We all agreed it would be really nice to have a quick way to flag that a WIP would never be finished, so we've logged that as an issue for a coder to implement. The idea of offering works up for adoption seems like it might have more limited appeal, so we agreed that for now, it would be better to leave this as something which people can simply indicate in the tags they use, if so desired (you can add 'Adopt this story' or indeed any other tag you wish as an additional tag to your work).

Reflecting on Release 0.8.9

As most of you reading this will know, we had a big release of new code at the beginning of November. This release included a lot of exciting new stuff; unfortunately, it didn't go as smoothly as we had hoped. In this meeting we reflected on problematic areas and ways that we can improve in future:

• We combined two big new features: the redesign of our front-end code and the new tag sets code for challenges and collections. We had decided to combine the two because the tag sets needed some front-end work anyway, and at the time we made the decision it made sense to roll the two things into one. However, the tag sets code was time sensitive: because it offers a new system of challenge nominations which significantly reduces the pressure on tag wranglers, we wanted to implement it in time for the big holiday challenges such as Yuletide. This meant that when we combined the two features, we had a lot more stuff to get ready within a set amount of time, which made everything more difficult. When we decided to merge the two, it didn't seem as if this was going to be a problem - but one thing we've learnt is that any deploy can bring unexpected hitches, so in the future if there's a time-sensitive feature we'll be trying to keep that as separate from other code as possible.
• This was a big visual change, which meant that it had an impact on a large number of users: visual bugs tend to be encountered by lots of users, and even if there are no bugs, people still have lots of feedback about visual changes. We were aware of this; however, given the scale of the response to this deploy we realise we weren't prepared enough. We'll be doing more testing of interface changes in future, and exploring ways of beta-testing them with more users.
• Since one thing about visual changes is that lots of people just prefer the design they are used to, one thing we could have improved on was providing a way of going back to the old default design. We tried to provide for this with the One Point Faux option, but it had quite a few problems. So, in future this is something we'll be paying more attention to: if we introduce a big change, we'll try to provide ways of opting out. The good news is that going forward, this will actually be easier, because the new skins system is much more lightweight and it should be easier to provide some backwards compatibility (one reason this was problematic this time is because the underlying code for the old system was less than ideal, so everything had been completely rewritten).
• We didn't have as much support documentation and information as we really needed for this deploy. In particular, we needed much fuller documentation on the new skins features so that people could try them out more easily and our Support team could point to useful information when helping people. There were several factors which led to a lack of documentation: crucially, several of the team who would normally take care of this were dealing with RL issues which limited the amount of time they could spend on it. In order to help avoid problems like this in future, we're building a deploy checklist which includes documentation, to make sure that we've considered whether we need additional documentation regardless of who is available to work on any given deploy. We're also aiming to build up a proper documentation team so that this work is less likely to fall through the cracks: if you're interested in being involved in this team, get in touch with our Volunteers and Recruitment Committee and let them know. We'd love to welcome new people to the team!
• We also needed more documentation on the new features for testers, so that it was clearer what people needed to test and what they should expect it to do. This is an ongoing aim - we're working to improve our documentation across the board. Improving documentation for testers will also help us to address another issue, which was that feedback from testers got a bit scattered - having clear docs to start with would have helped us make it clearer what feedback needed to go where. Again, we're working on building up our testing procedures generally - if you're interested in getting involved with testing, let us know!

While the problems we had with this deploy did highlight a number of areas where we need to work to improve, it's not all doom and gloom! There were also a number of things that went right with this deploy - we were able to fix critical bugs within 48 hours of the deploy, the Support team did a wonderful job keeping up with the many Support requests, and there was a huge amount of awesome code in the deploy itself. One reason the site is still in beta is that we're still learning the best processes for development (as well as because our code is new and rapidly changing): in the last four years we've gone from being a tiny group working on coding a 'closed' site (i.e. for the first two years we were just writing the code and testing, we didn't have any real users) to being a much larger group catering for a site of over 28800 users! So, we're still figuring things out - objects may still shift in transit! We're pleased that we've been able to keep the site up and running, and everything largely functional, even though we've had the odd bump along the way. Thanks to everyone who has worked hard to make this true!

Next deploy

We're hoping to get one last deploy in before the end of 2011! It will include some updates to our HTML parser, some improvements to our static pages for collections and challenges, and Atom feeds for fandom tags! (YEAY!)

News from our sub-committees

• Coders have been working on polishing off the issues to go in the next deploy. We're particularly excited about the forthcoming addition of Atom feeds for fandom tags - having tested this out for a good while now on the F/F tag, we think we can implement feeds without too much additional strain on the servers, and since this is a very popular request we're excited about launching it!
• Testers have been testing the issues for next deploy, and discussing how they'd like to see the subcommittee develop next year. There have been some great discussions on what worked and what didn't this year, how we can build a stronger testing community, and how we can support our testers.

News from our sister committees

• Support have continued to work amazingly hard keeping up with a high number of tickets. Looking forward, they're also thinking about our documentation needs and places we need more information for users.
• Tag wranglers have been discussing needs for next year with AD&T - the two committees will be meeting in the new term to talk over technical needs for tag wrangling. They've also been surveying all tag wrangling volunteers about their experiences this year, with a view to figuring out what works well and what can be improved on.

If there are things you'd like to do or say, please share them in comments, via the AO3 support and feedback form, by volunteering (we won't be taking on new volunteers until the new term, but you can get in touch now to let us know you're interested), or in whatever medium you feel comfortable with. Everyone is welcome to this party!

This meeting round-up by Lucy

The Accessibility, Design and Technology committee oversees technology-related projects within the OTW. Currently we are responsible for designing and building the Archive of Our Own. Our regular meeting updates keep you informed about developments on the AO3!

AD&T and our associated committees and subcommittees have been very busy recently working towards our latest deploy and then working on issues arising from that. This one didn't go as smoothly as we had hoped (understatement!); we knew that there would be bugs revealed by practical use that didn't appear in testing, though there were more than we had anticipated and we have been working hard to fix the immediate issues. We're happy to say that we were able to fix the most pressing problems within 48 hours; a week on from the deploy we've been able to address quite a few more, so those fixes will be deployed soon. We're really grateful to everyone who worked hard on this deploy and on addressing the issues subsequent to it. We are planning to do a thorough review of the deploy and think about the lessons learned and ways we can improve. This week, however, we focused on working through some outstanding business and outlining the tasks we need to complete before the end of the year.

Meeting highlights!

Goals for the rest of the year

We're drawing close to the end of the 2011 term, so we started to think about what our priorities are for the rest of this year. On December 16th all the OTW committees officially dissolve and we take a break before reforming in January (although in practice many members of AD&T tend to do quite a bit of work during the hiatus, heh). So, we talked about a few things we'd like to get done before then:

• Coding! Several people have code in-progress which they'd like to do some serious work on and hopefully finish by the end of the year. Site navigation, bookmarks improvements and a refactoring of our works code (important for tons of other improvements) are high on this list!
• Revising our roadmap. We have a longterm plan for what features we'd like to implement on the Archive and when. However, we don't always implement things in exactly the order they are in on the roadmap: we have to be flexible and adapt according to a range of things including the pressing needs of the Archive at a given time, the coding expertise available, the level of difficulty involved in a specific project (this is not always as anticipated), and a bunch of other things. We also add new things to out to-do list based on feedback from other fans. So, we have to review our roadmap regularly to ensure it reflects our capabilities at any given time: right now it's out of date, so we'd like to get it updated to help shape plans for the coming year.
• Completing our archive import code and rescuing some at-risk archives! Coder Naomi is currently putting the final touches to the code which will allow us to rescue archives which are no longer able to exist independently. Our immediate priority is the Smallville Slash Archive, which was hosted by the late, great Minotaur: several fans have worked hard to preserve this bit of fannish history, but it can't hold out much longer, so we want to help them out by the end of the year. We talked about the various things we need to do to make that a reality - stay posted for more news on this soon.
• Reviewing our testing procedures: One area we'd like to improve and develop more support is in our testing team, where a very small number of people do very dedicated work. Our testing lead Kylie will be hosting a meeting for current testers to think about what works well and what can be improved, to make sure they can continue to work well into the future.
• Exploring our tag wrangling options. The Tag Wrangling Committee and the big team of wranglers they manage do an amazing job at keeping the many, many user-generated tags on the Archive in order. However, we're growing at a massive rate and their job has become significantly bigger over a very short space of time. So, we want to talk to the TW Committee now to see if there are technical improvements that could make their lives easier, if the current system is still right for us, and whether there is anything else to think about from a tech point-of-view.

Issues for love!

As part of our recent drive to address features requests and feedback via support more quickly, we had a big drive in this meeting to burn through some of the 'issues for love' which are awaiting committee discussion before they can move on to the next step. A few of the things we discussed:

• Improving bookmarks: We get lots of support requests asking for more sorting and filtering of bookmarks, and our Support team wanted to know how our plans on this were progressing. We're happy to say this is being actively worked on and we hope to have it out by the beginning of next year.
• Donate to the Archive: We also get quite a few Support requests asking how to donate time or money to the Archive. We've long been meaning to make this much clearer on the site itself, and we're happy to say that the code for a page with this information has now been submitted by our new intern, Firewolf. If you're wondering in the meantime, both these things are handled via our parent Organization for Transformative Works: get in touch with our Volunteers and Recruitment Committee if you're interested in helping out with the Archive, or make a donation to the OTW to help fund the site. Since the committee term for this year is coming to an end and we'll be taking a break, we won't be welcoming any new people to our teams until we reconvene in January, but we still welcome expressions of interest now!
• Adding more than one related work: A couple of users had contacted Support to say they had works inspired by more than one other work and couldn't figure out how to show this. It is actually possible to add more than one related work - however, due to an oversight you have to add one, post the work, and then edit the second one in. This is clearly not very intuitive, so we're fixing it - and in the meantime we're adding some help text so people can find the workaround while we look at the more complex bit of the code.

Next deploy

The next deploy is scheduled for some time in the next week (depending on the availability of our team, several of whom have holiday celebrations this week). It will include a fix for the rich text editor (currently completely broken for some people), some fixes for oddities in skins, and a fix for index pages on subcollections (currently not showing up!).

News from our sub-committees

• Coders worked crazy hard to get our last deploy up and running, and then to fix some bugs arising afterwards. They did an awesome job of coming up with quick solutions to some of the bugs that showed up once we were on the real Archive - thanks to everyone for their hard work! More generally, they have been focusing on getting lots more projects out of the door before the end of the year. They are cooking up some exciting stuff, including navigation improvements and importing, so we're looking forward to having these see the light of day.
• Testers have been super active lately! They tested the latest deploy in all sorts of situations and configurations, and then did more urgent testing to help fix the things that slipped through the cracks. The testing team is small and they do amazing work - thanks lovely people!

News from our sister committees

• Support have also been working very, very hard dealing with all the tickets arising from our recent deploy. Every new deploy produces an uptick in tickets, because new code inevitably means some new bugs (this is why whenever big companies release a new OS, it's usually followed shortly after by a bunch of updates!). This deploy produced more tickets than usual - a lot more! - but Support have been doing a sterling job keeping up. If you do find they are a little slower than usual, then rest assured they will get to you as soon as possible.
• Tag wranglers have been awesome helping Support deal with tag-related tickets. The Tag Wrangling Committee gave AD&T some initial feedback on where tag wrangling stands at the moment, pending a meeting when we'll talk in more detail about tech needs for wrangling.

If there are things you'd like to do or say, please share them in comments, via the AO3 support and feedback form, by volunteering, or in whatever medium you feel comfortable with. Everyone is welcome to this party!

This meeting round-up by Lucy.

The Accessibility, Design and Technology committee oversees technology-related projects within the OTW. Currently we are responsible for designing and building the Archive of Our Own. Our regular meeting updates keep you informed about developments on the AO3!

This is a busy time for AD&T, because we're coming closer to our big deploy! We've been working on some major changes and they are almost ready to go onto the main Archive - this means lots of testing and bugfixing and general activity!

OTW October Drive!

Everyone has been working so hard that this already feels like a long time in the past, but we can't post without mentioning the great success of the OTW October Membership Drive! It was the most successful drive ever, raising a whopping US$21,456! This money will help to support the Archive as it grows, along with the rest of the OTW's projects. We're totally awed at the generosity of fandom (you can read more about the details of the drive at DevMem's October Drive Wrap-up.) We'd also like to give a big shout-out to Megan and the rest of the DevMem team, who worked really hard to make this drive the success it was. Kudos to everyone involved!

Meeting highlights!

Site redesign

We will soon be rolling out a redesign for the site. Visually, it won't be changing dramatically, but the front-end code underneath is changing a lot. It's now more flexible, easier to understand, and - crucially - more accessible. This has been a big job, but we think it will make the Archive much more usable and maintainable going forward.

Skins changes!

The overhaul of the site CSS and HTML has allowed us to make some major changes to our skins features. When we launched skins, users were super happy - but we know that they were not quite as flexible as you might like. With the new site CSS, you will no longer have to use the dreaded !important all the time. Even cooler, the new design allows you to have multilayer skins, so that you can combine several skins to get the site exactly how you want it. Most importantly, this means that if we change the site design again in future, you can make the old design a 'parent' for the skin you're using so that it doesn't break (similar to the way you can use S1 and S2 styles on Livejournal.)

The only downside of the new skins system is that your existing skins may break - we're doing our best to make sure this doesn't happen, but as there are a lot of user-designed skins we can't be 100% certain. We're currently testing the new system and figuring out exactly what the implications are for existing skins - we'll keep you posted on what to expect and how best you can prepare for the change.

Our Feature Requests process

We spent some time discussing our process for dealing with feature requests from users. Our lovely Support team receive lots of requests for new features or enhancements from users, and until recently these were logged on our internal wiki to await review by AD&T, who decide whether we can make a change and how it fits into our overall plans for the Archive. However, things were not getting off that page and onto the AD&T agenda as fast as we'd like, so we've been looking for a new process for a while now. Support have come up with a new proposed process which will involve putting new requests directly onto the AD&T agenda, so we don't overlook anything and deal with it more swiftly. Anything AD&T approve will be put into the pool for coders to work on; we'll also be keeping a clearer list of things which we decide we won't implement, with the reasons why. We're hoping this will help us be much more efficient and more responsive to users (it will certainly make Support's life a whole lot easier!). We're also thinking about ways of making the whole feature request process more visible to users, so you can see a bit more of the decision-making that goes into building the Archive.

Next deploy

The next deploy is scheduled for as soon as we can get it all working and tested. It includes some big changes, including the new site design, new skins features, tag sets for challenges, and much more - this is awesome but it means we want to be EXTRA sure we have picked up any problems (although no doubt some will sneak through the net).

News from our sub-committees

Coders

Coders are working away like busy busy bees, fixing things and writing new code. Rebecca ran some awesome training on automated testing tool RSpec, which will help us write some nice speedy tests so we don't fall asleep while we're waiting for tests to run - thanks, Rebecca! We are working on building up more and more coder training sessions, to share our skills and help people develop.

Testers

Testers are also busy, getting the new code tested and making sure it is all up-to-scratch. They work quietly in the background, but they are all absolutely awesome and without their hard work the Archive couldn't exist - thanks, testers! Longtime tester hill has also been working on automated testing using Watir - this replicates testing in different browsers, cutting down on the amount of manual testing needed and thus saving the testing team to work on the things that really need the human touch. Thanks, hill! We always welcome volunteers, and our awesome testers are particularly in need of backup - if you're interested in joining the team, get in touch via Volunteers and Recruiting.

News from our sister committees

Support

The Support team have maintained their great work keeping up with tickets - right now there is not one single unassigned ticket! We're pleased to welcome Anna and arithilim to the team - it's great to see them already getting stuck in with tickets! We'd also like to give a big shout-out to Yshyn, who has been doing awesome work developing Support's documentation and building up a knowledge base, and to Sam, who has ventured into the thorny wilds of the old Feature Requests page to carve out overlooked ideas!

If you're interested in what Support do, check out the recent Spotlight on Support - and remember, Support are always happy to answer your questions on all aspects of the Archive - just get in touch via the Support & Feedback form.

Tag wrangling

The Tag Wrangling Committee ran a very successful Open House in which we talked a bit about how wrangling works and walked through some wrangling. If you missed it, a transcript should be up on the OTW website soon! We are planning more sessions like this in future \0/ - keep an eye out for future news posts.

Wranglers also provided information for a number of support requests. In response to one of them, we have added the metatag Anthropomorphism above Anthropomorfic, with them both being canonicals (canonicals can be used to filter search results). This lets users who consider their works part of the “-fic” tradition to use this tag, while encouraging works of different types of media. We've left the subtags of Anthropomorfic as they are for the moment, with the exception of Fandom (Anthropomorfic)- since some of the works under this tag were not related to anthromorphism, but rather inspired by fandom itself, Fandom – Fandom was canonized as well under Other Media, and Fandom (Anthropomorfic) was subtagged under it as well as Anthropomorphism. We’ll be keeping an eye on fandom usage and adapt if necessary. If you’ve got further input to this, or other wrangling issues, please let us know by filing a Support request or tweeting us @ao3_wranglers.

Finally, we're pleased to welcome lots of new wranglers, including welfycat, Niko, Sossity, melodiousb, Pax, foxinthestars and Rodo! If you're interested in wrangling, check out the list of fandoms without wranglers - the Marvel Universe is particularly in need of love right now, and could use several co-wranglers who can work together on the various different parts! Please note that wrangler signup will close for the year on 1st November, so visit the volunteers page now to join the team!

If there are things you'd like to do or say, please share them in comments, via the AO3 support and feedback form, by volunteering, or in whatever medium you feel comfortable with. Everyone is welcome to this party!

This meeting round-up by Lucy.

The Accessibility, Design and Technology committee oversees technology-related projects within the OTW. Currently we are responsible for designing and building the Archive of Our Own. Our regular meeting updates keep you informed about developments on the AO3!

This was a nice busy meeting - 11 of our 14 staffers were able to attend! Managing different timezones and meeting times, as well as other commitments, means that it can be challenging for everyone to attend every meeting, so it's nice when lots of us make it (although some of us were off celebrating birthdays *looks about shiftily*).

Meeting highlights!

Improving our code commits and deploy process

This is an important subject to us, although one that isn't immediately apparent to our users! When a coder writes some new code, they 'push' it to our code repository and then submit a 'pull request' to ask for it to be included in the main project. Another coder then looks at the code and (if they don't spot any problems) merges it into the main project; when we have a few changes to that, we put all the code on our Test archive for testers to work on. Ideally, this whole process should be pretty quick - it's nice for coders to have their code accepted quickly (or sent back for changes) and it's nice for users if we get new code tested quickly and thus out onto the live site!

Right now, this process isn't as fast as we'd like it to be. Unfortunately, our automated tests currently take a significant amount of time to run, and that causes a bit of a chain reaction: coders run the tests as they work, run all the tests before they push their code out, run all the tests before they approve somebody else's code, and have a job set up on our development server to run all the tests every day and email the whole team with any failures. While we work on making the tests faster, we're hoping to do some reshuffling, where we reduce some of the duplication and the time required to merge in code, while doing more manual review. We'll be aiming to get code merged in and out to our testers on a quicker and more regular basis, so that ultimately users will have faster access to fixes and new features.

Mentoring

Ana and Jenny have been working on some ideas for improving mentoring for coders. We have lots of informal mentoring - one of the great things about coding with the OTW is that people on the project are so generous with their time, and are happy to answer questions and support new people. However, sometimes people feel awkward about asking for help at busy times, or they want some more intensive one-to-one mentoring to help work out a big project or get over a specific learning 'hump'. It can be challenging for us to provide this kind of mentoring, because we have such a small number of developers, all of whom are volunteers and many of whom are also learning this stuff as they go! The new plans are designed to make it a bit easier, and to make people more comfortable about asking for a specific mentor if that's what suits their style.

Front-end changes

We're continuing to work on changes to the HTML and CSS of the site. lim has been radically reworking the CSS to make it more flexible and much much easier to skin. Meanwhile, we have been working through front-end issues logged in our Google code issues project to identify old issues which still need attention, and close the ones which are now obsolete. Thanks to everyone who has been working on this!

Latest deploy

We deployed Release 0.8.8 this weekend, which included performance fixes, lots of JavaScript changes, and a fix for the annoying '500 error on download' issue. You can see the full list of changes in our release notes.

As most of you will have noticed, this deploy did not go as smoothly as we'd have liked! One of the problems with performance enhancements in particular is that they are very hard to test, since there's no way of reproducing the exact conditions of the live site. So, we were alarmed when after our big deploy (full of performance enhancements) the load on the site went UP instead of down. A whole lot of investigation and work later, our wonderful Systems team were able to get everything under control. The site went up and down quite a few times while all this work was going on, but the good news is that the server load is now lower than it has been for the past six months! The site is running correspondingly faster. We have a list of additional changes to make - one of the useful side-effects of the problems was that they highlighted some things we could improve - but we're really happy to see the 502s banished at last! A million thanks to Sidra and james_ who did a LOT of work to fix everything!

News from our sub-committees

• Coders did lots of last-minute work to get everything ready for the deploy, then the senior coders and Systems staff worked like CHAMPIONS to resolve the issues that showed up during the deploy.
• Testers also worked like champions getting this deploy ready for primetime. Jenn, Kylie, Seph, Tai, Weimar, xparrotx and Zebra, you all deserve a special shout-out after the hard work you put into sorting out this monster deploy!

News from our sister committees

• Support continue to keep up with tickets after their amazing work overcoming the backlog. They are happy to answer all kinds of questions about the Archive, whether you think you've found a bug or you just want clarification on something - please don't feel shy about asking if there's something you'd like to know!
• Tag wranglers will be holding an open house on Saturday 15th of October at 22:00 UTC. This will be a drop in session where you can find out about volunteering as a wrangler, ask about tags, help out with fandoms we don’t have wranglers for yet, or just have a chat about what we do. It will be held in the OTW Public Discussion Room - if you've ever been curious, drop by and find out more!

If there are things you'd like to do or say, please share them in comments, via the AO3 support and feedback form, by volunteering, or in whatever medium you feel comfortable with. Everyone is welcome to this party!

This meeting round-up by Lucy.

The Accessibility, Design and Technology committee oversees technology-related projects within the OTW. Currently we are responsible for designing and building the Archive of Our Own. Our regular meeting updates keep you informed about developments on the AO3!

It's been noses to the grindstone for AD&T since our last meeting, with staffers working hard on the forthcoming deploy and on their own personal responsibilities (alas for the necessity of working for a living).

Archive downtime and performance issues

We had a period of downtime on the AO3 on September 18th between roughly 1pm-3pm UTC, and another one on September 20th between about 10am-12 noon UTC. The issues originated in two different servers. We weren't able to identify the cause of the first problem, but after that outage our Systems team installed some tools which are helping us identify a solution for the second outage.

The outage on 18th September did cause a few other issues; most noticeably for users, it caused a temporary glitch with notification emails which resulted in some people receiving kudos notifications for other people's works. This was a very short-term issue and should only have affected a handful of people - apologies for the confusion!

More generally, we are struggling with performance at the moment - we know that people are seeing a lot of 502 errors. We have some improvements coming in the next deploy, but there is one issue that we're finding difficult to pin down, so we're not sure yet whether this deploy will banish the 502s altogether! Thank you for your patience while we figure things out (and if you're an experienced systems admin with spare time on your hands, then do consider volunteering with us!).

Don't forget, you can get the latest status updates from our Twitter @AO3_Status, which is mirrored on Dreamwidth and Livejournal.

Beat the 1000 limit - how to browse and search on the AO3!

One of the parts of the Archive where we'd like to make some major improvements is search and browse. In particular, we'd love to come up with a solution that would allow us to remove the 1000 limit on search results, which we put in to avoid exploding the servers. We're working on this, but it's tricky! In the meantime, the lovely X-parrot, who serves on the Tag Wrangling Committee and is tag wrangling liaison with AD&T, has written a fantastic tutorial on Browsing & Reading on the AO3 which includes loads of brilliant tips on how to find the works you want.

Meeting highlights!

Deploy planning

We spent much of the meeting discussing issues relating to our forthcoming deploy, which we're keen to have on the Archive as soon as possible. It will include the much-needed performance improvements and the new tag sets for challenge nominations, among a lot of other nommy stuff. We're currently trying to ensure that we've tested everything thoroughly enough - we have lots of JavaScript improvements, but as different browsers react slightly differently to JavaScript we need to be extra-careful that we've tested thoroughly. We're particularly in need of testers who can test in Internet Explorer - if you think you might be interested then do volunteer!

Open Video conference

Our co-chairs Elz and Amelia attended the Open Video conference in NYC, where they picked up lots of tips about tools that might be useful to us. Popcorn.js looks particularly exciting - it's a tool for synchronizing html5 video with actions elsewhere on a webpage, with JavaScript and CSS. Full of nifty potential, even if we don't have an immediate use for it on the Archive!

Next deploy

The next deploy is scheduled for as soon as we can complete the testing we need to do! It will include lots of exciting things, but right now we're most excited about the performance improvements!

News from our sub-committees

• Coders are helping out with some testing and fixing bugs which come up in the process. Coder astolat is working hard to get the new code for tag sets finished, so that it can be used for the Dark Agenda challenge, whose request inspired this feature in the first place!
• Testers are working really hard on getting the new code ready for deploy. They are few in number but extremely awesome - thanks, testers!

News from our sister committees

• Support EXCELLED themselves in their ticket party, dealing with ALL THE TICKETS. The number of unassigned tickets went from 99 to 0 in 24 hours! The backlog of old tickets had been delaying response times for a while now, so we're thrilled to be all caught up and able to deal with tickets in a more timely fashion. Major kudos to the Support team!
• Tag wranglers are currently focusing on small fandoms in need of wranglers - very small fandoms may only need a small amount of wrangling work and are easy for new volunteers to get up to speed with. Some of the small fandoms without wranglers include Bái Fà Mó Nǚ Zhuàn | Bride with White Hair (1993), Never Gonna Give You Up (Music Video), Alarm für Cobra 11, and Hotel New Hampshire - John Irving, which have just one work each on the Archive! And of course, Tag Wrangling Committee member X-Parrot wrote the fab tutorial on Browsing & Reading on the AO3 \o/.

If there are things you'd like to do or say, please share them in comments, via the AO3 support and feedback form, by volunteering, or in whatever medium you feel comfortable with. Everyone is welcome to this party!

This meeting round-up by Zooey.

The Accessibility, Design and Technology committee oversees technology-related projects within the OTW. Currently we are responsible for designing and building the Archive of Our Own. Our regular meeting updates keep you informed about developments on the AO3!

This meeting was the last on the current timetable. We've been alternating between two times on a Saturday and Sunday, but as new members join the committee and the schedules of the existing members change, we have to review from time-to-time, and we're switching to some new slots that suit our current membership better. With committee members from Argentina, Germany, New Zealand, Romania, the UK and the USA, it can be tricky to find a time that suits everyone! Kudos to the members who stay up insanely late or get up super early in order to make the meetings!

Meeting highlights

Collections and Challenges

Our taskforce met up to discuss the ongoing development of collections and challenges. Coder astolat is almost finished with the new tag sets functionality, which will allow users to create sets of tags for use in challenges - this will mean that nominations for multifandom challenges can take place on the Archive. Once this work is done we'll be reviewing the collections and challenges code to make it faster, prettier and simpler. We already have some major functionality - gift exchanges and prompt memes - but we want to refactor the code so it works better and make it easier for us to add other challenge types in the future (Big Bangs are definitely on our to-do list)!

FAQ improvements

The Archive FAQ is long and detailed - but it's not very easy to find what you want in it! We're planning some improvements to go along with our new Support Board so that our users can get the information they need.

CSS revamp

Front-end coder lim is currently working on a massive overhaul of the way CSS works on the site. The new structure will make it much easier for people to write skins (skins creators, you'll be able to bid a not-so-fond farewell to all those !importants). We're planning some very intensive testing to be sure the new design works in most browsers.

JavaScript revamp and testing

Our awesome coder Enigel has worked hard replacing the JavaScript library Prototype with JQuery. This should make our JavaScript less buggy and will help make it easier to design more accessible JavaScript which degrades nicely for people who don't use it. Now her work is done, we're faced with the massive job of testing it all. The changes affect most areas of the site, so our intrepid testing team have a big job on their hands!

Open Video Conference

AD&T chairs Amelia and Elz will be attending the Open Video Conference in New York this coming weekend. They're hoping to pick up some ideas for how we might progress with our plans for hosting videos on the AO3 - this functionality is still some way off, but we're really excited about the possibilties.

Fanart is coming!

In preparation for hosting fanart on our servers, our Content Policy team are revising our Terms of Service and FAQ to cover images. They are currently inviting feedback on the draft policy - our aim is to make our Terms of Service as clear and fan-friendly as possible, so please do raise any questions or concerns.

Technical preparations for fanart are also continuing. Our plans for a revamped 'post new work' form include more features for multimedia, and we'll be introducing ways of tagging different media so they can be easily filtered for.

Site performance and the invitations queue

The number of people waiting for an invitation now stands at over a thousand - we seem to have arrived! Many users will have noticed a corresponding increase in site slowness, especially at peak times when a large number of our 21793 users are trying to use the site all at once! The good news is that we have some performance enhancements in our forthcoming deploy which should help ease the site slowdowns so that you no longer run into the sad 502 page. The bad news is that the high demand means that we still need to manage the number of users signing up to the site at any given time, so we'll continue to use the invitations system for sign-up for the forseeable future. We're sorry that we can't give excited fans accounts immediately, but everyone who requests an account is given one. If you have added your email address to our invitations queue you can check that page to see when your invitation will arrive - if the date passes with no invitation, please get in touch with our Support team and let them know, as sometimes they do get caught in spam filters.

Tag tutorial

Ever wondered about how tags work on the Archive, or what the best way is to tag your work? Our awesome Tag Wrangling Committee have put together a Tags Tutorial explaining how everything works and what goes on behind the scenes! Thanks to the wrangling volunteers who gave feedback on the draft tutorial (and for all their hard work wrangling). If you have a specific question or comment about tags, you can contact the Tag Wrangling Committee directly via Twitter @ao3_wranglers or send a message via our Support team.

Next deploy

We're working hard to get the next deploy out as soon as possible. This deploy is a big one, and needs some heavy duty testing - because we've changed the JavaScript across the site, we need to do a full regression test to check everything is still working as it should. As soon as we're sure nothing is broken, we'll be putting the new code on the site - this deploy includes important performance enhancements as well as lots of other lovely stuff, so we're keen to get it out in the world as soon as possible!

News from our sub-committees

• Coders are continuing to tackle our issues list and working hard fixing bugs identified in the new code.
• Testers are working hard on the regression test for the new deploy - testing ALL the things. We always need new testers, so if you're someone who likes banging on the site and finding out how things work, please do get in touch with our Volunteers Committee and let them know you're interesed in testing. No special skills required, just a spirit of enquiry and a certain tenacity!

News from our sister committees

• Support welcomed two more new staffers to the team - Oaktree and lionpyh! They are planning a ticket party later in the week to tackle ALL the tickets (or at least quite a few of them!). They've also been updating the FAQs - thanks to Cybel for adding the new Kudos FAQ.
• Tag Wranglers are reviewing their membership to make sure that everyone on the list of volunteers still wants to wrangle. New volunteers are always welcome - check out the list of fandoms currently in need of a wrangler to see if there is an area you could help. The Tag Wrangling Committee has also recently revised some tag-related FAQs, and they have just posted their brand new Tag Tutorial! \o/

If there are things you'd like to do or say, please share them in comments, via the AO3 support and feedback form, by volunteering, or in whatever medium you feel comfortable with. Everyone is welcome to this party!

This meeting round-up by Zooey.

This was a well-attended meeting - after a few meetings where real life took various members of the committee away, most of us were back together this week.

Meeting highlights!

Upcoming design changes

We've got various sections of the site queued up for design work - navigation, the home page, fandom landing pages and news posts, among others. Some of these have been on the back burner for a while, but we're making progress and some of the designs are almost ready for the committee to review. We're pretty excited about the new designs, which should make the site a lot more usable as well as prettier!

Challenges and Collections

Our Collections and Challenges task force recently met up to work on plans to improve all the stuff we learnt from Yuletide 2009, Remix, Yuletide 2010, Final Fantasy Exchange and other challenges. Maybe this year will finally be the year there won't be any panic in the run-up to a big challenge? (We can dream!) Work on tag sets for challenges is progressing - this will make it possible to run nominations for multifandom challenges on the Archive.

Site security

Our security task force gained a new member and is reviewing ways of improving site security. One area where we're planning improvements is site login - we've asked our Systems team to get us an https certificate so we can introduce https secure logins.

Coding Open House!

Have you ever fancied coding for the OTW or wondered what it is we do? AD&T member Jenny will be hosting a public chat on coding, introducing Ruby on Rails and the setup for our coders. All are welcome! The chat will be held on Saturday, 27 August at 04:00 UTC (what time is it in my timezone?) in OTW's public chatroom on Campfire. The chatroom can be accessed at https://fanarchive.campfirenow.com/e79cc.

Next deploy

We're working towards another deploy, which will take place as soon as we can get it ready. It will include more accessible Javascript (yay for jQuery) and several performance improvements that should reduce the number of 502 errors, as well as the usual list of minor bug-fixes.

News from our sub-committees

• Coders have been working like crazy! Enigel has done awesome work updating all the JavaScript on the site and replacing uses of the Prototype library with another library, JQuery. This work will help fix some niggling problems, and lays the foundations for some accessibility improvements - soon, users without JavaScript will be able to delete!
• Testers: There's tons to test in this deploy - particular thanks to Kylie for organising parties, and X-Parrot for testing so much.

News from our sister committees

• Support are still working hard at keeping up with tickets, and providing feedback on the new Support Board as coder Sidra works on it. They are pleased to welcome new staffer Yshyn to the team!
• Tag Wranglers keep a-wrangling! They are always pleased to welcome new wranglers - fandoms currently in need of love include Weiß Kreuz, Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter – Laurell K. Hamilton and Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger.

If there are things you'd like to do or say, please share them in comments, via the AO3 support and feedback form, by volunteering, or in whatever medium you feel comfortable with. Everyone is welcome to this party!

This meeting round-up by Jenny S-T & Zooey

AD&T had a quiet meeting, as quite a few of our members were off on holiday (yeay!) or dealing with various other commitments. This meant that we made it through our agenda in record time, i.e. within the two hours actually scheduled for the meeting. (This is probably only exciting to us, but take our word for it it's a red letter day.)

Meeting highlights!

Site expansion - hello to our new members!

We've seen another increase in new members recently - welcome to all our new members! We know that the recent DDoS attacks on Livejournal have made many fans eager to back up their fanworks with us (as well as bringing lots and lots of readers!), and we're very glad that we're able to provide fans of all varieties a home! We like to think that groovy site features such as downloads and reading history have also played their part in increasing our popularity - our coding team is constantly working on site improvements.

Performance improvements

One of the key areas our coding team is focusing on at the moment is site performance. As the site expands and we welcome more and more users, optimum code performance becomes ever more important. You may have noticed some site slowdowns and occasional 502 errors recently; in addition to tweaking our server setup as particular issues arose, our coders have been working on longer-term improvements. The forthcoming deploy will include a number of things designed to improve site performance and reduce the number of 502s you encounter.

Shoutout to vidders!

As we enjoy the vids which premiered at Vividcon, this seems like a great time to give AO3 vidders a shoutout! At the moment, we can't host vids (although we will introduce this option in the longer term), but you can embed vids hosted on other sites. Currently, video embeds are supported from Youtube, Vimeo, blip.tv, Dailymotion, Viddler, Metacafe, 4shared CreativeCommons, ning and vidders.net. If you use a site which is not currently supported, then drop our support team a line and let us know you'd like it added. You should also feel free to include download links in your vid posts. We're working on a new interface which will allow you to say what medium your fanwork is in, but right now you can just add a tag in the 'Additional tags' field to let people know your work is a vid (or fanart, or a filk, or whatever else you'd like to post!).

Vividcon vidders, you may wish to add this year's vids to the Vividcon 2011 collection, or archive your older vids in Vividcon 2010 and Vividcon 2009.

Farewell to Eylul and Ira

We bid a sad farewell to two committee members, Eylul and Ira, who are stepping down to devote more time to other things. We're really grateful for all the hard work and energy they've devoted to the project.

Next deploy

The next deploy is scheduled for the end of August. It will include a bunch of performance enhancements, improvements to our prompt meme feature, many JavaScript enhancements, and a fix for the very annoying issue causing downloads to fail on the first try!

News from our sub-committees

• Coders launched Code Issue Bingo! Courtesy of coder Rebecca, coders can generate a custom bingo card linking to our Google code issues - the cards help us blitz some older issues, and also bring a strange sense of personal satisfaction. :D
• Testers waved goodbye to former test lead Eylul - we're really grateful to her for all her work. They're gearing up to test our forthcoming deploy.

News from our sister committees

• Support recently welcomed a couple of new members: mumble and Sam Johnsson have both dived in and are proving a great addition to the team. Support requests remain high, but the extra staff are making a big difference!
• Tag wranglers have been reviewing the wrangling rosters to confirm how many wranglers are still active, and gathering wrangler feedback on the new tag autocomplete so coders can improve it. They also have plans for a wrangling open house - more news coming soon!

If there are things you'd like to do or say, please share them in comments, via the AO3 support and feedback form, by volunteering, or in whatever medium you feel comfortable with. Everyone is welcome to this party!

This meeting round-up by Zooey.

We've been really busy in AD&T working on getting our next deploy ready. Thanks to a huge effort from everyone on the team, we expect to be ready to roll our new code out tomorrow! There are 93 issues in the new deploy! :o

Meeting highlights!

Tag sets

We're currently working on some new tag functionality for challenges, creating more flexibility for users to create sets of tags so they can, for example, create a list of Asian-source fandoms for a challenge. We spent lots of time in this meeting discussing how we can use the functionality provided through tag wrangling, which creates relationships so that, for example, the Archive knows that 'Hermione Granger' belongs to the 'Harry Potter' fandom, while still allowing users to create tag sets which include tags that haven't yet been wrangled by our awesome tag wranglers. We think we have come up with a solution which will combine the best of both worlds; we need to talk to the Tag Wrangling Committee to check out how it will work from their point of view, and then we hope to include this functionality in a mini-deploy coming up soon.

Skins functionality

We've had quite a few requests for the ability to include images in public skins. For security reasons, we can't allow images which are hosted on other sites, but when we begin hosting fanart we may be able to host images for skins. However, this would bring its own legal and content issues, so we have passed the issue over to our Legal and Content Policy teams to discuss.

Browsing enhancements

One of the things that's been high on our to-do list for a long time is improvements to our browsing system. We're aware that our current browsing filters leave quite a bit to be desired - the volume of works on the site has somewhat overwhelmed the design. One of our AD&T co-chairs has recently started work on this problem, and is busy coming up with some new designs for us to try out. Go go Elz!

Next deploy

The next deploy is scheduled for Monday 11 July, 2011. It will include a whole bunch of things including our new prompt memes functionality, new embed options to include embeds from CriticalCommons.org and Vidders.net, fixes for the annoying problem preventing some people from posting multichapter works, and much, much more. We're really proud of how much work has gone into this deploy!

News from our sub-committees

• Coders have been really busy finishing up the code for the new deploy. They've been working hard on fixing bugs found during testing, and have also been participating in our great new training tutorials. Recent training included awesome sessions on JQuery and CSS by AD&T member Ana!
• Testers have been working triple time to get everything in our giant deploy tested. Longtime tester XParrot has stepped up to become Testing Co-lead and has been working really hard on the issues for the new release - yeay XParrot! \0/

News from our sister committees

• Support have been working hard to keep up with the volume of Support requests, and have been giving some feedback on the new Support Board as senior coder Sidra works on it.
• Tag Wrangling have been wrangling hard, and giving feedback on the new tag sets functionality as it develops.

If there are things you'd like to do or say, please share them in comments, via the AO3 support and feedback form, by volunteering, or in whatever medium you feel comfortable with. Everyone is welcome to this party!

This meeting round-up by Zooey

We've had a busy month in AD&T! There have been several exciting code developments, and because life events for our team have prevented us sticking to our planned monthly deploy schedule, we've built up an impressive 98 issues for our next deploy! This is giving our testers plenty to work on!

Highlights!

Prompt memes

There's been tons of work going on getting our new prompt memes feature ready for primetime. Cesy, who has been coding the feature, has been hard at work polishing it up and fixing bugs. Our trusty team of testers have been trying out the feature on our Test Archive and finding all the little glitches, and our valiant volunteer Seph took on the task of writing a tutorial on the new feature. \0/ If you're curious about the kind of work that goes into creating a feature like this, check out Cesy's post on Coding prompt memes. We're really exciting about launching this feature!

Training and mentoring

We've been working on our training and mentoring procedures to make it easier for volunteers to join in and develop their skills. Cesy has been leading setup sessions for beginners, helping people get to grips with the tools we use and starting them out on a few bugs. We've embarked on a new series of training events focusing on different aspects of coding: Ana kicked off last Saturday with a fantastic introduction to XHTML, CSS and Javascript. We're also considering ways of enabling more one-to-one mentoring for coders.

The great work of our training team is already bearing fruit: new coders Tel, Laura and karen88 have been getting stuck in! We always welcome new volunteers, and the great work of our training team makes now a great time to get involved. If you're wondering how our coders go about their work, check out Enigel's post on the Day in the life of a coder.

Support board!

After lots of work by the Support team brainstorming requirements and putting together a design, senior coder Sidra has begun work on a dedicated AO3 Support board! Currently we use a third-party tool, 16bugs, to manage our Support requests, but it doesn't have the functionality we'd like. The new Support board will be entirely hosted on the AO3 and will enable all users to post responses to bugs - taking some of the pressure off our regular team when it comes to common problems - as well as providing a whole bunch of tools to help us manage the bugs. Now that we have such a big and active userbase, it's difficult for Support to keep up, so we're all REALLY excited about the new functionality.

Translation and internationalisation

Lots of work is going into making the Archive more usable to international users! Rebecca has been working closely with International Outreach and Translators as she continues to develop the functionality for translating the Archive interface - this is one of our core aims for the Archive and we're really pleased to see it finally coming into being. Meantime, new coder Tel has been working on improving the functionality for translated works and bookmarks of translated works on the Archive. Stay tuned for these improvements in the coming months!

Next deploy

The next deploy is scheduled for the weekend of 2 July (all being well). It will include prompt memes, a new autocomplete, the trial version of RSS subscriptions to tags (we're trying it out on the F/F tag to see how much load it places on the site), and lots of bug fixes!

News from our sub-committees

• Coders have been working hard committing code for the forthcoming GIANT deploy! They've also been running and participating in our new training sessions - everyone is learning a lot!
• Testers are busy on the epic task of testing out all the new code for the forthcoming deploy. They've been especially busy testing out the new prompt memes feature and giving feedback to improve it - challenges functionality is particularly hard to test because it involves so many different components (setting up a challenge, having people sign up, filling prompts, etc). Prompt memes include some anonymity features which need to be tested especially thoroughly - we want to be sure that anon features behave predictably for users.

News from our Sister committees

• Support have been working like heroes on keeping up with the steady stream of support requests. They've also been working with AD&T to finalise the plans for the forthcoming new Support Board - everyone is VERY excited about this!
• The Tag Wrangling committee has been working on the tag-related FAQs for the Archive, with the aim of making it easier for users to use tags and clearer how wranglers work on tags in the background. These changes will be reviewed and updated on the Archive soon. They've also been discussing how to handle original characters and fanon names for unnamed canon characters. If you are interested in wrangling, check out the list of fandoms without a wrangler to see if there's anything you can help with. Unassigned fandoms right now include Merlin RPF, Weiss Kreuz, and Pirates of the Caribbean.

If there are things you'd like to do or say, please share them in comments, via the AO3 support and feedback form, by volunteering, or in whatever medium you feel comfortable with. Everyone is welcome to this party!

This meeting round-up by Zooey

AD&T has been a little bit quiet for a while, as quite a few members of the committee have had a busy and/or turbulent couple of months. However, we've still been working away, and there is some exciting stuff on the horizon!

Highlights!

The AO3 is growing!

We've seen a massive expansion in user numbers over the last couple of months - 1,394 new accounts were created during April (up from 897 in March), and at peak times we had over 1000 new works being posted each day! We're really happy to see more fans joining the Archive - and we're thrilled that our shiny new servers are keeping up with all this work! We welcome readers as well as creators - if you've been wondering what the AO3 has to offer you, check out our recent post on Cool account features on the AO3: the readers' edition!.

Retiring OpenID

When we launched the Archive, we offered an OpenID option as an alternative to using a password. For various reasons, this isn't working out too well for us, and we're planning to retire OpenID account logins. If you want to know, check out our post on the future of OpenID on the AO3.

Prompt memes coming soon

This is a project that coder Cesy has been working on for a while, and we're super excited to see it coming to fruition! The new feature will make it possible to run a prompt-based challenge on the AO3! It includes anon options so that it's possible to run kink memes and other similar challenges - no more combing through multiple comment levels to keep track of your favourite prompt fills! More news coming soon.

Dark Agenda and new tag options

We've been discussing some other enhancements to our challenge feature with the mods of the Dark Agenda challenge. As part of this discussion, we've been brainstorming ways to offer more functionality on tags, so that it's possible for challenge owners (and other archive users) to create groups of tags for a specific purpose, e.g. to make a list of all fandoms which include chromatic characters. We think we've come up with a design which will give users more flexibility and take some of the load off our hardworking tag wranglers! \0/

Trial of Subscriptions RSS!

Since launching the first part of our subscriptions feature, we've had lots of requests for subscriptions via RSS. We're pretty keen on this idea ourselves, and in our next deploy we'll be trialing the feature by creating an RSS feed for works posted in the 'F/F' category - we've picked this because there is a steady stream of works posted each week under 'F/F', but not so many that we risk melting the Archive (at least, so we hope!). If all goes well, we'll roll out more tag subscriptions in the future.

Expansion of valid CSS for skins

When we first put out our skins, we erred on the side of caution and as a result, our parser didn't let through a lot of valid CSS. The parser will be updated in the next deploy, after which you should be able to use many more CSS features.

We're all going on a bug hunt!

AD&T member Ana is delving into the thickets of our current Support requests to identify some of the most problematic and recurrent bugs showing up for our users. He'll be compiling a 'hitlist' for coders to help them prioritise bugfixes. The good news is that so far, it looks as though the work we need to do to fix our more annoying bugs will also help us prepare for some of our new features. For example, we need to refactor the code that deals with posting new works in order to offer our planned new options for multimedia works, but this will also help us get to the bottom of the bug some users have reported with posting new chapters. Some bugs are trickier than others to squash, however, so we thank users for their patience while we work!

Next deploy

We interrupted our monthly posting schedule because so many of our team have needed to take a hiatus over the last month or so. The next deploy is scheduled for the end of May, and will include the new prompt code, the trial version of RSS subscriptions, and fixes for some of our more annoying bugs.

News from our sister and sub-committees

• Coders have settled into using our new version management system, Git, and have been working on a whole range of issues. There's been some great work on Cucumber tests - essential to the overall health of the site - and Enigel has taken up her trusty sword and plunged into the javascript thickets to deal with some of our bugs and continue our transition to jQuery! We're also debating the pros and cons of using some new coding tools: HAML, SASS andd Coffeescript (readers who have experience of these, let us know your thoughts!).
• Testers have had a quietish period, as we hadn't deployed any new code to our Test Archive for a while. We've now started work on the next deploy, so the team is getting stuck into work again. We've also welcomed two new testers: velocitygrass and Zebra.
• Support Committee have been working incredibly hard trying to keep up with the deluge of work. Lots of new users means lots more support tickets, so turnaround is slower than usual, but the team is doing an amazing job working through it all. If you're interested in joining Support, volunteers are always welcome!
• The Tag Wrangling Committee and their team of trusty wranglers have been working hard as always, keeping the tags ordered and useful for everyone. The TW Committee have been discussing the idea of the new tag sets options with AD&T. Wranglers have also been working closely with Support to address user questions on tags and fix the odd snag.

If there are things you'd like to do or say, please share them in comments, via the AO3 support and feedback form, by volunteering, or in whatever medium you feel comfortable with. Everyone is welcome to this party!

This meeting round-up by Zooey

We held our first AD&T meting of the new term on 22nd of January! The meeting was chaired by Elz, who is co-chairing this term along with Amelia.

We welcomed a whole bunch of new members along with several returning staffers. We have people who've been on AD&T for four years, and others who only joined the OTW a couple of months ago. One of the things we want to try to do this year is give people slightly more defined roles within AD&T, so that we can make the best possible use of everybody's talents. We're excited to be bringing some new people and skillsets on board.

2010 reviewed

We looked at back at our achievements from 2010, during which we rolled out icons, metatags, a new tag wrangling interface, all new archive CSS, username editing, challenge signups, assignments and matching, archive skins, work skins, advanced search, downloads, video embeds, sharing code, and kudos, among other things, and upgraded to Ruby 1.9, Rails 3, Unicorn and Nginx. We're proud of what we achieved and we're looking forward to seeing what we can get done in 2011.

News from the hiatus

We discussed everything that happened over the break, including the way we managed the work associated with hosting the Yuletide challenge, what we did well and what we can learn for next year. Yuletide a lot smoother than 2009, but there are still some improvements to be made.

New servers!

We have new servers arriving soon! You can read more about them in our New servers announcement and Meet the Machines. We'll be moving over to the new servers next week, and we'd love you all to join in helping us name them! Watch this space for more news.

Changes to our coding process

We're planning to move our code versioning system from subversion to git. This will make it easier for new coders to join, easier for coders to keep going without being hindered by code freezes, and easier for testers to have a regular schedule. We're hoping to deploy our current release in the next week or so, and then we'll move over.

Other business

We also decided on a few design queries, to clear up some old issues that were no longer relevant and to improve the layout of kudos.

News from our sister and sub-committees

• Coders are getting to grips with git in preparation for our move to the new system.
• Testers are getting starting with the first round of testing for the year, and getting stuck into some new training.
• Support have welcomed a bunch of new members and they are trying to catch up with answering ALL the tickets (there is a backlog from the hiatus - apologies if you have been waiting a little longer than usual for us to get back to you.
• Tag wranglers have been reviewing the wrangling team and making sure that all the fandoms on the Archive have some wrangling love.

If there are things you'd like to do or say, please share them in comments, via the AO3 support and feedback form, by volunteering, or in whatever medium you feel comfortable with. Everyone is welcome to this party!

This meeting round-up by new AD&T staffer Cesy!

All the latest news on the Archive of Our Own! Cake, servers, and Rails 3!

We all still had slight cake hangovers at this meeting after our wonderful party to celebrate our servers' first birthday!

Baby servers are one - our birthday party

Thank you to all the Archive users and volunteers who came along to our birthday party to celebrate the first anniversary of our servers of our own! It was an amazing party full of squee, virtual cake, fannish chat and amazing creativity - check out our round-up post for more details of all our party hijinks! Since the party our users have been busy - we now have over 107500 works hosted on the Archive and over 9496 users!

We really appreciate all the lovely feedback we receive - thanks to the many people who take a moment to drop us a line via our Support form or leave us a comment to let us know the things they are enjoying. This project is the hard work of lots and lots of volunteers, and it's a huge boost when people let us know our hard work is appreciated!

Forthcoming changes - Rails 3

There'll be a longer gap than usual before we release any new features, as the next task our coders will be working on is the upgrade to Rails 3 (the framework the Archive runs on). This is a big job which will affect all the code in the Archive, so we're pausing work on new features to allow this to take place. We think that the shiny new features in the last release make up for a little pause!

News from our sub-committees and sister committees

• Coders are working on all the tasks necessary to upgrade to Rails 3 - writing more automated tests, updating our documentation, and figuring out the actual changes that will be needed in our code base.


• Testers are updating documentation about regression testing in readiness for the Rails 3 upgrade. Regression testing involves working through every aspect of the site to check that everything is working right and looking good (automated tests help to check these things, but for big changes there is no substitute for real people testing!)


• Tag wranglers have been thinking about ways of making our wrangling system easier for users to understand and keeping up with the many new tags being added to the Archive by our new users!


• Support have been working hard to keep up with lots of Support requests from new users. They're doing a fantastic job, but there is a higher volume of requests than usual, so please bear with us if it takes them a little while to get back to you.

If there are things you'd like to do or say, please share them in comments, via the AO3 support and feedback form, by volunteering, or in whatever medium you feel comfortable with. Everyone is welcome to this party!

In a crazy break from tradition we held out meeting on Sunday this time, to allow me (AD&T's dedicated chair) to regather my brains after a week spent travelling and mostly offline.

Server birthday - party plans!

Last meeting we were looking forward to our plans for buying new servers. This time we were looking back - to the moment one year ago when we bought the first Servers of Our Own! Yes, the Archive's servers will celebrate their birthday on Monday 13th September! We're incredibly proud of everyone in the OTW and of fandom at large for making it possible for fandom to own the goddamn servers!

We'll be holding a party to celebrate all this fannish awesome - watch out for more details shortly! We hope that lots of you will show up to celebrate the wonderful things that you have made possible.\0/

We've got some extra special Archive tweaks planned to celebrate our servers' birthday - we decided to hold on the (VERY SHINY) new code we've been working on to make some final polishes so that we can deploy a really special release as our birthday gift to fandom.

Next deploy - PARTY GIFTS

As we reported in our last AD&T update, our next release will be chock full of delicious features! After many user requests and much anticipation, we'll finally be rolling out Skins and Mobile Exports! We know we're going to make lots of people happy with this release - not least us!

In order to spiff up the new code and make it extra shiny, we've held onto it and put some additional polish. We're currently putting the finishing touches and testing to within an inch of its life, ready to deploy the new code just in time for the beginning of the 13th of September (somewhere in the world *g*).

AO3 Search Plugin

A while ago, our fabulous user Punk created a search plugin for Archive users. She's updated it to give better results - download it from the AO3 page at the Mycroft Project. If you were using the old plugin, you'll need to uninstall that before installing the new one. Thanks, Punk!

Terminology change - pairings to relationships

We're changing the name of the field currently known as 'Pairings' to 'Relationships' to reflect its purpose more clearly. If you're interested in reading more about how and why we made this decision, check out our post on the Anatomy of a Change.

News from our sub-committees and sister committees

• Coders have been working hard to get our last-minute improvements in before the birthday celebrations.


• Testers have welcomed a new team co-lead, Kylie, and have been working to ensure that all our last-minute code is truly as shiny as it should be.


• Tag wranglers were super-active as usual, and in addition to their regular business were responsible for spearheading the change from 'pairings' to 'relationships'.


• Support welcomed a new commitee chair, Megan Westerby, and worked on some policy and long-term planning, while keeping up with their great work supporting our users on a day-to-day basis.

If there are things you'd like to do or say, please share them in comments, via the AO3 support and feedback form, by volunteering, or in whatever medium you feel comfortable with. Everyone is welcome to this party!

This meeting was small but perfectly formed, with quite a few of our members off on other business or pleasure.

Plans afoot - new servers!

The most exciting thing on AD&T's agenda this month was our meeting with our fantastic Systems committee to talk about upgrading the servers for the Archive! Although we bought our existing servers less than a year ago (their birthday is on the 10th September!) the Archive is already growing beyond their capacity - we now have more than 8000 users, who create more than a thousand new works each week! In this month's meeting we discussed what kind of setup we want to move to and set the process of getting quotes in motion - so exciting! The new servers will remove one of the main obstacles in the way of hosting fanart on the Archive, so we're extra excited about having this in sight. \0/

Next deploy - shiny new features!

Our work testing the new code on our Test archive is continuing, and we hope to deploy these new features to the real Archive by the end of August. This is going to be an awesome release with some hotly anticipated features!

Mobile Exports

Yes, you read that right, the forthcoming release will introduce the option to download works to enjoy offline on a variety of mobile devices! You'll be able to export works in mobi, epub and pdf formats! Lots and lots of users have asked for this feature, and with mobile devices like the Kindle getting ever more affordable we think this feature will be useful to lots of fans! A very special thank you to the lovely Meri_Oddities and Melina, who gave a little inducement to our coders to move forward on the plans for this feature in the form of a generous donation to the OTW and invaluable technical assistance. Their support made us very happy, and we know the results will make our users happy too!

Skins

Yes, we've been babbling about these for some time now, and they are really on their way! We're jazzed about them both because we know fans love pretty customisation, and because they make it MUCH easier to cater for people with specific viewing requirements such as low contrast or large fonts. Accessibility is really important to us and we're happy to be able to introduce this feature.

Invitations on the Archive!

We'd like to remind everyone that the Archive is very much an open party! We're still invitation only, as we need to monitor the number of new users in case of unexpected problems, but everyone who joins our invitations queue wll receive an invitation, usually within a few days. In addition you can share the love by going to the Invitations tab under your user home and requesting some invitations to give out to your friends. If you want to run a challenge or move a larger community to the Archive, feel free to make a request for a larger number of invitations - just let us know what you want them for. We'd love to see a more diverse range of fandoms on the Archive - there are now over 5000, but some are definitely better represented than others!

News from our sub-committees and sister committees

• Coders are fixing bugs in the new code as our testers find them, writing automated tests, and trying to sneak other new features in under the nose of their chair *g*. They've also welcomed several new coders and run some fabulous training to help other coders develop,


• Testers are working on our new set of code on the Archive, and thinking about the epic tasks ahead when we do our big upgrade to Rails 3.


• Tag wranglers have been putting together new policies on terminology (there'll be a couple of changes in upcoming releases), talking about better handling for tags in challenges, and generally being busy.


• Support have been busy busy bees as usual keeping up with a host of user queries, from problems with sign-ins to help on running challenges.

If there are things you'd like to do or say, please share them in comments, via the AO3 support and feedback form, by volunteering, or in whatever medium you feel comfortable with. Everyone is welcome to this party!

This isn't so much a meeting update as a general round-up of news from AD&T, since the writing up of reports, er... got away from me a little. But that means it is an extra tasty update!

Recent updates

We deployed new code to the Archive at the end of May - see the exciting list of new features in the Release 0.7.5. This release includes our new advanced search and a revamp to the HTML parser - this stuff was tricky to test and we're proud that the small amount of support requests suggests our testers did a great job of catching all the bugs!

Coming soon - Skins!

We're currently testing some awesome code on our Test archive. All being well, the next deploy will include the long-promised Archive Skins feature - you'll be able to choose from a range of lovely skins created by Archive staff, and create your own custom CSS. We know that lots of people have been looking forward to the opportunity to make the Archive look exactly the way that they want, and this will soon be possible! We're looking forward to seeing the beautiful designs people come up with. So exciting!

Rails upgrade - Faster! Better! More sparkles!

Our next big code project is to upgrade Rails, the application framework the Archive is built on. The latest version of Rails, v. 3.0, has lots of neat new features which will enable us to write much cleaner, faster code. In preparation for this change we have been writing lots and lots of automated tests, which will help us ensure we haven't broken anything in the move.

Refactoring - Code makeover

As we develop more automated tests and get ready to upgrade our version of Rails, we are also refactoring our code. Refactoring involves rewriting the code to make it much neater, more efficient and more beautiful. It's something which is necessary in all programming, but it's particularly important in a big project like ours with lots of contributors: by refactoring the code to make it more elegant, we make it easier for other people to work on it and smooth out any of the lumps and bumps which may have sprung up. Refactoring also improves the performance of code, and it's an important foundation for the next wave of development on the Archive.

Internationalisation on the Archive

We had a very exciting and productive conversation with the International Outreach Committee about the features the Archive needs in order to serve the fannish community internationally. All the work we have been doing on writing automated tests and refactoring will help a lot with developing our international features - we had to retire our old interface for translating the Archive because it caused some major performance issues, so we want to be sure that the new one we are planning will work smoothly. In addition to translations, we've also been discussing ways of improving our system for indicating the language of a work, browsing for works in particular languages, and setting useful defaults for language options. We're very lucky to have a brilliant International Outreach team who help us to see all the angles for our international membership - it's something we try to consider at all times, but it's very helpful having a team who are dedicated to this aspect of our work.

Introducing the new Tag Wranglers committee!

As most users know, the tags are the Archive are managed and organised by our behind-the-scenes team of dedicated and awesome tag wranglers. Until recently, tag wranglers were a subcommittee of AD&T, but there are now 133 volunteer wranglers working around the world to organise more than 99,666 tags, so it was high time for them to take on a more formal committee role. AD&T are very proud to see new committee chair Renay and her awesome team step out on their own: we'll be working closely with the new committee and we know that this change will help to ensure that Archive users continue to get a great experience.

News from our sub-committees and sister committees

• Coders are working hard on writing automated tests, refactoring, and getting ready for the Rails 3 upgrade.


• Testers are working on our new set of code on the Archive, and giving the new Skins option a workout!


• Tag wranglers have been adjusting to their new identity as a committee in their own right, figuring out some new policies, and generally being awesome.


• Support continue to do awesome work, answering most requests within a couple of days. They are a small but dedicated team and we value their hard work! (Don't forget that if you need a response from Support, you must leave a contact email address.)

If there are things you'd like to do or say, please share them in comments, via the AO3 support and feedback form, by volunteering, or in whatever medium you feel comfortable with. Everyone is welcome to this party!

This was a landmark meeting for us - we got through the entire agenda! Several members of the committee were absent because it was a holiday weekend, and those who remained were slightly distracted by the Eurovision Song Contest, but apparently we were borne upwards on butterfly wings!

Highlights

• We discussed our volunteers process and ways of making it easier for more people to get involved. We have a lot of awesome and dedicated people on this project, but we would like to make it easier for new people to get involved and to spread the workload a bit! If you know of examples of good practice, we'd love to hear about them.


• We signed off on a whole bunch of small coding issues which have been waiting for a final bit of design. Coming soon - more control over visibility to search engines, a way of removing a co-author from a series, and a fix for the editing of some old and buggy bookmarks.

Recent updates

We deployed new code to the Archive at the end of May - see the exciting list of new features in the Release 0.7.5. This release includes our new advanced search and a revamp to the HTML parser - this stuff was tricky to test and we're proud that the small amount of support requests suggests our testers did a great job of catching all the bugs!

Archive Roadmap

We've just released an updated version of our Archive Roadmap, which gives an overview of all the amazing work which has been done so far and all the cool things we have planned in the future. We're really proud of what we've achieved - fandom power is awesome! Thanks to our brilliant translations team you can also read the Roadmap in Deutsch or Español.

If there are features you'd like to see in the Archive, then we'd love to hear about them! Please contribute your thoughts to our post on the future of the Archive!

News from our sub-committees and sister committees

• Coders are gearing up to work on a new round of projects. We're about to revamp our translations code so that it can be used, making improvements on advanced search, and thinking about priorities for new projects.


• Testers did a great job getting everything ready for the last release, and are now working through the new code on the Beta Archive to verify that it's still working well.


• Tag wranglers did an awesome job of keeping up with the wealth of new tags introduced onto the Archive during two big challenges - Final Fantasy Exchange and Remix.


• Support continue to do a great job keeping up with support requests - for one golden moment there were no unclaimed issues! They also did a great job of swinging into action when our Support form had a momentary hiccup. :D

If there are things you'd like to do or say, please share them in comments, via the AO3 support and feedback form, by volunteering, or in whatever medium you feel comfortable with. Everyone is welcome to this party!

A busy meeting - we stayed on an extra 45 minutes to get through as much as possible. The whole team has been working really hard lately - they are awesome. <3

Highlights

• We talked some more about multimedia on the Archive, and started figuring out ways of improving posting and browsing for non-text-based works. Actually hosting things other than text on the Archive is some way off, but in the meantime, we think we can make a much more inclusive interface!
• We started discussing requirements for server upgrades in a bit more depth - we're talking to a few people for expert advice. The Archive is hungry!
• We discussed strategies for improving accessibility and diversity on the Archive - see below more more info!

Forthcoming changes

We're currently testing a new release, which we hope to deploy to the Beta Archive this coming weekend. It includes some exciting stuff:

• The first version of our new Advanced Search! We're super-excited about this - it's something we've wanted for a long time, and with the combined efforts of Sidra and Cesy it's finally in sight! This will be version 0.1 - there are more enhancements planned - but it's already an awesome improvement on our existing search facility.
• A new HTML parser, which we hope will be faster and more efficient. The parser processes the text of the works you post to make sure that it displays properly - it's a very tricky piece of coding, but with the help of an existing code library and the ingenuity of the wonderful Elz, we think we're getting there!

Accessibility and Diversity

We've been thinking about accessibility and diversity, and ways of keeping these at the forefront of our development. We've been talking to the developers at Dreamwidth about their experience in this area, as we think this is something they do well - thanks very much to Denise for her awesome advice!

We're integrating a few new things into our testing process to make it easier for us to catch any issues which might have an impact on accessibility. We're improving our automated testing, which will help us check that things on the Archive are basically functioning, freeing up our testers to do more work on more nuanced things. One area which we could use more help with is in testing how the Archive works with assistive technology - if you are a user of assistive tech and you'd like to join our testing team, you'd be warmly welcomed!

This is an area that's really important to us, and we welcome feedback from users. We're currently working on an accessibility and diversity policy which will state our core ethos; the most important message we'd like to get out is that we are willing to listen! If there's an area you think we could improve on, then please let us know via the Support and Feedback form - we always do our best to learn from user feedback.

News from our sub-committees and sister committees

• Coders have been working hard on projects big and small. We've seen some great contributions from newer coders as well as some big projects from our senior coders - they are all fab!
• Testers are currently working their way through all the new code on our Test Archive. They're reading lots of works in order to spot any weirdnesses with our new HTML parser and working through the list of new code to see it's all working well.
• Tag wranglers have decided on a new tag format for book fandoms, based on popular demand from users. From now on, the canonical tags (the ones we show on the fandoms page) for specific series will take the format 'Poirot - Agatha Christie', while the metatag (which covers all works by a single author) will have the format 'CHRISTIE Agatha - Works'. This should make things easier to find in the fandoms list and filters - you can still enter whatever you like on your own works and it will be connected up to the canonical tags.
• Support have been doing a phenomenal amount of work - there are currently just 21 open support issues, only 3 of which have not yet been worked on!

If there are things you'd like to do or say, please share them in comments, via the AO3 support and feedback form, by volunteering, or in whatever medium you feel comfortable with. Everyone is welcome to this party!

This was another endurance meeting, with the all-org meeting coming immediately afterwards, but we worked valiantly through our list of old business!

Highlights

• We talked about the next steps for fanart on the Archive, and started looking into server capacity. In the coming weeks we'll be breaking tasks down into 'stuff we can do now' and 'long term plans'.
• We got very excited about the new Vidding Roadmap and started talking about some initial plans for embedding vids on the Archive.
• We reviewed some proposed improvements to the way chapters are managed and the way works are marked as 'in progress' or 'complete'. Coming soon - ways of marking sections in your work as prologues, epilogues, interludes, etc!

Upcoming cool stuff

• We're currently working on more improvements to our HTML parser (that helps control the way your work looks in the Archive) - we've deployed a new version to our Test Archive and are testing it extensively to work out any bugs.
• We have a team working hard on developing a new Advanced Search interface, and we're hoping to have the first part of that soon!

Vidding fundraiser!

Over on Dreamwidth, Collswan and a group of other vidding enthusiasts have launched the AO3 for vidders fundraiser. They're raising money for the OTW to help support our goal of establishing a home for fanvids! \0/ (Money raised will not be specifically dedicated to one project - OTW finances are managed as a whole - but additional money in our pot makes it a lot easier for us to move forward with confidence on resource-heavy projects like hosting vidding). We're really excited and pleased that people out there want to support our projects like this - drop by and check them out!

News from our sub-committees and sister committees

• Coders are taking advantage of a period without any urgent deadlines to work on some bigger projects, including the Advanced Search and new HTML parser. They're also working through lots of smaller bugs.
• Testers are reading lots of works on our Test Archive in order to spot anything weird the new HTML parser is doing. It's a hard job, reading awesome fic, but someone has to do it.
• Tag wranglers are working on a new policy for the names of book fandoms in response to user feedback. Our current system uses the author's family name and the series name, e.g. 'Rowling - Harry Potter'. Lots of users have told us they want to see the whole author name, and now we have longer tag limits this is possible, so we're contemplating a switch. A debate is currently raging about the merits of Family Name, Given Name vs Given Name, Family Name, and other format details! Stay tuned for more news.
• Support have been working incredibly hard on a reduced team, as illness and real life pressures have taken a few people out of action. Our skeleton staff have consistently managed to keep the number of open bugs below 100 (this includes bugs which they have responded to but which need more work) - we think that's pretty impressive!

If there are things you'd like to do or say, please share them in comments, via the AO3 support and feedback form, by volunteering, or in whatever medium you feel comfortable with. Everyone is welcome to this party!

My family claimed my attention this week (apparently there is a limit to how many times chairing a meeting can be used as a reason to be missing from Family Events) so the most awesome Enigel stepped up to chair in my stead. <3 Quite a few other people were claimed by Real Life, so it was a quiet meeting for once!

Highlights

• Bingeling did a heroic job of collating all the feedback about fanart on the Archive and we starting discussing what we'll need to do to make these dreams a reality. There's a lot of work that needs to be done first, but we're really excited to be moving forward on this.
• We talked about ways of making it easier to browse for works in a particular language - there are currently thirteen different languages represented on the Archive, but it's not too obvious how to find them (also, at the moment the languages page is a bit broken! We'll be fixing the layout in the next deploy). We'll be adding some more options for this soon.

Recent changes

We deployed Release 0.7.3.7. to the Archive with a couple of critical fixes - the option to hide warnings and tags by default should now be working properly (it was getting stuck in our cache) and you should be able to add other users as co-authors. Hurrah for Elz who coded and deployed these fixes.

Deploy schedule

• April 18th: We deployed a bunch more code to our Test Archive for our testers to bang on.
• May 2nd: If all goes well, we'll be deploying the new code to the Beta Archive in two weeks time! If our testers are feeling active and they don't discover any hideous bugs, it may even make it sooner.

Cool stuff coming up

There are loads of small enhancements in the new code we're testing now:

• A way of marking a work as a translation, and linking to the original work.
• A way of turning off admin messages so that people who aren't interested in getting our release notes can be left in peace.
• Comment notifications for admin posts (this is only really exciting to me, but I am VERY EXCITED).
• A basic bookmarklet for posting bookmarks of works not hosted on the Archive.
• A fix for a bug which makes the sort criteria on index pages invisible to screen-readers.

Public service announcement - problems importing from Fanfiction.net

We're experiencing an ongoing issue with importing works from Fanfiction.net. Unfortunately, the request from our server is getting 'stuck' on the way to theirs, which means that imports hang for a long time and then time out. We're looking into solutions, but because this is caused by a server routing issue and not by our code there's not much we can do. We're very sorry about the inconvenience! For more information on this and other bugs you can always check out our Known Issues page.

News from our sub- and sister committees

Everyone continues to work incredibly hard and to contribute in many awesome ways. Go team!

If there are things you'd like to do or say, please share them in comments, via the AO3 support and feedback form, by volunteering, or in whatever medium you feel comfortable with. Everyone is welcome to this party!