Archive of Our Own ^beta

We had quite the list of releases to close out 2024 here at AO3! There were improvements to the user experience for our administrators, and a massive improvement for our tag wranglers, meaning they won't have to deal with those pesky tags from draft works anymore. We also deployed a number of things laying the groundwork for some exciting technical improvements and upgrades in the new year.

Thank you and welcome to first-time contributor Jake Faulkner! We'd also like to thank Sekoia for pointing out a security issue.

Credits

• Coders: Amy Lee, Bilka, Brian Austin, calm, Cesium-Ice, Jake Faulkner, james_, Nisha
• Code reviewers: Bilka, Brian Austin, lydia-theda, Sam Johnsson, sarken, Scott, ticking instant
• Testers: Amy Lee, Anh Pham, Bilka, Brian Austin, C. Ryan Smith, calamario, Claire P. Baker, Deniz, Gloria L, Irina, Jenni D., Lucia S., Lute, lydia-theda, megidola, Nary, Rhine, Runt, Sam Johnsson, Sanity, Taki, Tal, Taylor Clossin, Teyris, therealmorticia, wichard

Details

0.9.383

On November 25, we deployed the first in a series of changes to (gracefully) finalize the Rails 7 upgrade.

• [AO3-6812] - Our first try at upgrading cookies to the modern Rails format did not go well. This time, we are preparing by deploying some code to force all servers (new and old) to work with the old format first.

0.9.384

We deployed an array of improvements to the admin experience on December 6. We also added some email previews to help our translators when they translate them into languages besides English, in our ongoing effort to introduce language options to the AO3 interface.

• [AO3-6709] - Policy & Abuse admins can now view comments in user inboxes.
• [AO3-6771] - The email that AO3 creators receive when Open Doors imports one of their works didn't respect the user's locale preference. That is now fixed. (The locale preference is currently only available in testing.)
• [AO3-6773] - To make testing easier, we added a preview for the email that gets sent out if your request for invite codes to share is denied. (Please note that it is not possible to request shareable invitation codes at this time.)
• [AO3-6835] - We also added a preview for the email confirmation you receive when changing your email.
• [AO3-6854] - And what's a release without updating our trusty code linter?

Several of the changes in this release fall into the bucket of "making sure only the admins who need access to something have access to it":

• [AO3-5520] - Modifying the Wrangling Guidelines is now restricted to admins from the Tag Wrangling team.
• [AO3-6697] - Updating the Known Issues page is now strictly the domain of our Support team.
• [AO3-6698] - Modifying the English FAQ has been restricted to the Support and Docs teams, while the Translation team can modify any of the languages the FAQs are translated into.
• [AO3-6760] - Admins from the Policy & Abuse and Tag Wrangling teams can access the unsorted tags bin to see tags that were created by bookmarkers and haven't been assigned categories yet, but only Tag Wrangling can actually sort them into categories.
• [AO3-6761] - Now only admins from the Tag Wrangling team can wrangle tags from the mass wrangling bins or access certain information about wrangling tools, while Policy & Abuse admins can still access the mass wrangling bins but not do any wrangling.
• [AO3-6762] - Similarly, read access to fandom bins and tag edit pages has been restricted to Tag Wrangling and Policy & Abuse admins, but only Tag Wrangling admins can actually make changes to tags.

0.9.385

On December 8, we deployed a single change to continue the process of gracefully finalizing the Rails 7 upgrade.

• [AO3-6686] - We updated the Archive's configuration to use Rails 7's brand new defaults. This only includes some of the changes to cookies this time around, since doing everything all at once last time was definitely a Bad Idea.

0.9.386

On December 9, we prepared to upgrade our web servers to more modern software.

• [AO3-6858] - Added support for Puma, so we can transition away from Unicorn and god for our web servers.
• [AO3-6861] - You'll never believe this, but we also updated our code linter again.

0.9.387

On December 23 2024, we deployed some changes to make work easier for the Support and Policy & Abuse teams. And we snuck in a treat for Tag Wrangling and a security fix along the way.

• [AO3-6211] - Tags on unposted (draft) works used to show up in the wrangling bins, which often made tag wranglers' jobs more difficult. Now those tags don't show up in the wrangling bins until the work is posted.
• [AO3-6232] - When a Support ticket is submitted, we now record which site skin you're using and what page you were on. We've also started including your IP address in the copy of the ticket our Support team receives (it was previously only shared with our automated spam checker).
• [AO3-6308] - When a user is temporarily suspended, an error message tells them when their suspension is supposed to end. The old message sometimes gave an incorrect time, so we've fixed that.
• [AO3-6622] - We decreased the margin sizes on definition lists in FAQs to make them more consistent with styling elsewhere on AO3.
• [AO3-6717] - In order to prevent abuse, banned and suspended users can no longer change their usernames.
• [AO3-6792] - The Support and Policy & Abuse forms each have a list of languages the teams can answer tickets in. We've given admins from those teams the ability to update those lists.
• [AO3-6832] - When people reported a comment to our Policy & Abuse team, a copy of the work the comment was left on was sometimes mistakenly attached to the ticket PAC receives. We made sure that doesn't happen anymore.
• [AO3-6855] - We upgraded rails-html-sanitizer from 1.6.0 to 1.6.1 to address a potential security vulnerability found by our dependency checker.
• [AO3-6864] - We changed the CSS sanitizer to disallow sneaking naughty code into URL values.
• [AO3-6866] - We updated the code that creates our testing database to make sure the test data contains user roles that are similar to the current setup on AO3.