Archive of Our Own (BETA rev. 2375)

Chair update for Open Beta

Published:2009-11-17 15:36:26 -0500

OMG we did it people! It's almost exactly 2.5 years (17th May 2007) since a certain someone said we should build an Archive of Our Own and I am so proud of us!

We didn’t have a meeting this week unless you count staying logged into the chatroom continuously from Friday afternoon to Monday morning (I lie, I left to sleep occasionally). We *did* have a number of passionate discussions which revolved around performance, squee, bugs, more squee, support, and you know, squee.

Fun things (some of them) I have done in the last 5 days.

• Ticked a tickybox marked “Invite from queue enabled ” and clicked ‘Update’


• Entered ‘50’ into a field marked “Number of people to invite:” and clicked ‘Invite from queue’ I did that a lot! My apologies to people kicking the queue during the times I was asleep in Australia, we decided it would be easier if one person managed invite issuing.


• Posted a few times


• Sleep - still building up to that :p

AO3 Launch Update: zooey_glass masterfully summarised the launch in her fabulous post Open Beta - How the party's going! and we’ve set up an AO3_Status on Twitter to let people know what’s going on in the (hopefully extremely rare) event of an outage.

AO3 Invitation update: We were issueing 30-50 per hour for a fair amount of the weekend. We're now switching to letting the automated job issue about 50 per day. We'll re-evaluate this on the coming weekend.

Stats as of Wed 18th 1:00 am UTC for the curious :)

• Number of shareable invitation codes issued to account holders: 531
  Number of invitations issued to addresses from the queue: 1305
  Total invitations issued: 1757Total unused invitations out there: 520
  Number of accounts before Open Beta: 347
  Number of accounts at present: 1663
  Potential number of accounts: 2104
  Accounts created during Open Beta: 1316
  Percent invitation uptake: 79%
  Percent increase in accounts: 379%


• Number of works before Open Beta: 6598
  Number of works at present: 13502
  Works created during Open Beta: 6904
  Percent increase in works: 205%


• Number of fandoms represented before Open Beta: 674
  Number of fandoms represented at present: 1104
  New fandoms created: 430
  Percent increase in fandoms:164%

AO3 Help:zvi  has generously contributed a fabulous explanation of how the tagging wuzzle system works and in that vein I have bookmarked some other great posts I have seen. Comment and let me know if you see, or would like to contribute something. We're conscious we need to do more of this so if you have an urge to write 'help using the AO3' documentation we're keen on recruiting you. We'll do this regardless (the writing, not the recruiting although we like doing that too) but we love new people and welcome fresh views.

AO3 Support: We're doing our best to respond to everyone and we're delighted people are talking to us - we're also getting a lot of requests so please, be patient with us if we don't respond immediately.

Deploy Schedule:We have a mini-release called Release 0.7.1.1  (heh,  'mini', it has 29 items so far) of fixes to some of the most commonly reported problems. We'd like to deploy it this weekend but we're making changes to the Post Work form so if it doesn't test clean we'll delay until it does.

If there are things you want to do/say - feel free to share either in comments, or by volunteering, or whatever medium you're comfortable with. You are invited to this party :)

Previous posts on Dreamwidth (bysamvara the 2009 committee chair) and the Organization for Transformative Works website (by the Accessibility, Design & Technology committee)