Archive of Our Own ^beta

The OTW has recently completed two surveys with our project users to find out more about what they know about our work. In our 16th Anniversary Survey, 87% of the 67,474 fans who responded said that they had never heard of OTW's Open Doors. However, in our International Fanworks Day (IFD) 10th Anniversary Survey, over 60% of survey takers said they did know that the OTW preserves fandom archives, although only 28% knew that we help preserve physical fanworks as well.

So we'd like to put a spotlight on the important work that this OTW project does. Open Doors began in 2009 by facilitating donations of fan creations, such as zines, audio and video tapes, and ephemera, to academic libraries who house and preserve them. In 2012, they began the first of over 100 digital archive imports to AO3. This project imports archive content in all languages and formats.

In 2022, they went one step further and created the AO3 Fanzine Scan Hosting Project, through which fanfiction and fanart originally published in print fanzines is imported to AO3.

When you support the OTW, you support the work of Open Doors and all our projects in preserving the history and works created by fans over decades. And for those who are able to donate, we have some items we think you'll find worth keeping as well!

Our IFD survey revealed that over 11% of the survey takers had created fannish poetry. But if you haven't yet, with a US$75 donation you can try your hand at it with our new poetry magnets featuring fun fannish words!

For a US$40 donation, we now have a new sticker set of animal themed OTW + project logos.

You can also set up a recurring donation and save towards the gift of your choice. Just select the gift you want, and if the total for that donation doesn't reach the amount needed for the gift you selected, future donations will be applied. Those of you in the U.S. might also be able to double your contribution via employer matching: contact your HR department to find out if this is an option for you.

A donation of US$10 or more will also allow you to become a member of the OTW. OTW members have the right to vote for the Board of Directors — the OTW’s governing board. You have until June 30, 2024, to become a member if you would like to vote in this year’s election, which will be held in August.

We hope that many of you will take this opportunity to donate to keep Open Doors doing their work, as well as Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. And for all of those OTW members who are renewing their membership, thank you for your continued support!

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Through the last year, the OTW Finance team has continued to ensure that the organization's bills are paid, tax returns filed, and standard accounting procedures met. Preparation for the 2023 audit of financial statements is currently ongoing!

The team has also been diligently working to meet the OTW's 2024 needs, and is proud to present to you this year's budget (access the 2024 budget spreadsheet for more detailed information):

2024 Expenses

Archive of Our Own (AO3)

• US$36,323.75 spent so far out of US$317,388.37 total this year, as of February 29, 2024.
• 47.2% of the OTW's expenses go towards maintaining the AO3. This includes the bulk of our server expenses—both new purchases and ongoing colocation and maintenance—website performance monitoring tools, and various systems-related licenses, as well as costs highlighted below (access all program expenses).
• This year's projected AO3 expenses also include US$120,000 to purchase new servers, as well as US$20,000 in server related equipment to increase the capacity of existing servers to handle expected site traffic growth through the year.

Open Doors

• US$1,814.10 spent so far out of US$10,618.35 total this year, as of February 29, 2024.
• Open Doors' expenses consist of hosting, backup, and domain costs for imported fanwork archives, as well as an allocated share of various OTW-wide productivity tools (access all program expenses).

Transformative Works and Cultures

• US$314.00 spent so far out of US$4,220.80 total this year, as of February 29, 2024.
• Transformative Works and Cultures' expenses are the journal's website hosting, publishing, and storage fees, as well as an allocated share of various OTW-wide productivity tools (access all program expenses).
• Additionally, the University of Amsterdam provided €1,000 (US$1,061) to Transformative Works and Cultures, which will be used to help fund the Fans of Color Research Prize.

Fanlore

• US$1,603.11 spent so far out of US$18,249.93 total this year, as of February 29, 2024.
• Fanlore's expenses are its share of allocated server hardware, maintenance and colocation costs, as well as its portion of various OTW-wide productivity tools (access all program expenses).

Legal Advocacy

• US$0.00 spent so far out of US$2,947.20 total this year, as of February 29, 2024.
• Legal's expenses consist of registration fees for conferences and hearings and funds set aside for legal filings if necessary, as well as an allocated share of OTW-wide productivity tools (access all program expenses).

Fundraising and Development

• US$20,537.62 spent so far out of US$159,357.74 total this year, as of February 29, 2024.
• Our fundraising and development expenses consist of transaction fees charged by our third-party payment processors for each donation, thank-you gift purchases and shipping, outreach work by volunteers at various fan conventions, and the tools used to host the OTW's membership database and track communications with donors and potential donors, as well as an allocated share of OTW-wide productivity tools (access fundraising expenses).

Administration

• US$39,976.35 spent so far out of US$161,831.47 total this year, as of February 29, 2024.
• The OTW’s administrative expenses include hosting for our website, trademarks, domains, insurance, tax filing, and annual financial statement audits, as well as productivity, management, and accounting tools (access all admin expenses).

2024 Revenue

• The OTW is entirely supported by your donations—thank you for your generosity!
• We receive a significant portion of our donations each year in the April and October fundraising drives, which together will account for about 22.4% of our income in 2024. We also receive donations via employer matching programs, royalties, and PayPal Giving Fund, which administers donations from programs like Humble Bundle and eBay for Charity. If you'd like to support us while making purchases on those websites, please select the Organization for Transformative Works as your charity of choice!
• Thanks to your generosity in previous years, we have a healthy amount of money in our reserves, which we can use to pay for larger than usual purchases and keep on hand for legal contingencies. As mentioned previously, we plan to continue to upgrade the capacity of the Archive's servers, which significantly increases server equipment and server hosting expenses. The growth of the Archive and other projects of the OTW also requires more volunteers and administrative support, further increasing expenses. The budget spreadsheet projects a withdrawal of US$230,000 from reserves to cover the costs that exceed the amount of revenue projected to be received this year. This amount may be withdrawn as needed during the year.
• US$78,066.43 received so far (as of February 29, 2024) and US$448,320.00 projected to be received by the end of the year.

Got questions?

If you have any questions about the budget or the OTW's finances, please contact the Finance committee. We'll get back to you as soon as possible!

To download the OTW's 2024 budget in spreadsheet format, please follow this link.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with Remi, who volunteers as a Tumblr moderator on our Communications committee.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

I run the OTW Tumblr account! The OTW was born of a love of fandom, and Tumblr is a place where a lot of fandom things happen. Still. No matter what the other news sites say about Tumblr. There are writers and artists, gifmakers and fancrafters, people whose whole blogs are finding fandom things and promoting their brilliant creators.

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

A couple of times a day I check the askbox and notes in the activity feed. A few times a week I trawl the tags for more posts to put into the queue. Some days the work is just being another point of contact for people trying to find information on the OTW, but sometimes it is about being a fandom sounding board—and those parts are my favorite. I try to balance queuing posts and reblogging polls, since those are usually time-constrained.

Sometimes I will get an ask that prompts me to start a conversation with another OTW team, and then I get to post something about how the OTW works that I didn’t know before someone asked. It might be tag wrangling on AO3, how things get imported to Open Doors—OTW heading to cons, even!

What made you decide to volunteer?

The call for volunteers went out, and I came across the Tumblr post mentioning that one of the openings was for a Tumblr mod. I have been a longtime supporter of the OTW and their mission, and I have been in and around various fandoms on Tumblr for a long time. This seemed like a way I could contribute to the OTW on an ongoing basis.

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?

There was that one time that the Tumblr blog was the only available communications platform due to a DDOS attack that took down all the OTW servers, right at the same time as Twitter was only viewable to logged-in Twitter users. That was definitely a challenge. If y’all are on Tumblr you will know that other than one-liner news updates via the Supernatural meme, it is not the best place for breaking news that requires continuous updates.

At least once a day I worry that I am not finding enough fandom variety in the queue. Finding fandom content for a fandom you aren’t in? Surprisingly stressful.

What fannish things do you like to do?

I have been an avid fic reader in a variety of fandoms for most of my adult life. I will read all sorts of things—I have a weakness for crossovers (although not usually fusions), crack-treated-seriously, and when someone fleshes out a canon’s worldbuilding. My friends will often laugh at me because I am almost always more excited to read about sidekicks than the protagonists.

I sort fic by word count and start with the longest! I will rarely find anything under 10,000 words without someone sending it to me. I started reading fanfiction because I always wanted to know what happened next, or what happened when we weren’t there in canon—so longfics are my go-to.

I beta read for a handful of writers. I really love being excited and screaming my excitement at a writer as they are writing. Beta reading was my first non-commenting contribution to fanworks, and my enjoyment of that led to me joining some fandom events.

I am not really an author, and the only art I make is fiber art. Luckily I found some events that were extremely supportive of the inclusion of fibercraft! I started to crochet fandom amigurumi for the artist-entry, and on occasion I have even sent them to the authors who inspired them! I also add fandom-related colorwork to my knitwear.

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out earlier Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Tennessee's proposal of the ELVIS Act might sound like something fun for fans, but in fact has the potential to create problems for fans engaging in a variety of fannish activities. This legislation is moving forward next week under pressure from Tennessee Governor Lee, but there is still some time to voice concerns and message the governor about how this act will hurt the public interest.

A number of organizations including the American Society for Collective Rights Licensing, Authors Guild, Copyright Clearance Center, National Music Publishers Association (NMPA), and Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) are sponsoring this act. The proposed legislation creates a new right of publicity “in any medium in any manner” for life + 10 years.

OTW Legal is concerned about the potential impact of this Act, and believes Tennessee fans should be aware of the profound risks posed to both RPF and fictional fanworks that invoke an actor's image. One part of the law is relatively minor: it adds “voice” to the existing right of publicity, which covers commercial uses. But it goes further. There is new, broad liability for anyone who knowingly “publishes, performs, distributes, transmits, or otherwise makes available to the public” content that includes someone's voice or likeness, with no limitation to commercial uses. This could potentially harm artists, authors who describe an actor (or a character played by a particular actor), vidders, and other fannish creators. There is also broad liability for anyone who “distributes, transmits, or otherwise makes available an algorithm, software, tool, or other technology, service or device” whose purpose is to make the replicas.

Because the ELVIS Act establishes liability for both the “user” and the “developer/platform”, it means that – without clear definitions – there could be a legal free-for-all on social media. The act's wording could mean that anyone clicking on an infringing document could be at legal risk. One of the OTW's partner organizations, NetChoice has more information about why the ELVIS Act could put fans at risk just for posting concert photos or for being associated with violations. As their post points out, there could be better laws passed instead to ban deep fakes.
The ELVIS Act is unnecessary as Tennessee law already adequately handles fraud, deception, and misappropriating someone’s likeness. If you are also concerned about this Act, let Tennessee officials know.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Would you like to wrangle AO3 tags? Can you read and translate from Russian to English? Can you read and translate from Filipino to English? Are you a digital artist interested in the OTW's work? The Organization for Transformative Works is recruiting!

We're excited to announce the opening of applications for:

• Tag Wrangling Volunteer - closing 20 March 2024 at 23:59 UTC [or after 90 applications]
• Tag Wrangling Volunteer (Russian) - closing 20 March 2024 at 23:59 UTC [or after 30 applications]
• Tag Wrangling Volunteer (Filipino) - closing 20 March 2024 at 23:59 UTC [or after 30 applications]
• Communications Graphics Volunteer - closing 20 March 2024 at 23:59 UTC [or after 40 applications]

We have included more information on each role below. Open roles and applications will always be available at the volunteering page. If you don't see a role that fits with your skills and interests now, keep an eye on the listings. We plan to put up new applications every few weeks, and we will also publicize new roles as they become available.

All applications generate a confirmation page and an auto-reply to your e-mail address. We encourage you to read the confirmation page and to whitelist our email address in your e-mail client. If you do not receive the auto-reply within 24 hours, please check your spam filters and then contact us.

If you have questions regarding volunteering for the OTW, check out our Volunteering FAQ.

Tag Wrangling Volunteer

The Tag Wranglers are responsible for helping to connect and sort the tags on AO3! Wranglers follow internal guidelines to choose the tags that appear in the filters and auto-complete, which link related works together. This makes it easier to browse and search on the archive.

If you’re an experienced AO3 user who likes organizing, working in teams, or having excuses to fact-check your favorite fandoms, you might enjoy tag wrangling! To join us, click through to the job description and fill in our application form. There will also be a short questionnaire that will help us assess whether you have the skills and attributes that will lead to your success in this role.

Please note: you must be 18+ in order to apply for this role. For this role, we’re currently looking for wranglers for specific fandoms only, which will change each recruitment round. Please see the application for which fandoms are in need.

Wranglers need to be fluent in English but we welcome applicants who are also fluent in other languages, especially Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian), Português brasileiro (Brazilian Portuguese), Čeština (Czech), Español (Spanish), isiZulu (Zulu), Italiano (Italian), Polski (Polish), Suomi (Finnish), Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese), Türkçe (Turkish), Українська (Ukrainian), ไทย (Thai), 한국어 (Korean), беларуская (Belarusian) and 中文 (Chinese - we welcome all dialects) — but help with other languages would be much appreciated!

Applications are due 20 March 2024 [or after 90 applications]

Tag Wrangling Volunteer (Russian)

The Tag Wranglers are responsible for helping to connect and sort the tags on AO3! Wranglers follow internal guidelines to choose the tags that appear in the filters and auto-complete, which link related works together. This makes it easier to browse and search on the archive.

If you're a fluent Russian speaker who likes organizing, working in teams, or having excuses to fact-check your favorite fandoms, you might enjoy tag wrangling! To join us, click through to the job description and fill in our application form. There will also be a short questionnaire that will help us assess whether you have the skills and attributes that will lead to your success in this role.

Please note: you must be 18+ in order to apply for this role. We’re currently looking for applicants who are fluent in both English and Russian (we welcome all dialects!). The work for this position will involve both regular Tag Wrangling work and translating tags from Russian into English. While this role has specific language requirements, we also always welcome multilingual speakers as part of our regular role, so please consider applying for that role if translating for any language as part of the wrangling team is of interest.

Applications are due 20 March 2024 [or after 30 applications]

Tag Wrangling Volunteer (Filipino)

The Tag Wranglers are responsible for helping to connect and sort the tags on AO3! Wranglers follow internal guidelines to choose the tags that appear in the filters and auto-complete, which link related works together. This makes it easier to browse and search on the archive.

If you're a fluent Filipino speaker who likes organizing, working in teams, or having excuses to fact-check your favorite fandoms, you might enjoy tag wrangling! To join us, click through to the job description and fill in our application form. There will also be a short questionnaire that will help us assess whether you have the skills and attributes that will lead to your success in this role.

Please note: you must be 18+ in order to apply for this role. We’re currently looking for applicants who are fluent in both English and Filipino (we welcome all dialects!). The work for this position will involve both regular Tag Wrangling work and translating tags from Filipino into English. While this role has specific language requirements, we also always welcome multilingual speakers as part of our regular role, so please consider applying for that role if translating for any language as part of the wrangling team is of interest.

Applications are due 20 March 2024 [or after 30 applications]

Apply at the volunteering page!

If you have further questions, please contact us.

Communications Graphics Volunteer

Are you a digital artist interested in the OTW's work? The OTW Communications committee is looking for graphic designers to create digital art for our news posts and other official documents. Communications is the main information distribution team for the OTW. We manage the OTW News blog and related social media accounts, and we assist other teams in managing project-specific communication. If you would like to join the OTW and help bring news to fandom and the public, click through to learn more about the role and apply to join as a Communications Graphics Volunteer.

Applications are due 20 March 2024 [or after 30 applications]

Apply at the volunteering page!

If you have further questions, please contact us.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

I. TWC FANS OF COLOR RESEARCH PRIZE

TWC recently announced their new Fans of Color Research Prize. The award recognizes the best peer-reviewed article about fans and/or fandoms of color published in Transformative Works and Cultures in the preceding 3 years (currently no earlier than 2021) and furthers the journal’s goal to support scholars whose work fills critical gaps in fan studies literature about racially marginalized and/or non-western fans. The winner will receive a $500 cash prize. Please feel free to disseminate the prize widely and nominate qualifying articles!

In addition, TWC is putting the finishing touches on their upcoming special issue on Fandoms and Platforms, which will be published on March 15th.

II. AT THE AO3

Open Doors has recently finished importing works for The Common People Warehouse, an archive focusing on the ordinary people of the Marvel universe, inspired by The Common People (TCP) genre of Marvel Comics fanfiction. They have also imported both prompts and fills for The Disney Kink Meme, a prompt meme focusing on the Disney animated films.

In February, Accessibility, Design & Technology deployed updates to several dependencies, including preparation for the upgrade to Rails 7, as well as changes to the mass wrangling bin to make loading it snappier. The details of these changes are in release notes for the changes deployed from November through February. Systems also migrated their version control to a new location so that they will have less to manage in the near future.

In January, Policy & Abuse received 2,112 tickets, while Support received 2,106. During January, Tag Wrangling handled more than 437,347 tags across upwards of 63,400 fandoms, more than 1,000 tags per wrangler.

III. INTERNATIONAL FANWORKS DAY

Communications had a particularly successful IFD celebration – many thanks to all our participants! The IFD survey apparently led many fans to become more aware of our social media outlets and project websites, as we received more visits or followers to all of them.

Thanks too to everyone who took part in the IFD Fanlore Challenge, which has been a great success with 47 participants! Fanlore volunteers also worked hard on posts for Femslash February!

IV. GOVERNANCE

In the past month, Board successfully ran the first Board public meeting of 2024. They had 110 attendees and answered a total of 21 questions received from the participants, of which 14 questions were answered during the live meeting period. The OTW’s contracted culture firm also delivered their report, and Board is excited to share their findings with OTW volunteers soon.

Meanwhile, the Board Assistants Team has recruited a Board Cybersecurity Delegate to begin working on Strategic Planning's cybersecurity goals.

V. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

From 19 January to 21 February, Volunteers & Recruiting received 111 new requests, and completed 118, leaving them with 42 open requests (including induction and removal tasks listed below).

As of 21 February 2024, the OTW has 867 volunteers. Recent personnel movements are listed below.

New BAT Volunteers: spacegandalf (Project Specialist) and 2 other Project Specialists
New Legal Volunteers: 1 Legal Committee Member
New Open Doors Volunteers: Eggy (Technical Volunteer), 1 Import Assistant and 2 Technical Volunteers

Departing Fanlore Volunteers: 1 Policy & Admin Volunteer
Departing Open Doors Volunteers: 1 Administrative Volunteer, 2 Import Assistants
Departing Support Volunteers: 1 Support Volunteer
Departing Systems Volunteers: 1 Technical Writer
Departing Tag Wrangler Volunteers: hmweasley (Supervisor), Kaysa, JoJo, mutedpiano (Tag Wranglers), and 10 other Tag Wranglers
Departing Translation Volunteers: Fifi, Mana (Translators) and 4 other Translators

For more information about the purview of our committees, please access the committee listing on our website.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

These eight releases feature quite a few notable improvements, including: modernizing the way we generate PDFs, making it more obvious which comments were made by guests, and fixing an issue that caused forced logouts. Additionally, we started laying the groundwork to upgrade to Rails 7.

Thank you and welcome to first-time contributors Albert Pedersen, Claire C, Domenic Denicola, isaackwatra, kwerey, leo60228, and Paul Lemus! We'd also like to thank de3sw2aq1 for pointing out two security issues.

Credits

• Coders: Albert Pedersen, alien, Bilka, bingeling, Brian Austin, Ceithir, Claire C, Domenic Denicola, EchoEkhi, Eliah Hecht, ellieyhc, james_, isaackwatra, Ivedonestranger, kwerey, leo60228, Paul Lemus, salt, Sarken, ticking instant, warlockmel, weeklies
• Code reviewers: alien, Bilka, Brian Austin, Ceithir, redsummernight, Sarken, ticking instant, weeklies
• Testers: alien, Brian Austin, Chelsea Cheyanne, Claire C, Dre, Frost the Fox, Jennifer D2, Kitsune_Scribe, lydia-theda, Maine, Priscilla, Runt, Sam Johnsson, Sarken, Sveritas, Teyke, Vio, wick

Details

0.9.352

On November 18, we released a bunch of bug fixes for tests and work downloads, and changed the way we generate PDFs.

• [AO3-5626] - When a download contained information about works it inspired, the title of those works overlapped the little "Works inspired by this one" heading, making it hard to read. We've stopped that from happening.
• [AO3-5774] - Tag category names in downloads were not pluralized when there was more than one tag, so the information block at the top of the work would say, for example, "Character: Name 1, Name 2." We've fixed it so it will now say "Characters" (or "Archive Warnings" or "Relationships" or...) when there are multiple tags of that type.
• [AO3-5776] - There's a note at the end of work downloads that encourages you to leave a comment. It used to use the word "author," but we've switched it to "creator," because "author" generally implies written works, and not all works on AO3 are written.
• [AO3-6058] - Downloads and work pages had inconsistencies galore when it came to including information about translations and other related works, so we standardized things a bit and fixed a bug that could sometimes reveal the title and creator of unrevealed works.
• [AO3-6601], [AO3-6632], [AO3-6633], [AO3-6638] - We made it so a whole bunch of automated tests that used to fail from time to time are more reliable!
• [AO3-6625] - The table of contents for EPUB downloads didn't always work on Kindles. We figured out the problem was related to spaces in the download's filename (seriously!), so we've started replacing them with underscores.
• [AO3-6605] - The tool we were using to flag syntax and style issues in code submissions was out of date and unlikely to be updated, so we switched to a different one that's up-to-date and has more capabilities.
• [AO3-5629] - When we started using Calibre to create the downloadable versions of works, it had some dependencies that meant we didn't want to use it for creating PDFs. Since it no longer has that dependency, and we'd found a security issue with the way we'd been creating PDFs, we've started using Calibre for PDFs as well.

0.9.353

We had a little two-issue deploy on November 29!

• [AO3-6611] - Autoloading constants during initialization outside configuration blocks will cause an error when we update to Rails 7, so we've addressed that issue ahead of time to make the update easier.
• [AO3-6636] - We've started using Chrome's prefetching to load the next chapter of works, which should make the site feel a little faster for Chrome users.

0.9.354

On January 6th, we rang in the new year with a packed release! Highlights include adding the ability to filter all works in a specific language and making it easier to tell which comments were left by guests.

• [AO3-3217] - On fields with character counters, screen readers used to tell you how many characters you had remaining every time you pressed a key. That was very annoying, so we made them stop doing that. Now they only provide this information if you ask for it by navigating to the character counter.
• [AO3-3471] - You can now filter all the works in a specific language by going to, for example, /languages/fr for works in French or /languages/ko for works in Korean.
• [AO3-5048] - When a collection owner or moderator changed their username or pseud, the blurb for the collection didn't always update to use the new one. Now it will.
• [AO3-5259] - If you opened the tag filter menu on AO3 News after filtering news posts by tag or language, it would contain a messy list of duplicated tags. We've tidied it up so it only includes each tag once, in alphabetical order.
• [AO3-6528] - If a collection owner tried to add a banned or suspended user to their collection, they'd receive a message telling them the user was banned or suspended. For privacy, we've changed the message.
• [AO3-6533] - Works are only supposed to have one rating, but it was possible to get around that by using your browser's developer tools. Now you'll get an error message if you try to do that.
• [AO3-6551] - We added a character counter to the CSS field on the page for creating skins and made sure it gives a nice error message when you're over the limit, rather than just giving a 500 error with no indication of what's causing the problem.
• [AO3-6626] - Wranglers could create tags containing Chinese and Japanese commas, which was bad because tag autocomplete expects commas to indicate the end of one tag and the start of a new one. Trying to create these tags will error now, so we don't end up with unusable tags.
• [AO3-6643] - We fixed a bug that resulted in errors when trying to sort work search results by certain fields.
• [AO3-6645], [AO3-6646] - We fixed some occasional failures in our automated tests.
• [AO3-5995] - The database column that indicates whether a comment was marked as spam has a rather confusing name, so we took the first step toward renaming it by adding a new column named spam.
• [AO3-5386], [AO3-6314] - We removed some unused columns from the database tables for preferences and external works.
• [AO3-6505] - We made some performance tweaks to how statistics and collections are fetched to show in work blurbs.
• [AO3-6639] - We did a schema dump to capture what the current data structure looks like before we upgrade to Rails 7.
• [AO3-6548] - Comments left by guests got a makeover! They'll now have a different icon from the default icon for logged in users, plus the word "(Guest)" will be added in nice bold text beside the commenter's name.
• [AO3-6579] - We changed the browser page title on the Create Account from "New Registration" to "Create Account." Consistency! 🎉
• [AO3-6609] - Checking the status of your invitation will now give you the option of having it resent to you, assuming you haven't used it yet and it was sent more than 24 hours ago.
• [AO3-6631] - The Twitter widget on the homepage no longer worked, so we replaced it with links to where you can find us on social media.
• [AO3-6386] - Our previews for testing translated emails weren't working right because the fake email addresses were being translated, which would sometimes result in invalid characters in the addresses. To fix that, we've changed how the fake email addresses are generated.
• [AO3-6650] - After we added chapter prefetching in the last release, we noticed the new code wasn't always included when it should've been. We tracked down the cache block that was causing this and moved the prefetch code outside it.
• [AO3-6653] - We updated the tool that automatically adds and removes labels on pull requests.

0.9.355 & 0.9.356

On 8 January and 11 January, we fixed some performance and security issues.

• [AO3-6664] - We made some performance improvements to the code that handles both redirects for works imported by Open Doors and checking to make sure a URL has only been imported once.
• [AO3-6665] - We added protocol restrictions for URLs used for the source and track elements of audio and video embeds to ensure they begin with http:// or https://.
• [AO3-6666] - Allowing users to resend invitations (AO3-6609) was causing some performance issues, so we reverted that change until we can make the code work better.

0.9.357

We did a bit of housekeeping on January 16.

• [AO3-6662] - The automated task for deleting unused tags stopped working, so we fixed it on production. Then we had to commit that fix to the codebase.
• [AO3-6663] - We fixed an occasional test failure related to archivists and co-creators.
• [AO3-6654], [AO3-6655], [AO3-6660] - Our dependency updater updated a few things we use when running automated options on GitHub.

0.9.358

On January 24, we made some changes to session cookies, which required some downtime to ensure logged in users didn't get logged out.

• [AO3-6629] - We've switched from encrypted cookies to signed-only cookies to increase compatibility with Cloudflare. This change, combined with some work by our lovely Systems team, should reduce the number of forced logouts some users were experiencing.

0.9.359

Our February 10 release features the ability to add parent skins in the skin wizard, plus a big performance improvement for wrangling pages.

• [AO3-6566] - The code for telling assistive technology (e.g., screen readers) that help links control the help pop-up was written wrong, so we made a one-character change and fixed it.
• [AO3-6574] - We updated how our menu items present themselves to screen readers to match current standards.
• [AO3-6659] - When banning a user for spam, admins have the option to delete all their creations, including collections. The list could include collections the user belonged to but did not own, which wasn't quite right. That bug has been fixed.
• [AO3-6473] - There was some code in the Application Controller that wasn't used, so we got rid of it.
• [AO3-6651] - We've been using Rails 6.1 for about a year now, so we updated to use the default settings that go with that version.
• [AO3-6656], [AO3-6657], [AO3-6673], [AO3-6675], [AO3-6677] - Our handy bot friend updated several of our dependencies and automated tools for us. 🤖
• [AO3-2722] - You can now add parent skins from the skin wizard!
• [AO3-6210] - In order to improve performance and make some nifty things possible down the line, we've begun loading the tags in the mass wrangling bins from Elasticsearch, not from SQL.
• [AO3-6500] - Entering a URL with the HTTPS protocol when bookmarking an external work, providing a link in a challenge prompt, or setting a header for your collection will no longer result in the protocol getting changed to HTTP.
• [AO3-6572] - For troubleshooting and anti-abuse purposes, admins can now see exactly when a user blocked or muted someone.
• [AO3-6637] - Remember release 0.9.353, when we started using prefetching to speed up chapter loading times in Chrome? Well, now we've moved on to an even newer and faster way of doing the same thing: prerendering!
• [AO3-6640] - With each new version of Ruby on Rails, there are new default configurations for how things work under the hood. We still had some old ones set, so to prepare for upgrading Rails, we removed them.

Open Doors is pleased to announce the completion of 11 archive import projects in 2023, a total of over 10,000 works! We hope that you will find old and new favorites in the collections listed below.

Open Doors has been importing at-risk archives of fanworks since 2012, starting with the Smallville Slash Archive. These latest projects bring our total number of archives imported to 101! The 100th archive imported was the LeBeau Library of the Gambit Guild forum.

A Priest in Korea

Completed: January 2023

Susan Leinbach created fanart and fanfiction in a number of fandoms, including M*A*S*H (as Iolanthe) and Star Trek. Unfortunately, Susan passed away in June 2006. Susan’s next of kin agreed for archivist Quordle to preserve Susan’s M*A*S*H fanfiction, which Susan originally shared using the pseud Iolanthe on her website titled A Priest in Korea.

Find works at the Iolanthe_memorial AO3 account.

For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the A Priest in Korea import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the Susan Leinbach and A Priest in Korea Fanlore pages.

Dragonfayth

Completed: February 2023

Dragonfayth is an archive dedicated to the Yu-Gi-Oh! pairing of Anzu Mazaki/Seto Kaiba.

Find works at Dragonfayth Collection.

For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the Dragonfayth import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the Dragonfayth Fanlore page.

Lord of the Rings Fanfiction

Completed: February 2023

Lord of the Rings Fanfiction was an archive for fic inspired by the Lord of the Rings books and movies. While the archive included sections for crossovers, Lord of the Rings RPF, and slash, the main focus was canon-based non-slash works. Founded in 2004 by Adora, the archive was eventually entrusted to Queen Mab, who worked with Open Doors to move its works to the AO3.

Find works at the Lord of the Rings Fanfiction Collection.

For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the Lord of the Rings Fanfiction import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the Lord of the Rings Fanfiction Fanlore page.

Viggorli Secret Santa

Completed: May 2023

Viggorli Secret Santa, an annual Lord of the Rings RPS fanfiction gift exchange focusing on the Viggo Mortensen/Orlando Bloom relationship, has been running on AO3 since 2020. In an effort to consolidate all the older works (2010-2019) from the LiveJournal and Dreamwidth sites, the moderator wanted to move those works across to AO3 as well.

Find works at Viggorli Secret Santa Exchange Collection.

For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the Viggorli Secret Santa import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the Viggorli XMAS Fanlore page.

Offpanel.net

Completed: September 2023

Offpanel.net was a superhero comics-focused online archive that ran from 1999 to 2016, featuring the works of approximately 15 creators on separate homepages. Its byline is, "Where 4-Color Doodles Do Off-Color Things," though the content includes stories of every rating and category.

Find works at Offpanel.net Collection.

To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the Offpanel.net Fanlore page.

Weir/McKay Fanfiction Archive

Completed: September 2023

Weir/McKay Fanfiction Archive is an archive for Stargate Atlantis Rodney McKay/Elizabeth Weir fanfiction. The site launched in January 2006 and remained up until sometime in 2015, when the founder, Purpleyin, could not maintain it anymore and the site went down.

Find works at Weir/McKay Fanfiction Archive Collection.

For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the Weir/McKay Fanfiction Archive import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the Weir/McKay Fanfiction Archive Fanlore page.

Echoes from the West

Completed: October 2023

Echoes from the West was a Saiyuki fanfiction archive. It was closed and imported to the AO3 due to the original provider being no longer able to support the archive.

Find works at the Echoes from the West Collection.

For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the Echoes from the West import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the Echoes from the West Fanlore page.

The ARC

Completed: November 2023

The ARC is an archive for Primeval fanfiction. The site was hosted online from 2008 until 2014, when due to the founder's impossibility to maintain it, it went offline.

Find works at The ARC Collection.

For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the The ARC import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the The ARC Fanlore page.

What Makes the Desert Beautiful

Completed: November 2023

What Makes the Desert Beautiful (WMTDB) was an archive for CSI: Crime Scene Investigation fanfiction focused on the Nick and Greg slash pairing, active from 2004 to 2017.

Find works at What Makes the Desert Beautiful Collection.

For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the WMTDB import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the WMTDB Fanlore page.

LeBeau Library

Completed: November 2023

The LeBeau Library of the Gambit Guild forum was an X-Men fanfiction archive focusing on the character Remy LeBeau or "Gambit", active between 2006 and 2010.

Find works at LeBeau Library Collection.

For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the LeBeau Library import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the Gambit Guild Fanlore page.

Library of Moria

Completed: December 2023

The Library of Moria was founded in 2002, shortly after the release of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, and was one of the first online archives for The Lord of the Rings! Unlike other Tolkien archives at the time, its focus was movie-based slash fanfiction organized by pairing. However, it quickly grew in scope and popularity. The AO3 collection is open and accepts all Tolkien-based slash, gen, and RPS fanfiction.

Find works at Library of Moria Collection.

For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the Library of Moria import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the Library of Moria Fanlore page.

We want to give a huge THANK YOU to all of the archivists and volunteers who made these imports possible, as well as all the creators who have transferred or claimed their works! We look forward to importing more archives in 2024.

Commenting on this post will be disabled after two weeks, on 18 March. If you have any questions, concerns, or comments regarding these imports after that date, please contact Open Doors.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.