Actually, our general policies about fanworks could be considered to fall under "letting people post this stuff, tag it whatever the hell they want and clutter up everything," depending on your feelings about freeform tags and the relative quality of the fic we host, but that's an argument on other posts.
The coders have been consulted, and providing mechanisms for work types is actually part of the roadmap for AO3. It's a feature folks have been requesting fora long time, and one that pre-dated any discussion of hosting or not hosting meta.
As far as changes to the TOS, these came out of committee and are currently up for review. Board will look at them for approval once feedback's been collected and incorporated.
The coders have been consulted, and providing mechanisms for work types is actually part of the roadmap for AO3.
We know it's on the roadmap. What we'd like to know is how far away it is. Is there a rest stop a couple exits away, or do we have to go 49 miles without a goddamn piss break?
Also, I'm repeating my question from above since you totally ignored onlyforreading's complaint: Why are these revision documents in .doc and .pdf format rather than something much more accessible like .html?
Honestly, I can't speak for the coders on a definite timeline. There are some other pieces of work for them that have priority, and being a non-tech person I can only sum it up as putting what exists in code into a cleaner form (so big projects are easier in the future and small projects are faster to incorporate), evaluating where they really stand in terms of progress, and taking a bloody well-deserved breather. The estimate I heard last for kicking into gear on works types was August, and I'm not sure when that would ultimately get deployed.
Frankly, though, a little patience would go a long way. Everyone in the org is a volunteer with other life commitments, and we're working as fast as we can to satisfy folks with the time and energy we have available without burning each other out, and to get you answers as quickly and thoroughly as we can.
As for why the docs aren't in html, I have no idea. It's something that can definitely be asked for and that I'll follow up on over the weekend, and in the meantime, I'd suggest doing what I do when I run into a format I can't open on my laptop, DL it as as .doc and use googledocs or something similiar to view it.
I'd suggest doing what I do when I run into a format I can't open on my laptop, DL it as as .doc and use googledocs or something similiar to view it.
This is not how to do accessibility. In the future, it would be extremely considerate if AO3 would provide HTML documents for this kind of stuff instead of something that requires the use of other programs and/or a third-party website.
It's definitely not an answer I like giving or a permanent solution, expressly because it does make accessibility a heck of a lot harder. I know that we generally try to provide docs in html (the Annual Report is one example that comes as, I believe, doc, pdf and html), and I honestly don't know what happened here. It's possible that it was straight out overlooked, but it's also possible that it's in the works and will be added over the weekend. I'll follow up and see if we can get the additional format, but it may take a couple of days as we're a little light-staffed this weekend due to various personal commitments and major holidays over the week in North America.
Frankly, though, a little patience would go a long way.
This is supposed to be a joke, right? People have been asking for categories for a long time and it is something that should have been part of the plan from the beginning and something that even a person who isn't tech savvy can see will only get harder down the road.
And as far as I remember many Ao3 users were asking the OTW to be patient when it came to allowing in meta and wait until the categories were finally implemented.
Yes, we know it's on the road map now, but that still doesn't tell us when categories are going to happen. Yes, we know this site is run by volunteers. Yes, mistakes can happen. It's human. But this decision seems rushed and impatient to me.
No, really not joking. There are a lot of features that would have been great to have from the start, but none of us can see the future. We do our best to anticipate and plan, and we have limitations. As I said elsewhere, the most recent conversation I've had with our coding team lead suggested August for a start on the work toward having category filters.
At this point, we're just not comfortable slapping dates on something for the sake fo having a date attached. I hope we never reach that point. With our workforce, it's just flat hard to anticipate when there will be time to knock out a complex project, and make no mistake, this is a complex change.
As for meta, many members were also asking us to allow it. It was _already_ on the archive, and was not significantly disrupting people's experience. The strident anti-meta reactions puzzle me when it was something so few of us even noticed until it became a discussion point. It's a lot like het fans wading in and being repulsed by slash existing in their fandom, or slash fans complaining about the icky het, only more overblown given the ratio of meta to any other work type on the archive. That, for me, was one of the deciding factors in voting to allow meta, because it doesn't fundamentally impact the experience of anti-meta users, and creates a space for fans of meta to engage with the archive, and also because I really loathe this hierarchy of what's considered legit fannish practice.
I'm sorry, but the Ao3 can still not host anything but text and nobody seems to have a problem telling people to patiently wait for that. You have no problem telling people to wait patiently for the work type categories right here. But it's really too much to ask from the people who wanted to have meta on the Archive to wait till we have said work categories and filtering will be easier? Didn't you imply that patience would go a long way?
It's nice to know that work on the code for said work type categories will probably start in August and that it's finally on the agenda at all again. I was happy to see it on the roadmap again - although the last roadmap promised a lot of stuff that never was worked on. I understand that it's not easy to implement the work categories and that it will take time and I'd be totally okay with that if the OTW would be upfront about the fact that it was a huge mistake not to think of this from the start. Because now a major overhaul of the whole database is needed and the longer down the line it happens the more complicated it gets, especially when you invite in a new text based type of fanwork.
Which is why I think meta could really have waited a little longer - at least until coders had time to make feasible plans for how all this is going to work. And maybe if this would have been handled differently, nobody would have been so angry about it in the first place. That is what most people in the last discussion were saying.
Meta is welcome on the Archive for all I care, so is Podfic and Fanart and Vids and Cosplay pics and whatever else people come up with. But the creators of these other fanworks have been waiting for much longer for categories and appropriate posting posibilties. I'm sure fic writers and readers would be okay with it, too, with a better way to filter fanworks.
Waiting five years for decent accomodation for other works in the form of work types or a work-appropriate posting interface is rather patient from the fans. And we know even the embedding was bloody well fought for.
If you need more coders, hire them.
I see the 'just hire them' answer for a lot of things, but it's not simple. Before we can take steps to hire anyone, it would require a huge shift in our HR practices to provide for direct management, pay roll, potentially coordinating international employment practices, raising our annual insurance by 500%, developing employment contracts, running a hiring process, at minimum. If our Legal, Financial, Volunteers & Recruiting Committees, and Board, again at minimum, did nothing else for the next year, then, yes, we could do that. We'd also need donors to kick in at least 3 times more than they currently do annually to adequately pay a professional coding staff and cover the overhead.
This is something we're working toward, but like everything, it has a place in our priorities. I think, at least for this year, we'd all prefer securing our existing volunteer base, keeping our tax status, and adding more servers so we can continue to function rather than backsliding in the services we do provide.
1. Please take steps to clearly identify yourself as a member of the Board of Directors of the OTW in these comments. Not everyone is just going to know nor, considering how some of these comment sections have been allowed to devolve into claims and counter claims of insider knowledge and ad hominum attacks is everyone going to even know at a glance your screen name is genuine. Also, you profile here does not list you as a Board Member.
2. Please take a moment to consider that your comment here is the first time anyone in an official capacity of the OTW on an afficial forum of the OTW has even hinted at a time frame for work types. People think it's simple, that it should take no longer than the filters to implement, because it's such a simple idea to imagine. People, your members, the AO3 users, so important people, have been left in the dark on this in a way that seems like it's on purpose. They should not be expected to be able to intuit how complex this is and what your work loads are like.
So really, asking for patience from these important people you've left in the dark to guess where the door is is going to sound like, "Shut up and go away, HDU question us."
Think on this from their point of view.
Imagine, just for a moment, if you'd been honest about this with yourselves and the volunteers as well as with these important people. Imagine how much more co-operation with the work-type tagging you'd get if the important people felt like they were in it with you.
Everything about this is so incredibly on point. Meta is being pushed through and implemented before the AO3 can actually accommodate it and they're likely just going to call that "good enough" like they've done with art and podfic embeds. People can only be so patient, especially when they keep seeing workaround after workaround after workaround (this time being written into the Terms of Service themselves) with no actual progress on the technical pieces to make the archive what it's advertised to be.
I think many people recognize that everyone working for the AO3/OTW are volunteers, but I still don't think it's too much to ask for actual project management, transparent updates, and leadership that understands that you look to implementation and have a plan for it before you make sweeping policy changes?
Saying we'd allow meta really wasn't a sweeping policy change. It affected roughly 1000 works on the archive at the time the decision was made, and was rooted in a question of what to do with those 1000 works. Rather than take a mealy-mouthed, half-way solution of "we'll allow these but not anyone else," and rather than outright reject the works already on the archive, we said we want this. As a high level policy, in looking to make the archive broadly inclusive, we want this to be allowed. And then we said we will figure out how to implement this in a way that's fully supported along with figuring out how we fully support other work types.
One step of that implementation is in making changes to the TOS, and that work did progress faster than the coding work for the simple fact that the committees involved in developing the TOS were able to make it an immediate priority. The technical factors are in line after other user-requested features, and after other backend fixes to make the overall work of running the archive more effective. That's just the nature of the org. In many of the changes to AO3, the process has been that someone, somewhere, has asked for something---and in any case, there are always people happy to let us know just how much they hate whatever has changed. It's agreed that it will happen, input is gathered from relevant committees, and then the tech folks figure out how to make it happen. This was just entirely more in public view than some of the other work.
This is the price of greater transparency, for all of us.
As for project management and transparent updates, we're steadily working on improving those things. Fandom memory is short on some aspects, and long on others. Two years ago, there was a lot of discussion and a lot of revelations about how burnt out volunteers were, and how lacking we were in some basic, commonsense practices. Some of those problems have been fixed, some are being worked on, and some are future steps for which we're just not ready. There have been internal and external constraints to how quickly we've been able to move and implement changes to our fundamental organizational structure, and to be frank, there are places where there are serious questions of just who is leading and who is accountable, and how to navigate those tensions, along with just plain figuring out how to coordinate information flow.
Something that continues to amaze me is that users, members, random passersby have more access and more ability to access staff, volunteers, and board members of this organization than any other I know. We are as naked about our work as we can be, as we each have the ability to be, without sacrificing the need to make decisions and maintain some confidentiality in the organization. ~sanders, otw board member & treasurer
I think your second point is very true. I asked about the timeframe in a comment replying to the original post, and my question was entirely ignored by staff. I can understand if they don't know but it would be nice if they were to acknowledge it in some way.
Thank you for pointing out the first. I'll go back and edit to make that clear. It's easy to forget when it feels like I work in such a small fishbowl with so many eyes on every move and every decision I'm part of.
Filters actually did take time to implement and develop, and I'm sure you remember like I do the span of time where they were taken down to be redesigned. And even when filters were initially rolled out, they carried bugs that had to be resolved, like the distinction between AND/OR that never quite worked right for me. Work types is likely going to be the same way.
I have thought about this from the other side, but honestly not for a while. It's still astonishing to me to see the levels of work that go into making this site function, and I'm looking at it as a definitively non-tech person (I deal with finances). I forget that not everyone is getting the behind the scenes view because this has become a fundamental part of my days. The bottomline lesson I've learned, and would pass on, is that sites like ours really don't happen over night or by magic, and it's actually a slow process relative to internet time (where even a day can feel like an eternity). Features can take months from design to implementation, or longer, depending on who has the time to work on it and the scope of the feature itself. Sometimes they can take years because there are simply other pieces of basic functionality that have to be built out first.
I can only give a timeframe for work types now, and it's one that's extremely tenative, mind, because a meeting was held last month that began tossing out ideas on how aspects of it would work. I'm wary of having even said that much because if August comes and goes without progress because other things catch fire---a not uncommon occurrence for nearly all of our committees and people---we'll be excoriated for it, no matter how naked we are in explaining where we stand in that moment.
My request for patience isn't a way of saying 'how dare you'. I welcome the questions, the majority of us do, but it's also an issue of having the time and energy to respond, and also just plain having the answers, because sometimes we don't. It's incredibly hard to wade into a post where I've been, by virtue of being on the board, called an idiot, accused of letting power go to my head (What power? Seriously?), and generally encountered some pretty demoralizing comments. All for making a decision that some people don't agree with, that some love, and some couldn't give a hoot about, and because the people I work with have human limitations in how much work they can accomplish. I don't blame my colleagues for not engaging when they don't have to; getting called names and being bullied for giving the 'wrong' answers wasn't really something any of us signed on for. We're in a real damned if we do, damned if we don't position, and expected to just take it.
Imagine how much easier it would be to get volunteers in thankless positions, giving countless hours, to engage in meaningful conversation if everyone could take a deep breath and remember there are real live people on both sides.
other pieces of basic functionality that have to be built out first
Well, the problem I have, for example, is that the AO3 always has been promoted as a multimedia archive but there have been built many text-based features that I really wouldn't call 'basic functionality' - like the ability to organize challenges on an archive, bookmarks, all those things. Why are filtering for additional tags and all those other things you can filter for more 'basic functionality' than being able to select the work type you want to post? You have beeing *starting* to talk about work types a month ago, over five years after this was started? It's not like expanding an archive that has the basic functionality of letting you *post multimedia fanworks* has never been an option, and before you raise concerns about bandwidth again, even embedding was implemented rather late. There's ways to keep image file size down to what is sustainable. This prioritizing has never been properly explained to me and that is the reason I am feeling rather impatient by now. And now we have that laughable diversity statement that once more looks like paying lip service to an inclusiveness that no one actually ever cared about.
edited to correct use of 'archive' when I meant 'organization'
I actually do care about the inclusiveness, as does the rest of the current Board. It was pretty important to me to get that statement out there as a step in stating that everyone should be welcome here. Honestly, I also take it with a grain of salt because I know we aren't fully there yet by any means. But it's the principles we're working from and working toward, and for this organization, it's a pretty big step toward acknowledging and respecting that fandom's not a very white, very western, very female, very fic-based thing. It's also a step toward being held accountable to those principles.
Also, between you, me, and the internet, pretty much any diversity statement can be a bit dodgy. Organizations can always go either way from them, by failing big time to live them out, or by making successful steps forward. On the inside of the org, we're making steps forward that I fully support as a queer, poor, semi-able bodied woman of color with a wide-range of fannish interests. We've taken steps backward, too, and it's all a learning experience.
As for being built around text functionality... that's a huge can of worms that I'm hesitant to open, but I'm going there anyway. Bluntly, it's an echo of bias in how the Archive was intially conceived and in how the organization functioned. There were more fic writers and fic fans involved because of where and how the org started, and distinct biases in ideas of who and what constituted fandom and fannish practices. That's evolving. We have more, and more vocal, podficcers and fan artists as volunteers, staff, and Board members. We have more people inside the org who have questioned and are questioning how work on the archive is prioritized. I'm not going to lie, it makes me furious that we prioritized work on challenges over things like having a translation interface or developing adequate means for hosting artworks. Those decisions were driven by several factors: complexity of coding, interest in the work, perceived immediacy of the need, to name a few; and those decisions weren't always in the best interest of either the org as a whole or AO3 in particular.
I'm absolutely not going to bring up bandwidth. I think it's a flawed argument, even to my non-tech eyes and ears, and one I don't have the background to get into in any more than a surface way. I will say that I think we've made mistakes in the way the organization has grown, but it is what it is. We weren't working from any model, but from the ground up and just trying to get *something* we could call our own. We also didn't have an organizational structure that directed that growth, but allowed it to sort of chase the shiny object. That's changed and is continuing to change.
Coming to work types now is part of a collective feeling that we've gotten to a stable enough place, and an immediate enough need, to do it. From this side, I don't see that progress stopping. There are people too doggedly determined at all levels of the org to push it through, and who have a different vision of what constitutes fanworks.
I just want to take a moment to thank you - as an AO3 user and as a Tag Wrangler - for taking the time to engage with us like this. I understand what you mean when you say you forget that the public doesn't know everything you do, I do that sometimes, too. I also understand the huge time commitment you and many of the coders have, even though it is much greater than my time commitment. It's hard to hear people speak poorly of an organization and an effort and a dream like the AO3, because you know first hand the difficulty of making it happen. The blow-up two years ago was hard for those reasons, but necessary. I - as a user and volunteer - appreciate your efforts to reform and bring the org priorities in line with what the users need and want. As a user I know it's hard not to be impatient at times, so thank you for letting us know a little more behind the scenes and for candidly talking about the Org's shortcomings. It does make the waiting easier.
I find it interesting that the issue of coders' time is why things are being implemented before there's a way to manage it. All of the OTW is volunteers, right? So what about the time involved for committees to implement these workaround/makeshift terms, then REWRITE them, then go through the work of approving and implementing those once work types actually exist on the site? Then the time involved for volunteers (and users) to go back and make everything fit and comply with the new system? That's all time that is very precious for a volunteer organization so it just makes no sense to do things two different ways and create even more work for everyone.
Also, I find it interesting that people asking about work types (which was promised YEARS ago) is suddenly seen as a personal attack on everyone in the OTW. Yes, some people want it to filter out meta. Some people want it to filter IN meta. Some people want it to be able to better find podfic or art or many other things that are hidden in the archive right now and difficult to find. Some people simply want it because it's been promised time and again with no visible progress or even an update or timeline on when it might happen. If the OTW was truly about being inclusive and believed in their new diversity statement, they'd make work types a priority and put them in before codifying workaround and burdensome policies about other work types because it's the right thing to do. The constant approach of taking the questioning of any decision as a personal attack does not do well to assure users about the professionalism of those running this organization.
Comment on Proposed Content Policy ToS and FAQ changes
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