Archive of Our Own

The last several code deploys introduced some exciting changes to work posting: a big update to our rich text editor, support for the HTML5 audio and video tags, a little tweak in how we handle language selection, and some less confusingly labeled buttons! In addition, a whole lot of challenge improvements and behind-the-scenes infrastructure upgrades.

Credits

• Coders: Alix R, cosette, Elz, Enigel, james_, redsummernight, Sarken, Tal, tickinginstant
• Code reviewers: Ariana, bingeling, Enigel, james_, redsummernight, Sarken, Scott, tickinginstant
• Testers: bingeling, Briar, CJ Record, GoldenFalls, Izzy, james_, Lady Oscar, lydia-theda, MagnusIsMyRock, McBangle, Nary, nimadge, Paula, Rebecca Sentance, redsummernight, Relle, Sarken

Details

Rich Text Editor

• [AO3-5191] - We upgraded the version of TinyMCE that we use for our Rich Text Editor.
• [AO3-5809], [AO3-5811] - The new version of TinyMCE overrides the browser's default context menu, which prevents desktop users from right-clicking to copy, paste, spell check, etc. We disabled this behavior.
• [AO3-5812] - The same new version of TinyMCE defaults to a reduced interface for users on mobile devices. We disabled this behavior too.

Collections and Challenges

• [AO3-4353] - Some inconvenient caching was affecting the display of tag set content (e.g. Character or Relationship tags) on challenge sign-up pages. Now the correct tags are shown.
• [AO3-5786] - Trying to access the list of allowed tags from a challenge sign-up would throw an error 500, which is now fixed as well!
• [AO3-5785] - Owners of collections were previously able to add works in other, anonymous collections to their own, which enabled them to see the work's creator. We've now made it impossible to add anonymous works to your collection.
• [AO3-5101] - Trying to save a challenge with sign-ups open and a closing date set, but no opening date, would throw an error 500. Now the challenge profile correctly states that you can sign-up and until what date.
• [AO3-5102] - If you closed sign-ups for a challenge before the set closing date, the challenge profile would show that sign-ups were closed, but ~in the future~~~ (i.e. the set closing date). Now the date just isn't displayed anymore, to avoid any confusion.
• [AO3-5593] - When fetching a list of all collections a work had been approved to be in, we used an unnecessary query, which was not good for database performance. Much better now!
• [AO3-4571] - You have two open assignments, and they both happen to be for the same recipient. You post a work fulfilling one of the assignments. However, the other assignment's ticky box is also checked in the posting form. If you don't notice this, you post the work and suddenly your other assignment is fulfilled as well. But it's really not! (Aww.) We now make sure only the correct ticky is ticked and you still have to write a second work for the other assignment. *\o/*

Language

• [AO3-5702] - We previously had English set as the default language when posting a new work. This led to a lot of miscategorized works, since creators often wouldn't notice the language selection when posting non-English works. We now require all users to manually set the language their work is in.
• [AO3-4605] - The form used for work imports now sports a mandatory "Choose a language" field as well.
• [AO3-5790] - We accidentally broke filtering for works in português brasileiro or português europeu, so we intentionally fixed it.
• [AO3-5616] - In our lists of FAQ categories available in Arabic or Hebrew, the first category name was misaligned. We've put it back in line.

Misc.

• [AO3-5693] - Posting audio or video fanworks? Now you can use the HTML5 audio and video tags!
• [AO3-4080] - We had a very peculiar bug where our devs weren't able to use multiple CSS box shadows on their development environments despite it being possible on the Archive itself. Turns out we had a broken regular expression in our code, but the fact that we had box-shadow in the wrong part of the production configuration file was hiding the issue. The bug has been fixed and the production config file updated, so now box-shadow works the same for everyone.
• [AO3-4560] - We renamed the buttons for posting works: "Post Without Preview" becomes "Post", and "Save Without Posting" becomes "Save As Draft".
• [AO3-5632] - When you follow a link from the Archive to another site or go to a page with the Twitter widget (e.g. a work), some information is automatically sent to the site (or Twitter). We have now limited referrer information and won't tell the site you clicked on (or Twitter) which page you were on.
• [AO3-5761] - We have added the Rack::Attack gem, which enables us to control how many requests to the database an IP address can send before we firmly tell it to not (and serve an error page instead).
• [AO3-5639] - Trying to visit an unrevealed work (and getting a helpful message instead) or accessing a hidden work (as an admin) would increase that work's hit count, potentially giving the creator of said work quite the scare. We have removed that particular source of panic now.
• [AO3-3617] - Tags that begin with a capital letter with an accent or other diacritical mark (e.g. Éomer) wouldn't show up in the autocomplete if no fandom was entered in the posting form. Now they should!
• [AO3-5825] - Dashboard sidebars retrieve work and bookmark counts from Elasticsearch, which ties up Elasticsearch in long queries, making everyone sad. We are now caching those counts, creating a little less work for the search engine every time a page with the sidebar is loaded. \o/ (Note: This means the count will no longer go up immediately when you add or delete a work or bookmark. The delay should currently be about half an hour, but we may adjust it in the future.)

Infrastructure

• [AO3-5789] - Updated Database Cleaner and other test-only gems.
• [AO3-5795] - Updated MySQL2 to 0.5.2 to support libmariadb and Debian 10.
• [AO3-5798] - Updated Loofah from 2.2.3 to 2.3.1.
• [AO3-5749] - Updated Elasticsearch to 6.8.5 and its gem to 6.8.0.
• [AO3-5826] - Updated Nokogiri to 1.10.5.
• [AO3-5797], [AO3-5800] - Updated the staging server names in our deploy script.
• [AO3-5194] - Updated schema and structure files.
• [AO3-5787] - We've put the code for the public site skins Reversi, Snow Blue, and Low Vision Default in our code repository for safe keeping and better tracking of changes.

Tests

• [AO3-5788] - We had previously been using Ubuntu Xenial for tests on our CI service, but now we've switched to Bionic, which is closer to our production environment.
• [AO3-5814] - Sometimes we make changes that we don't need our automated tests to check. We've made it so we can include a note in the commit message that will tell one of our CI services to skip running the tests and deploy the changes straight to our staging environment.
• [AO3-5815] - The automated tests for our emails had a lot of redundancy, so we reduced that.
• [AO3-5758] - We changed some settings on our automated code style checker to make its formatting suggestions more useful.
• [AO3-5772] - We've stopped running automated code style checks on JavaScript files for third-party plugins, since we didn't write them and aren't going to address style violations found in them. We've also stopped checking minified JavaScript files because, seriously, we know it's one giant long line without spaces or indentation -- that's the whole point.

I. MILESTONES FOR FANLORE AND AO3

This month, two of the OTW's projects celebrated major milestones, as Fanlore hit 50,000 pages and AO3 turned 10 years old.

Communications made a series of posts marking the AO3's 10-year anniversary, which fell on November 14. We spoke to a number of staffers who have been with the OTW since the early days about some of the challenges they had faced, as well as about their favorite parts of working for the OTW and some of their predictions for the future. The hard work of the Translation committee meant that we were able to publish these posts in 24 languages.

A little later in the month, we were happy to see the 50,000th page published on the Fanlore wiki. The committee marked the occasion with social posts across Tumblr, Twitter and Dreamwidth as well as a post on AO3 news. Check out the post to see the special banner that the team's graphic designers created for the occasion!

Fanlore's next goal is to reach one million edits; they are already at 900,000 and climbing. If you are interested in contributing, you can find more information at Fanlore's Portal for new visitors.

II. AT THE AO3

The Accessibility, Design and Technology committee and the Systems committee have been dealing with some intermittent site slowness on the AO3 over the past few weeks. This is due to strain on the Elasticsearch servers, which became more acute under the heavy traffic of the American Thanksgiving weekend. The OTW had already been planning to purchase new servers and these have now been ordered (as of 27 November) but we ask for users' patience over the next few months until they are delivered and installed. In the meantime, we are working to upgrade the Elasticsearch software in the hope that this will at least alleviate the issue.

We'd like to thank everybody whose generous donations enabled this purchase: this is a real example of what we are able to do with the money entrusted to us by our users.

Continuing the work they began last month, our Open Doors staffers have been working hard (in collaboration with the Board of Directors and the Legal committee) to preserve as much content as possible in advance of the Yahoo Groups closure, currently scheduled for December 14. This work has included expanding archive import procedures to include procedures for importing Yahoo Groups and/or storing their contents.

The Tag Wrangling team created a new team of Chinese-speaking wranglers, who work to translate tags for the rest of the committee. They're also working to standardize these translations so that the same terms remain consistent regardless of who is working on them. That was in November; in October, the wranglers handled around 244,000 tags in more than 34,000 fandoms!

Meanwhile, Policy & Abuse handled 2,000 tickets in October and Support around 1,200 tickets.

III. ELSEWHERE AT THE OTW

A few additional updates from our other committees: the Board has been working with Legal, Systems and Finance to explore how we can push back against the recent sale of ".org" domains to a private company. Translation conducted a very successful recruitment round, receiving an unprecedented number of applications and bringing the team to a total of 236 volunteers!

Lastly, Transformative Works and Cultures is working hard on the finishing touches for their next issue, which will be published on December 15.

IV. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

Volunteers & Recruiting: As of 27 October the OTW has 812 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below.

New Committee Chairs: Aenya, AliceJane (Policy & Abuse)
New Committee Staff: ami, BooksAreLife, Cerberusia, Haunt_Haunt_Haunt, interstitial, Mars, Seakittens & Zixin Zhang (all Policy & Abuse) and 10 other Policy & Abuse staffers, Beth Boisvert, Gillian Webster, Irina, Jen S, Megan Q, Zoë Renee (all Tag Wrangling) and 2 other Tag Wrangling staffers, Laure (Translation), Hanna White (AO3 Documentation)
New Fanlore Volunteers: Marion McGowan
New Translation Volunteers: Aqilah Norain, aruna, Beste Karataş, Bruna, Cynassa, Cypher, dxdim, Felix Engler, Joyce Zhao, Lauritz, lemoncave, Masha Yankovych, Maya Habee, Melifluo, Reptile Ruler, siobhrag, solrosan, soumyaa, Tygermine, Vincent, wildflower01, Winchester1989, Zoey and 20 other Translation volunteers

Departing Committee Staff: SarkaS (Translation), Cyn (Support), Muriel Kalliokoski (Policy & Abuse), Makari Crow (AO3 Docs), Ona Lu (Legal), Aris Gemenetzis (Fanlore), 1 AO3 Docs Staffer, 2 Communications staffers, 4 Development & Membership staffers, 1 Fanlore staffer, 1 Legal staffer, 1 Translation staffer
Departing Communications Volunteers: 2 volunteers
Departing Development & Membership Volunteers: 1 volunteer
Departing Fanlore Volunteers: 2 volunteers
Departing Tag Wrangler Volunteers: BeautifulMistake3, cest_what, Flynn Germain, Giana, Hannah Miro, Minkster, Sam Bailey and 25 other Tag Wranglers
Departing Translation Volunteers: Anya Z, SimK
Departing TWC Volunteers: 2 volunteers

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.

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 Anhaita, who volunteers with the Translation Committee.

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

As a volunteer, I'm part of the Translation Committee. Our main objective is making the site and its content available in different languages for easy accessibility and understanding to all those whose first language isn't English. We help in cross lingual communications with other Committees as well! (Support and Abuse, for example).

Translation is also subdivided into smaller language teams, so no matter what language you wish to communicate in, we most likely have someone to make sure the message gets interpreted correctly. As the OTW is geared towards fans from various communities and cultures, our goal is to make sure people can access our website in languages they feel comfortable with.

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

As I'm part of a very small team (literally, it's just two of us here), we mainly have a large number of documents to sort through and translate. So usually, I spend the week translating a document, perhaps a webpage for the OTW site, like the FAQs or a News post. At times, I may get contacted to help translate a text-image, or fic-tags in my language, for a different Committee -- we are kind of the go-between here!

Translating some words into my language, Marathi, can be pretty tough, and sometimes hilarious even. We have to figure out how sentence structures have to be changed to fit a text, or the closest possible translation is used. Fun fact: Fanvid is literally translated to mean "Western Picture Gallery" in Marathi (because that's a word English totally dreamt up one day and refused to inform the other languages).

On the whole, it's a pretty relaxing workload, and is easily managed side by side with university life (with some good time management skills; seriously, if it's one thing I've learnt as a volunteer, it's that!).

What made you decide to volunteer?

I've always wanted to, I think. On some level, I wanted to give back to the community that has been there for me in little ways, throughout my formative years, providing encouragement and companionship when I needed it. And volunteering for the OTW was a way to do that, to be a part of something that allows fans to have a wholesome and positive environment to exercise their creativity in! It also allowed me to actively support the site that I'd grown so fond of!

What's the most fun thing to you about volunteering for the OTW?

The sense of community! Seriously, imagine hundreds of people with like minded interests and passion for fannish activities -- it's a wonderful feeling. Another thing I've really enjoyed is taking part in the annual International Fanworks Day celebration -- hosting games and interacting with people who've come to enjoy this site so much. It's lovely to see how this site has brought fans together!

What fannish things do you like to do?

Oh, a myriad of things! I've read, written and even beta-read many fanfictions over the years. I've taken part in and helped organise a couple of fanwork challenges, and I love browsing through the truly wonderful fan art created by artists out there!

But mainly, reading (devouring) fanfiction has become a very integral part of my life. I've officially read more fanfiction than books by now!

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 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.

The OTW Open Doors Committee has sent the following letter to leadership at Verizon to request that they extend the deadline for deletion of existing archives of Yahoo Groups files and messages by at least six months. This request follows Yahoo's announcement that Yahoo Groups will be permanently closing, and deleting all previously posted material on December 14, 2019. The OTW previously reported on the Yahoo Groups closure in its posts Yahoo Groups Closure - What You Can Do and Yahoo Groups Closure - What You Can Do - Part 2.

Please respectfully contact Verizon's Executive Team via email or Twitter with a link to this post requesting an extension through May 14, 2020. If you are tweeting, be certain to include news groups that have covered the Yahoo shutdown, such as CNET (@CNET), TechRadar (@TechRadar), Boing Boing (@BoingBoing), or The Telegraph (@Telegraph).

---

Dear Verizon,

We are writing regarding the impending closure of Yahoo Groups on behalf of the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), a nonprofit organization run by and for fans to provide access to and preserve the history of fanworks and fan cultures.

Due to its unique status as a large nonprofit focused on fandom advocacy, the OTW has a major presence in fandom. The OTW is made up of over 800 volunteers from all over the world, and our best-known project, the Archive of Our Own (AO3), has over five million fanworks, two million registered users, and over 1.4 million unique visitors per month. This year, the AO3 won a Hugo Award for Best Related Work, and, along with Yahoo, was listed by Popular Mechanics as one of the 50 most important websites of all time (https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/g29575328/most-important-websites/). Other OTW projects include Fanlore, the fandom history wiki, and Open Doors, which rescues fanworks archives that are at risk of disappearing from the Internet.

The OTW's main concern regarding the effective closure of Yahoo Groups is for its long-term impact on online fandom history and online history as a whole. Yahoo Groups was a fandom hub for more than two decades, and many of the fanworks saved there are not duplicated anywhere else, to say nothing of the conversations and other ephemera. While the OTW is primarily concerned with fandom, there are over 5 million Groups in total with countless messages and files, and hundreds of millions of people who will be affected by the loss of almost 20 years of data and history.

Open Doors and Fanlore, among other projects, are currently working hard to help preserve these works, messages, and other data, but saving everything before the time limit is simply impossible. Open Doors normally receives one or two requests each month from moderators seeking to transfer their archives to the AO3; since the announcement on October 16 that Yahoo Groups was closing, we have received over 40 requests from Yahoo Groups moderators alone.

We are using all of our official channels to inform people about the closure, as well as coordinating with other preservation projects such as YahooGeddon and the Archive Team. We are also fielding requests from members and moderators to help download and save files and messages from their Groups, and discussing the creation of a dark archive to store these downloads until more permanent methods of preservation can be found. Unfortunately, the Archive Team's automated download program has been blocked by the Yahoo Groups servers, so we are forced to do what we can by hand and are therefore extremely limited in what we can save.

Saving Yahoo Groups is going to require a great deal more time and support from Verizon. Although Verizon promised users they could download their Groups data via the Privacy Dashboard, many users are being told, "Your download request has been completed, but no data of this type is available in your account." The GetMyData sets are also incomplete, often missing files and photos. Instead, people are having to copy-paste, manually download, or utilize specialized software in order to save their Groups. To make matters worse, because Verizon has chosen to limit downloads to a few weeks, moderator and members, along with the Archive Team and Wayback Machine, are being locked out or blocked and prevented from accessing their data.

Furthermore, many Groups—especially in the EU, South America, and Asia—have not yet been informed of the Yahoo Groups closure. This is in part because Verizon has not made an official, widely posted announcement and in part because the Yahoo Groups mailing lists have been broken since 2013, with mail arriving days or weeks late, or not at all.

Therefore, Verizon needs to extend the deadline to allow time to get the word out to Yahoo Groups owners about the closure, time to fix its download request feature, and time for users to access their data. Based on the number of groups these teams' combined efforts are trying to save, the rate at which they are being saved, and the fact that many Yahoo Group moderators are still being informed of the closure, we are requesting that six months be added to Verizon's deadline, so that data from Yahoo Groups will not be deleted until May 14, 2020.

There is a long history of large websites losing information without a trace. One of Open Doors' first projects was a last-minute scramble to rescue GeoCities sites. MySpace deleting a decade of content is a recent example. This is not uncommon in new media that is not yet considered worthy of preservation, but with your assistance, Yahoo Groups can be saved from being the latest entry on a tragic list of websites that simply disappeared forever. Other tech companies have shown a callous disregard for the value of user's memories, experiences, and history, but by granting this extension, Verizon can demonstrate that it truly values its users and the important role that Yahoo Groups has played in their online lives.

Sincerely,
The Organization for Transformative Works

Fanlore, the collaborative fandom wiki from the Organization for Transformative Works that anyone can edit, is celebrating a huge milestone: 50,000 pages! Would you like to come celebrate with us?

If you haven’t heard of Fanlore, it’s a multi-fandom, free and open wiki that was designed to be a living, evolving record of fandom’s past and present: created by fans, and maintained by fans. Like AO3, Fanlore was launched in 2008, and since then, fans have made more than 900,000 edits across more than 50,000 pages to record tropes, communities, meta, memes, fanworks, fannish perspectives and much more.

Fanlore is open for anyone to edit – all you need to do is create an account. Any edits, big or small, are welcome! You don’t need to be an expert, or have been in fandom for a long time, to contribute. The wiki wouldn’t have gotten to where it is without the dedication, perseverance and experiences of thousands of fans over the years who have added to and edited Fanlore.

Recently, Fanlore editors have been working to document hundreds of fannish Yahoo! Groups before they’re deleted in December, and last year fans took to Fanlore to document the history of fandom on Tumblr in the midst of the Tumblr NSFW Content Purge. But it isn’t just about big historical events or fandom migrations – every corner of fandom, from the Hanahaki Disease trope to A/B/O, massive fan archives to tiny niche ships, has a place on Fanlore. Try searching for your favorite character or ship! You could add something of your own to those pages.

If you’d like to edit Fanlore but aren’t sure where to start, our New Visitor Portal has a bunch of tips and links to get you started. We also have a how-to on editing pages, and a tutorial for creating new pages if you’d like to help us start down the road to 100,000 pages! Every single edit helps Fanlore preserve more of fandom’s history and experiences, and helps ensure that the amazing creativity and passion of fandoms old and new is recorded and remembered.

The Fanlore team have set our sights on one million edits next – we hope you’ll join us!

To learn more about what Fanlore’s volunteers do behind the scenes, check out our previous spotlight posts:

• Five Things Kate Flanagan Said
• Five Things SoyAlex Said
• Gardener Spotlight: MPH

Did you know you can post and browse works in over 70 languages on the Archive? In fact, AO3 is home to roughly 400,000 fanworks in languages other than English, with more posted every day! To help everyone find works in their preferred language, we've made some small changes to posting and searching.

Previously, the "Choose a language" field on the posting form was set to English by default, which made it easy to accidentally post a non-English work with the language set to English.

To fix this, we've updated the "Choose a language" field so English is no longer the default. Instead, everyone will need to select the correct language when posting a new work. If you forget, don't worry -- we've also added a friendly error message to remind you.

We've also made it a little easier to search or filter for works based on language! While we provide a "Language" field on our various search and filter forms, sometimes it's not enough -- for example, if you want works in either Spanish or Italian.

A search like that used to require knowing some numerical codes unique to the Archive. Now you can use these standard language codes with the search operators described in our cheatsheet. For example, to find works tagged with "Friendship" in either Italian or Spanish, you would enter language_id: es OR language_id: it in the "Search within results" field on the work listing for the "Friendship" tag. (The old numerical codes will continue to work, so there's no need to update bookmarks or links.)

We hope these changes will make the Archive a bit better for everyone, regardless of which languages you use for creating and consuming fanworks. And as always, if you notice a work with the wrong language, you can contact our Policy & Abuse team and they will help correct any mislabeled works.

Over the last few weeks, you may have noticed a few brief periods when the Archive has been slow to load (or refusing to load at all). This is because our Elasticsearch servers are under some strain. We've made some adjustments to our server setup, but because this is our busiest time of year, we expect the problems to continue until we're able to have new servers delivered and installed in a few months.

We've been planning this server purchase for a while now, but the machines we wanted -- AMD's Epyc Rome CPUs, which have an increased core count and are cheaper than the Intel equivalent -- didn't come on the market until August. Now that they've been released, we're working on finding the best price to help us make the most of your generous donations. We expect to order them very soon.

While we're waiting for our new servers, we plan to upgrade the Elasticsearch software to see if the newer version offers any performance improvements. We hope this upgrade and the changes to our server setup will keep things from getting much worse during our end-of-year traffic influx.

Thank you for your patience, and for all the donations that allow us to buy new hardware when these situations arise!

Update 27 November: The servers have been ordered, but it will still be a few months before they are delivered and installed.

Michele Tepper’s contribution is the final post in our series celebrating 10 years since the launch of the Archive of Our Own. Michele was a founding member of the OTW and helped create much of AO3’s “look” in her role as head of design in the early days. Her contribution provides a nice conclusion to the series, emphasizing the importance of working together in order to make such a big project a success.

I got involved with the OTW because I knew some of the other founders already. I had designed a discussion board for Buffy fans (buffistas.org) a few years earlier, and so I had an understanding of the challenges of working with a remote team of volunteers on a project for a fan community. Also, I was working for a digital product design studio, where I saw the wave of commercialization around "user-generated content", and I liked the idea of doing something that helped keep transformative works in the hands of the creators. So I told Naomi Novik I was interested in helping out, and that's how I ended up as a founding board member for the OTW!

What I remember most about the early days of the Archive was the collaboration. Naomi, cmshaw, and I spent long hours coming up with the core functions of the archive; technologists and user experience designer collaborating to find the best solution. We built out a roadmap that saw the Archive through its earliest years, as well as an experience that people point to as exceptional, and I'm proud of that.

My favorite thing about AO3 is the tagging and the tag wranglers. I have the tag page for "feels" as a bookmark on my phone, and when I need an emotional boost, I go and look at all the different ways people have tagged for feels, all listed out and merged by the wranglers. It makes me ridiculously happy every time.

I don't pretend to know what the OTW's future will be, because I couldn't have predicted its past! Fanworks are much more accepted in the mainstream than they were 10 years ago, and the OTW and the Archive are a big part of the reason why.

So that’s all for our series from behind the scenes at the AO3. We are so appreciative of all our contributors, as well as the other volunteers who have been working hard since the OTW was founded to make the Archive a haven for fanworks of all types. We agree with Michele that fanworks and fan culture are much more widely accepted than they were 10 years ago and we are proud to think that the OTW and the AO3 have contributed to that. Cheers to 10 years of AO3!

Today’s post in the Archive of Our Own’s 10th anniversary series is from Matty, who has been with the AO3 since it launched. You’ll read in her contribution about the many departments she has been part of since she began volunteering with us 10 years ago. There have been a lot of long work hours, particularly for the volunteers who were with the OTW in the early days, and we are so grateful for Matty and all of the others who contributed their time to help us make AO3 a reality.

I joined the Organization for Transformative Works as a tag wrangler back in 2009. I had been following the development of the OTW and the Archive since their inception and was thrilled to be able finally to help in a concrete way.

Tag wrangling in those days was both exciting and nerve wracking! One wrong push of the button could cause havoc. Early wranglers may remember the frantic searching when we repeatedly lost the Justin Timberlake tag, the terror of sharing a single spreadsheet that tracked all the fandoms on the Archive and the volunteers who wrangled them (and the screaming when someone sorted the sheet while others were trying to type), and the many, many, many long discussions that took place on our mailing lists while we tried to write our policies.

After Tag Wrangling I moved to Support, before sliding over to the Policy and Abuse committee (PAC). It is funny to compare how much things have changed between now and then. For the first few years PAC received less than 50 tickets a year. Now we sometimes receive 50 tickets in an hour, or more! The types of reports we receive have also changed. Initially, the vast majority of reports were about plagiarism. These days we see more reports about non-fanworks (such as RP ads, fic searches, etc). The size of the committee has also grown enormously; when I joined we had 3-4 active volunteers and now we have over 40! While the work can be overwhelming at times, it has also been incredibly rewarding.

I am so incredibly proud of the Organization and its volunteers for making our projects so successful. While there have been some growing pains over the years, we've built something amazing that we all should feel proud of!

When asked to write up a few words about his time with the OTW and AO3 in particular, james_ had so much to say that he had trouble sticking to the word count. (He’d like to thank Priscilla for helping him to edit!) Below you can read about some of the tougher times that james_ has seen during his time as a member of the Systems and Accessibility, Design and Technology committees. You can also hear about the rewards he’s gained from his hard work to keep our vision clear and our morale high. As you can see below, james_ was amongst the staffers who accepted the Hugo Award for Best Related Work on behalf of AO3.

Volunteering for the OTW in the early days was exciting, stressful, exhausting, and demoralising, but also worth it. At that time we were working with five servers and we were constantly adjusting the load between the few systems we had. We reached out to our friends at Dreamwidth (thanks, Mark) and they helped us. We were learning even as the tsunami of growing AO3 traffic beat down upon our shore.

While there are always people willing to try and pull you down, they are greatly outnumbered by those supporting us and buoying us up. I am grateful to each person who donates to the OTW. Your donations mean that we can afford the machines that keep the Archive running stably, and that nowadays I rarely get woken in the middle of the night due to unexpected downtime.

Something else that has had a significant impact in my volunteering life were the recurring conflicts both my committees had with previous iterations of the OTW Board of Directors. These were a source of great frustration and I even contacted the Legal committee to see how OTW members could call the board to account. After the resignation of the entire 2015 board, things have been much better. No organization is perfect, but I believe everyone in the OTW is very much happier today. I hope this will continue and believe the best way to do that is to ensure that every election is properly contested; I stood for election myself in 2016 and would do so again if necessary to make sure that there were enough candidates.

Our successes have been external as well as internal. This year, I had the pleasure of standing on the stage at Worldcon as AO3 won a Hugo Award and it was such a joy.

As for the future, I believe that we will need to raise significantly more than we do today in order to hire paid employees. We cannot sustainably run forever on purely volunteer labor. We get roughly 5% of Wikipedia's pageviews and our budget is about one-third of one percent of theirs.

Rebecca Sentance is the chair for Fanlore, a staffer for Docs, and a layout editor for Transformative Works and Cultures. We’re hearing from her as the second part in our five-part series celebrating ten years since the launch of AO3. Whilst she hasn’t been at the OTW quite as long as our previous poster, Francesca Coppa, Rebecca has made a big name for herself as an OTW volunteer involved in many of our different committees. Here is what she has to say about her experiences working for us:

I first became involved with the OTW as a volunteer in 2015, but I’d wanted to volunteer for years before that. A combination of being a full-time student and always just missing the window for recruitment kept me from doing it until the summer after I’d finished my Masters degree. I’d finally decided to get serious about volunteering, and had set up an alert on the OTW Volunteering page to monitor it for any changes. The first committee that opened recruitment after I did that was the AO3 Documentation Committee (Docs for short). I applied, and the rest is history!

Being one of the people responsible for drafting and editing AO3’s help documentation (FAQs and tutorials) has given me an exciting front-row seat to some of our big coding changes over the years. My proudest moment so far as an OTW volunteer – apart from when AO3 won a Hugo Award! – is having been involved in testing the massive upgrade to AO3’s searching and filtering that was released last year, and getting my name in the release notes. I am also fond of the Unofficial Browser Tools FAQ, which I had to beta for my first task as a Docs committee member. It gave me the opportunity to download and play with a lot of fun userscripts and tools.

When I created my AO3 account in 2011, I was mainly attracted by the tags, and the way that users could create new fandoms and relationships just by tagging them. I was proud to publish one of the first fics in the Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides fandom! Nowadays, I write a lot of fic for a small podcast fandom, and there’s still no greater joy than creating a tag that’s never been used before.

We're beginning our 10th anniversary celebration series about the AO3 by hearing from Francesca Coppa. Francesca is a founding member of the OTW and its longest-running board member (serving for five years). She is still with the OTW today.

Francesca was very enthusiastic about contributing to this series! Here’s what she had to say:

I have been in school nearly all my life and the OTW has been, hands down, the best school I ever went to: like they say, “everything I really needed to know I learned in the OTW!” I have such fond memories of those early days in the summer of 2007, after the call for an Archive of Our Own. The meetings lasted for hours! Naomi Novik and Michele Tepper were evaluating technological tools and drawing up user experience blueprints, and Rebecca Tushnet and Susan Gibel were working on our nonprofit paperwork and creating the legal and institutional structures governing our existence. (I think Susan is the unsung hero of the early OTW.)

Meanwhile, I was organizing our volunteers into committees. We'd asked those who were “Willing to Serve” to tell us about their skills and interests, and it was the most impressive and moving thing: we had lawyers, coders, public relations professionals, database analysts, professional fundraisers, sysadmins, journalists, management consultants, accountants, and technical writers; just so much expertise and so many kinds of expertise, and all of it offered to us out of love.

That is the thing that stays with me, and the thing I think most about now: that the OTW and the AO3 are about the collective, the network of fandom with its strong ties (“I would die for you”) and its looser ties (“Hey, we were in a fandom together once”), and then just the ties of shared identity (“you have once loved a thing as I have loved a thing!”) that make us recognize each other when we see a t-shirt, a sticker or an open tab. All of us are pulling together toward a common goal. We are what the web was meant to be: a network of people coming together to build something and keep it going.

When the Organization for Transformative Works was founded in 2007, the AO3 was just an idea. In July this year, we reached 5 million fanworks and 2 million registered users and on 14th November this year, we will be celebrating the AO3’s tenth anniversary. We have chosen to mark the occasion with a series of posts from long-time members and founding volunteers, sharing a glimpse into what the archive looks like from the inside.

So prepare yourselves for a series of posts over the next two weeks. We have five big contributors from the OTW’s long list of volunteers, and they won’t be holding back! We asked each of them to share some stories about what things were like in the early days of the AO3, their experiences as a volunteer with the OTW, and where they think the organization may be headed in the future.

In the upcoming days, you’ll hear from Francesca Coppa and Michele Tepper about the collaboration and the range of skills that were necessary to launch AO3 and the OTW’s other projects. You’ll also hear from one of our long-time staffers Rebecca Sentance about how she came to volunteer for the AO3, from james_ about what it was like to accept a Hugo award onstage, and from Matty about wrangling the AO3’s very first tags.

We hope that these posts will give you some insight into the history and day-to-day operation of the AO3, and that you are as excited as we are by what the site has become. We are proud of everything the AO3 represents as an open and inclusive place for fans to host their work, and we can’t wait to see how it develops and grows over the next ten years and beyond.

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 Olivia Riley, who volunteers as a graphics creator.

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

That old idiom that “a picture is worth a thousand words” tends to hold particularly true on the internet, where users face an info-overload on a daily basis. The OTW needs visuals in order to break through the babble: bright, easily digestible messages to catch audience’s eyes and draw them into the larger conversation. That’s where we graphics volunteers come in!

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

Part of the fun of being a graphics volunteer is that it’s always changing! The most frequent graphic we make is headers for the “This Week in Fandom” post, but aside from that, it depends on what events are going on in the OTW that need visual accompaniment. So, I’ll get a message from the folks in Communications, who wrangle requests for graphics from the other arms of the OTW, and they’ll give me the basics on what they need. I’ll draft an image up and share it, and then it’ll go off to be approved by the relevant committee. If it needs some tweaking, I’ll edit it, and then the new version will go off into the cyber-world!

What made you decide to volunteer?

I’d been studying AO3 & the OTW as the centerpiece of an undergraduate research project for a while, so when I saw a call go out for volunteers, I really wanted to do something to give back to this awesome organization that had so benefited both my personal and academic lives. I’d recently taken a class introducing me to graphic design and realized that the graphics volunteer gig was a perfect opportunity to use those skills!

Do you have any favorite graphics you've created?

The “This Week in Fandom” graphics are always fun! They give me a reason to experiment with new graphic design tips and tricks. This one is a particular favorite…

What fannish things do you like to do?

It pretty much runs the gamut! I love to vid (Gotham and Hannibal, lately), I write a good bit of fic, and I’ve tinkered around with making gifsets and drawing fanart. I’ve recently started listening to a lot of podfic and would like to try making some of my own!

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 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.

We're excited to announce we've recently added support for the <audio> and <video> HTML elements! With this change, you'll be able to use these tags to embed your self-hosted audio or video fanworks on AO3.

Unlike the Flash-based audio player we already offer, these new elements will work in all modern browsers, and they will continue to work even after Adobe ends support for Flash in 2020. (While we have no plans to remove Dewplayer at this time, we strongly recommend updating to the <audio> tag.)

Basics

There's still a lot of design, policy, and coding work to do before we can host audio and video files, so for now you'll need to upload your files to your own web space. Once you've done that, you can embed the file in your work with a small bit of HTML:

• <audio src="AUDIO URL"></audio>
• <video src="VIDEO URL"></video>

That's all it takes! Exactly how the resulting media player looks depends on the browser being used to access the work. We do, however, make sure that playback controls are available and adjust the width of videos using CSS to ensure big videos will fit on everyone's screens. We also make sure autoplay can't be enabled, and we add the preload attribute to gently suggest browsers save bandwidth by not loading the full file until you press play.

Complex examples

If you'd like to do something more complex, we support that as well. For example, you can include a poster for your video using the poster attribute (poster doesn't work for audio, but you can still include an image above your audio player):

<video src="VIDEO URL" poster="IMAGE URL"></video>

Because some older browsers don't support these elements, you can also include fallback text on either element to provide a download link:

  
<audio src="AUDIO URL">
  <p>Your browser doesn't support streaming with the HTML5 audio tag, but you can still <a href="URL">download this podfic</a>.</p>
</audio>

Because different browsers support different file formats, you might want to use the <source> element to include multiple formats.

  
<video>
  <source src="WEBM VIDEO URL" type="video/webm">
  <source src="MP4 VIDEO URL" type="video/mp4">
</video>

If you'd like to include captions or subtitles to improve the accessibility of your media file, you can do that with the <track> element:

  
<video>
  <source src="VIDEO URL" type="video/mp4">
  <track src="SPANISH SUBTITLE URL" kind="subtitles" srclang="es" label="Spanish" default>
  <track src="ENGLISH SUBTITLE URL" kind="subtitles" srclang="en" label="English">
</video>

List of allowed tags and attributes

Here is a full list of the tags we've added support for and which attributes you can use on them.

<video> element

• class attribute
• dir attribute
• height attribute
• loop attribute
• muted attribute
• poster attribute
• src attribute
• title attribute
• width attribute

<audio> element

• class attribute
• dir attribute
• loop attribute
• muted attribute
• src attribute
• title attribute

<track> element

• default attribute
• kind attribute
• label attribute
• src attribute
• srclang attribute

<source> element

• src attribute
• type attribute

You can get more information on using these elements and their attributes in these articles from MDN:

• Video and audio content
• The Video Embed element
• The Embed Audio element
• The Media or Image Source element
• The Embed Text Track element

Edit November 8 at 07:53 UTC: If your audio or video file isn't loading on the Archive, you probably need to enable Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) on your website. Your web host's documentation or support department should be able to help.

Recently we posted that that Yahoo Groups will be permanently closing, and deleting all previously posted material on December 14, 2019. This post is an update to our previous post, to signal boost current preservation efforts.

Before we launch into details, we have two requests.

Many Yahoo Group members and moderators have no clue that Yahoo Groups will be deleting their files, photo and message archives on December 14, 2019. We need everyone who is a member of a Yahoo Group to copy and paste the message below into their Yahoo Groups and to also ask that every other Yahoo Group member who is reading your message to copy and paste the same message to their Yahoo Groups. If we want to save our fandom history, we need to do what we have always done and use our networks of fan friends to help one another.

Yahoo Groups will be deleting our files, photos and message archives on December 14, 2019. Many moderators and Groups remain unaware. Please forward this message and this link: https://opendoors.transformativeworks.org/yahoo-groups-rescue-project/ to all of your Yahoo Groups and ask your fellow Group members to do the same. And then request a copy of your Yahoo Groups data from Verizon at: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/getmydata

The second request is to ask each of you to request a copy of your Yahoo Groups directly from Verizon before Dec 1, 2019. The request is a simple, one click from within your Yahoo account. When the data arrives, hold on to it and check back here for next steps.

And that’s it: Alert your Yahoo Groups, ask your fellow Yahoo Group members to alert their Yahoo Groups and tell everyone about Verizon’s “GetYourData” one click backup option.

Now our update on the various preservation efforts.

Open Doors

Open Doors is working with the OTW's Board and Legal Committee to determine what we can store and/or import to the AO3. Meanwhile, we are accepting preservation requests from moderators and members of Yahoo Groups, and we are assisting them to backup their groups. Contact us if this is you!

Yahoo Groups Fandom Rescue Project

A fan group working to get information out and preserve what they can from fandom Yahoo groups. See this document for current ways you can help - including backing up groups, requesting data from Yahoo/Verizon, nominating groups for rescue and more.

Archive Team

The Archive Team is working on taking backups of public groups, with the intent to submit the data to the Internet Archive. You can submit a request for them to backup a group using their nomination form. The nomination form also has an email where moderators can give permission for their Groups to be archived. They’ve also developed a Chrome extension to simplify and coordinate signing up to at-risk groups and have moved many fandom groups to the top of their queue (note: the extension also helps them download non-fandom groups).

Helping these teams

If you’re a moderator who’d like to potentially import your group to the AO3, contact Open Doors and we’ll talk to you about options. For more updates on what’s happening, see announcements or check back on this page.

If you’d like to directly help rescue teams and you want to save only fandom groups, you can use this form to nominate fandom groups OR you can go directly to the public spreadsheet to find nominated groups that still need downloading. (General downloading instructions are here.) If you want to help save fandom groups and many other non-fandom groups, see Archive Team's chrome extension. Both are worthy efforts and both face a hard deadline of Dec 14.

In our latest series of deploys, we made several improvements to searching and filtering, cleaned up a whole bunch of broken links, and made some finicky, but necessary changes under the hood to upgrade Ruby to the latest version.

An extra special thank you to our first-time contributor dlhardin!

Credits

• Coders: Ariana, dlhardin, Elz, Enigel, james_, lethnie, Matt Sears (Littlelines), MaxwellsDaemon, redsummernight, Sarken, Tal Hayon, ticking instant
• Code reviewers: Ariana, Elz, Enigel, james_, redsummernight, Sarken, ticking instant
• Testers: Alison Watson, Ariana, Briar, briar_pipe, Claire P. Baker, cosette, GoldenFalls, Izzy, james_, Katherine, Matty, Memé, mumble, Naomi, Rebecca Sentance, redsummernight, Relle, Sammie Louise, Sarken, Taylor Clossin

Details

Searching & Filtering

• [AO3-5492] - Searches using tags with numbers in them (e.g. "Episode S01E03") would completely ignore the numbers (and return all works with Episode tags, for example). It now respects your choices.
• [AO3-5707] - When we renamed the class for Archive warnings (more details about that in the Infrastructure section), we realised this could break searches made with the old code (such as bookmarked searches, or searches in your browser history) by allowing them to include unwanted results. We ensured that those searches will keep working as intended.
• [AO3-5649] - Sorting works by creator names would sometimes lead to confusing results for co-created works, since a work "by Alec, Ellie" could show up under E. It now follows the actual alphabet and sorts by the first creator listed.
• [AO3-5652] - You can now search for works by the title of the series a work is part of. \o/
• [AO3-5703] - Works and bookmarks are now searchable by their language codes, i.e. two- or three-letter abbreviations that are easier to look up than the IDs our database assigns to each language. You can read more about this in our hidden search operators cheatsheet.

Broken linkage

• [AO3-5583] - When accessing the comment section on a work or news post via a direct link, the pagination links would jump you to the top of the page, away from the comments. We've now made sure the anchor stays firmly in place.
• [AO3-5179] - We used to have an older page with information about orphaning, to be read before orphaning a work. We now point to the Orphaning FAQ instead, which is more neatly maintained.
• [AO3-5688] - However, when deleting an account, the "What do you want to do with your works?" page did not link to any information on orphaning, leaving users to wonder what that option would do. Now it links to the Orphaning FAQ as well.
• [AO3-5076] - The Terms of Service FAQ was using old URLs to link to specific Archive FAQ items, leading to errors. Those links have now been fixed.
• [AO3-5077] - Also in the Terms of Service FAQ, some links to subsections of the Terms of Service were broken. We fixed those, too.

Misc. Fixes

• [AO3-5673] - The fandom, user, and work counts on the Archive homepage used to be hard to parse, so we added commas as thousands separators. Much neater now!
• [AO3-5730] - On the posting form, the labels for chapter number and title weren't properly associated with the respective form fields. Now clicking on those labels will select the field so you can enter the information.
• [AO3-5733] - The assignments page used to show an extraneous email link when a user had multiple assignments in the same exchange. We have fixed that.
• [AO3-5024] - Trying to log in as an admin with incorrect information would just quietly fail, leaving the admin puzzled why nothing was happening. It now displays a helpful error message.

Infrastructure

• [AO3-5613] - Previously, our code used a class named Warning for Archive warning tags. Newer versions of Ruby, however, wanted that class name for themselves, so we had to rename ours to ArchiveWarning before we could upgrade the version of Ruby we're using. (We used warning tags in more places than we ever imagined...)
• [AO3-5756] - We updated the Devise gem to version 4.7.1.
• [AO3-5655] - One of our test files ended up in the wrong folder where it was never run. We moved it to the right place.
• [AO3-5750] - We updated a library used by the testing suite -- the gem formerly known as factory_girl is now factory_bot.
• [AO3-5391] - We removed unused code related to tags.
• [AO3-5784] - We've upgraded the version of Ruby that the Archive runs on to 2.6.5 (the latest stable version at the time of coding).

Yahoo! has announced that Yahoo Groups will be permanently closing, and deleting all previously posted material on December 14, 2019. Some of you may be wondering what you can do to preserve fannish content posted to Yahoo Groups before it is deleted, and what the Organization for Transformative Works can do to help.

What can Open Doors do?

The Open Doors project is dedicated to offering shelter to at-risk fannish content. At this time the Organization for Transformative Works has no way of serving as a replacement to active Yahoo Groups that would like to continue to function as groups or mailing lists. However, we are prepared to work with moderators to preserve fanworks from their groups on the Archive of Our Own and provide tools so Yahoo Groups mods and users can archive messages and other content.

We have two processes in place -- one to move fanworks from Yahoo Groups onto the Archive Of Our Own, and one to download and preserve messages and other content from Yahoo Groups in file systems so moderators and Yahoo Groups users have more than nine weeks to figure out how to preserve and possibly share that content.

Open Doors can only import fanworks archived in Yahoo Groups onto the Archive of Our Own with the consent of the moderator(s). If you are a moderator and would like to import fanworks from your Yahoo Group(s) to AO3, you are welcome to contact Open Doors via our contact form.

While fanworks posted to public Yahoo Groups can be imported using our usual process, we have internal restrictions on what fanworks we can import from private Yahoo Groups, to protect the privacy of fan creators and respect their copyright of their fanworks. Since Yahoo’s announcement is sudden news for everyone, including us, we are still working out the fine points of what we can and cannot import from restricted groups based on the Archive of Our Own Terms of Service. However, moderators are still welcome to contact Open Doors and discuss preservation options for their groups. If we cannot import a group's fanworks to AO3, we can direct moderators to other fandom preservation efforts that are taking place.

Because the content in many Yahoo Groups has historical, cultural and sociological value to each Group’s members, and also to fandom-focused scholars, Open Doors is also open to providing storage of Yahoo Groups backups that are assembled by moderators and non-moderators alike. Please note that at this time we cannot promise how or if the backups we store will be able to be migrated or accessed in the future by anyone other than the uploader(s), the moderator(s), the Open Doors team and affiliated volunteers.

What can you do - if you are a moderator of a Yahoo Group?

If you are a moderator, you can contact Open Doors via our contact form. You can also email your group notifying them of the closure and encouraging members to save their fanworks.

Right now, we believe the most important thing for any administrators to do, if they are interested in preserving fanworks from their Yahoo Group, is to download and back up those fanworks, as it is likely that the ability to do so will diminish or disappear as Yahoo Groups shuts down. Open Doors can then work with moderators to figure out whether we can import fanworks from their group. Information on how to download files and messages from groups can be found here.

What can you do - if you are a member of a Yahoo Group?

Anyone who posted their own fanworks to a Yahoo Group is welcome to post those fanworks to AO3 themselves. You can download your own fanworks and upload them to AO3 at any time. If you need an AO3 account, you can request an invitation at this link.

If you’re not a moderator, but are willing to download the files and messages from a group, please do so to help preserve them! You can find information about how to do this here. You can send these to Open Doors for storage, and we will store them for you. Please note that at this time we cannot promise how or if the backups we store will be able to be migrated or accessed in the future by anyone other than the uploader(s), the moderator(s), the Open Doors team, and affiliated volunteers.

Additionally, If you are not a moderator but would like to see a Yahoo Group preserved, you can contact us via our our contact form with a link to the Yahoo Group and, if you have it, contact information for the moderator. You can also contact the moderator to request that they get in touch with us.

If you would like to help preserve the history of a Yahoo Group, please consider documenting it on Fanlore. If you're new to wiki editing, no worries! Check out the new visitor portal, or ask the Fanlore Gardeners for tips. Fanlore has also recently made a helpful Tumblr post with tips for preserving the history of Yahoo Groups.

Thank you for your interest in helping Open Doors to preserve fannish content from Yahoo Groups!

Are you fluent in another language and would like to help translate AO3/OTW news posts? The Organization for Transformative Works is recruiting!

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

• News Translation Volunteers - closing 23 October 2019 at 23:59 UTC

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.

Translation Committee - News Translation Volunteers

Would you like to help translate OTW/AO3 news posts? We are looking for volunteers of native or near-native fluency in their target languages, who can translate or beta news posts within five-day deadlines.

If you enjoy working collaboratively, if you're fluent in a language other than English, if you’re passionate about the OTW and its projects, and want to help us reach more fans all around the world, working with Translation might be for you!

We particularly need people for Afrikaans, Arabic, Bengali, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Filipino, Finnish, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Marathi, Persian, Portuguese-BR, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese and Welsh—but help with other languages would be much appreciated.

(Please note that our French, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese-PT and Russian teams are not accepting new members at this time.)

Applicants may be asked to translate and correct short text samples and will be invited to a chatroom interview as part of the selection process. More information about us can be found on the Translation committee page.

Applications are due 23 October 2019

Apply at the volunteering page!

I. Transformative Works and Cultures Publishes Its 30th Issue

On 15 September, the Transformative Works and Cultures team published the journal's 30th issue. This was a large issue on general topics, containing over 20 items whose subjects range from eighteenth-century prophecy to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There's something for everyone!

The team is now working on the next issue, number 31. “Fan Fiction and Ancient Scribal Cultures” will be guest-edited by Frauke Uhlenbruch and Sonja Ammann and is scheduled to be released on December 15, 2019. They're also looking forward to the issues coming out next year (and beyond): check out the TWC website to view open Calls for Papers.

II. AT THE AO3

This month, Open Doors completed the import of a little piece of gundam wing, an archive which originated way back in 2001. We're happy that it's found a permanent home on the AO3!

Good news for those with questions about tagging their fanworks: this month, AO3 Documentation uploaded a new and improved Tags FAQ. Use it to find answers to all of your questions, including what tags are, how they are organized and what to do when the tags you want don't seem to exist. One thing that we all know for certain is that our Tag Wrangling team are kept busy: in August, they wrangled approximately 256,000 tags! (September numbers will be available next month.)

And finally for AO3 news, our user-facing teams have been busy as usual: the Policy and Abuse and the Support teams each received around 1,100 tickets across the month. Policy and Abuse ask for users' patience as they deal with your incoming tickets: the team is small and made up of volunteers and where cases are complex, it can take some time to get through them. They would like to request that users submitting a report bear in mind that the more information you can provide, the easier it is to investigate. As a reminder, non-fanworks such as prompt posts, fic searches, RP ads, etc are not allowed on the Archive and will be removed where they are reported. A warning will also be noted on the account and future violations may cause an account to be suspended or banned.

The Support team further reminds users that they are unable to provide users with updates on the status of cases reported to Policy and Abuse. Our privacy policy means that only Policy and Abuse staffers have access to the information in their queue.

III. COMMUNICATIONS AND CONTENT PRODUCTION

The OTW's Communications committee has been busy this month. On 5 September, they led celebrations of the OTW's 12th anniversary, marking the location by releasing updated flyers and info sheets as well as a series of genre-themed graphics which fans can use on their own websites and social media pages to show support for the OTW. They also published a Guest Post, chatting to Angie Fiedler Sutton of the G33K Out podcast; a Five Things interview with Volunteers and Recruiting staffer Frost the Fox; and two issues of This Week in Fandom, volumes 121 and 122.

As well as keeping our own website busy, Comms staffers have continued to respond to media requests received in the wake of the AO3's Hugo win. As usual, you can find all the latest articles in which OTW projects appear in our Press Room on transformativeworks.org.

Meanwhile, Fanlore ran the two-week long Stub September challenge, focused on growing stubs into full-blown articles. Participants were rewarded with some fantastic badges courtest of the team's new graphic design volunteers! Fanlore also reports a general uptick in editing activity thanks to the excitement around the AO3 Hugo Award. Many, many thanks to everyone who worked hard at documenting it all!

IV. GOVERNANCE

The OTW Board voted on, and is proud to announce, its new Officer roster for 2019/2020: Natalia Gruber as President, Lex de Leon as Secretary, and Yuechiang Luo as Treasurer. The Board also extends its thanks to Priscilla Del Cima and Kristina Busse for their hard work as their tenure on Board comes to an end, and to Claire P. Baker and Jessie Casiulis as they pass their officer roles onto the next cohort.

Development and Membership and Translation were both busy throughout September preparing for the October fundraising drive. You can expect to hear more about that in our newsletter for October!

V. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

Volunteers & Recruiting: As of 24 September the OTW has 815 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below.

New Directors: Kirsten Wright, Rebecca Sentance
New Committee Chairs: Morgan Drake (AO3 Documentation)
New Committee Staff: Briar, Fiona M, Kelly Gritten, memorizingthedigitsofpi, MorningStarlight, Semnai, x_lazart_x (all AO3 Documentation) and 1 other AO3 Documentation staffer, Audrey J. (Communications), Silas O'Neill (Communications), Seamus Johnston (Systems), Ashley Pancho, arwenxs, eastofoktober, Jocelin, Kyrstin, Leila Varzideh, Mile, Nick_S, SashaK (all Support) & 4 other Support Staffers
New Fanlore Volunteers: djiange, Jercy Dee, memorizingthedigitsofpi and 4 other volunteers
New Tag Wrangler Volunteers: 1hillarynguyen, Alana, Amy2, Aurita, batcat229, Blue_Link13, ceci, cirelle, Cordz, Danielle Plung, Dawn Huang, Dia, Dixon, eak_a_mouse, fulltimeDreamer, gecko, Gwen O, hmsphere, Jacqui, JakUnderhill, Jody, Kay, Leah Kim, Liekinloimu, Martisz, Masha, Mavis, Megan S, Minx, Mosaik, mysk, papernote, Patricia Tang, peaandsea, pumpkinpaix, Quine, Ron Geromy, Siki, SWColeson, Terri Morgan, toby, Upasana Das, Zhimo, Zhirong, Zozo and 2 other Tag Wranglers

Departing Committee Chairs: Angelique Jurd (Communications)
Departing Committee Staff: Angelique Jurd (Communications)
Departing Tag Wrangler Volunteers: waveridden and 1 other volunteer
Departing Translation Volunteers: Lez, Naroen, Natalia Suzdal, Ula and 1 other volunteer

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.