Archive of Our Own ^beta

This week on Survey Sunday, we're taking a look at some illuminating stats regarding OTW membership: why fans join the OTW, why fans don't join, and why fans don't renew their membership. As always throughout this series, we are only offering aggregate results and summary comments rather than individual responses.

Today we're going to focus on the following submitted question:

• "I'm interested in the answers to 73 and 74, and to a lesser extent 72. Basically I want to know what the roadblocks are that are preventing people from donating or that are making people decide to quit donating."

Before we show you those results, however, let's talk about data we're not showing you yet. In the last Survey Sunday, we fielded several queries from some of you regarding the Fanlore sections of the survey, including a great request for conclusions drawn from cross-referencing responses to multiple questions. We're currently working on those questions and eventually hope to provide you with all of that info and more, but there were too many essay-style responses for us to complete the Fanlore section for this Survey Sunday.

How we're working on the data

The survey workgroup in charge of combing through all ~6,000 responses has been organising and filtering the data almost from day one (that is, since the results came in), but only recently met for the first time to define goals and settle on a methodology. We agreed that before we can really know how to categorize the data we're dealing with, we need to get a clear overview of what the feedback actually is.

Since many questions can be grouped together by subject, we've split up into mini-teams that have agreed to work on each grouping, both individually and as an overall composite set of data, such as the 3 questions we're sharing with you today. Here's a bird's-eye view of the organization process for these mini-teams:

1. preview the data and develop a good understanding of it
2. report back to the group, share results with the relevant committees, gather feedback
3. develop a group-wide organizational system
4. work within the team to sort and categorize aggregate and open-ended results for each question

Once these steps are complete for all questions, we plan on digging into the guts of Surveymonkey's Export options, and possibly unleashing an Excel/SQL subgroup to work database magic and expand that preliminary analysis. At this level, we'll have the ability to cross-reference questions, filter by respondent data (like country or platform), and more. But we're not there yet! As we stated previously, we hope that sharing some preliminary data publicly as we proceed will help keep you updated and actively invested in the results.

Responses to questions on OTW membership

So, let's start with a look at 3 questions regarding OTW membership to give you an overview of what the OTW looks like in terms of donor motivation.

The lead-up question to this section was #70, "Have you ever been an OTW member?", serving as the gateway determining which follow-up questions were asked. Of the 5021 respondents, 730 were currently OTW members and proceeded to answer question 72, "What was your main reason for becoming a member?", but skipped questions 73 and 74. 226 had let their membership lapse and got question 73, "What made you stop being a member?", followed up by #74, "What might make you choose to be a member in the future?". This was also the question that the 4065 respondents were routed to who answered that they had never been members.

(Please note that the replies to question 70 don't actually reflect current membership numbers: 965 people skipped the section entirely, and the number of members had increased during the April membership drive.)

Question #72: "What was your main reason for becoming a member?"

As you can see, the main motivation for respondents in choosing to donate to the OTW is support. "Support," of course, is a broad concept. In the open response portion of the question, a number of recurring themes emerged:

• respondents wanted to do a combination of the options given to them, e.g. show general and financial support, or some form of "all of the above"
• respondents wanted to support the OTW's legal advocacy, the Archive of Our Own, and/or other OTW projects
• respondents wanted to have a vote in the OTW elections and a voice in the direction of the organization
• respondents just wanted to give money to the OTW, but didn't realize they would become members as well/didn't realize they had a choice about also becoming a member
• respondents donated as a way of making up for not having time or ability to volunteer
• respondents donated as a way to express their belief in the value of the OTW

It bears repeating that all of this is a preliminary, broad overview of trends we saw in responses; as we categorize data we will look more closely at specific motivations people have for starting, renewing, and discontinuing their OTW membership.

The same principle goes for membership renewal, which was explored further in question 73.

Question #73: "What made you stop being a member?"

It's important to remember that when we designed the survey, we included these particular options because we realize that acknowledging former member dissatisfaction is crucial to learning how to increase membership renewal. It's heartening to know that 42% of respondents might potentially renew their membership, but we also care about the 13-17% of former members who had negative or ambivalent experiences with the OTW after they donated to it. We appreciate these respondents, both for their initial memberships, and for taking the time to share their experiences as members with us.

It's harder to pick up on general themes for this question, especially due to the more contentious nature of the question, and the fact that we had fewer open responses to this question. However, some recurring trends from respondents were:

• A combination of two or more of the closed-ended responses
• Former members plan to renew but just haven't gotten around to it
• Former members shifted their support to volunteer work instead for numerous reasons
• Former members had negative experiences or received negative impressions during OTW election campaigns, or during their time as members

We hope to cross-analyze these types of responses with other responses to different aspects of the survey to glean more specific data about the things that hinder and help our efforts in this area.

Question #74: "What might make non-members join in the future?"

If long-term and new membership are crucial to our health as an organization, then it doesn't take a team of SQL experts to see right away that there's a statistical correlation between the 13-17% of lapsed members from Question #73 who are unsatisfied with our organization's current fannish outreach, general policies, direction, and progress, and the 17-21% of potential members who cite solutions to these same issues as potential incentives to join.

However, this set of questions weren't designed to ask what creates levels of dissatisfaction—only to quantify the relationship between dissatisfaction and membership. Other parts of the survey will hopefully provide more context. What this data does provide us is a sharp, bird's-eye perspective on the rest of the survey: every area where we succeed or fall short, no matter how small, connects back to our actual membership numbers.

And while, alas, we can't control the state of your finances and we definitely understand that the OTW is not for everyone, there are many things we can change to impact membership for the better. We hope the survey analysis will ensure that the organization as a whole knows what we need to change and renews its commitment to do so at every level.

What we can't tell you right away, though, is what those numbers mean in terms of conclusions or future direction. Once our Development & Membership committee has had time to familiarize themselves with these results and discuss them in depth, we will be able to amend this report with their interpretations and conclusions. We will collect similar analyses from committees along with creating more reports, and compile it all into a more fleshed-out final report.

In the meanwhile, check our list of all survey questions and tell us what you're curious about for the next Survey Sunday post on June 17th!

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW blog. Find related news by viewing our tag cloud.

Welcome to Release 0.8.14. Ariana, Elz, Enigel, Lal, mumble, Naomi, Sam J. and Sarken contributed code to this release, which was tested by our awesome testing team: Jenn, Kylie, Melanie, mumble, Sparkling Snowfall, Xparrot and Zebra. A special welcome to our new coders Andreja, Ariana and Lal, who already contributed their first bug fixes for this deploy and the next! \o/

Right on the heels of our April deploy come the changes to our notification emails and the stats feature that we had previously announced. We welcome feedback on both! You can comment here, on the announcement or, for those more comfortable with code branches and spec drafts, our Github wiki.

We also spent some time going through our bug tracker with a fine comb and flagging several older issues that had been lingering for a few months or years. Some of those had been magically fixed somewhere along the way, some weren't relevant to our current code base anymore, some simply needed a confirmation that the fix worked as well on the actual Archive as it did in our test environment. Consequently, 53 additional issues could be closed in this deploy cycle.

In our next deploy, we're hoping to introduce some major improvements to our search and browse system. These improvements should help us address some of the performance problems we've been experiencing recently. We'll be testing everything carefully to ensure that we don't make the Archive blow up, but if it all works out, that will be coming your way within the next month. We'll have a preview for you before it's released, so stay tuned for more news!

Highlights!

Stats page!

This deploy sees the launch of the first version of our user stats page! Senior coder Naomi incorporated several popular feature requests into this information-rich overview, and added a few more features based on the feedback you gave us when we posted a preview of the stats page. You can see your total number of subscribers, kudos, and hits as well as your total word count, and a list of your works sorted by hits, kudos, bookmarks, or comments. On top of that, all this information can also be broken down by year!

Please note that this feature is still in progress, and improvements and bug fixes are in the works. Due to the way subscriptions are currently handled, it's difficult to differentiate between subscriptions to a work and to the series this work is part of. Consequently, series subscriptions are not being counted right now. Please stay tuned for updates!

A note about referrer information: The next version of the stats page will include a short list of recent referrers for each work. If you're unsettled by the idea that an author can see that you linked to their work, for example in a Tumblr or Dreamwidth post, you can use a go-between like anonym.to to link to works on the Archive. The content of locked or filtered posts will obviously not be accessible even if the link to it is listed! Furthermore, the mere fact that you linked to a work in the past will not make your post show up in the referrers. Someone has to click on that link as well.

Batch emails!

We know that many of our users liked to receive kudos notifications in real time, as a little nibble of joy throughout the day or week. However, the sheer number of emails going out every minute was bringing our server to its knees, so we had to drastically cut down on our email traffic. :-(

As a result, kudos notifications will go out only once a day, and subscription emails (new works by an author, new chapters in a WIP, or new parts in a series) will be batched and sent out hourly. This will relieve the pressure on our servers and help ensure emails arrive in a timely fashion. We're open to feedback on this process, and are hoping that the stats page will at least partly make up for the change!

Tools for Open Doors staff!

Open Doors gets an arsenal of new tools to make the importing process smoother, such as the ability to resend notification emails for unclaimed authors, for users that accidentally deleted it the first time, or no longer have access to the email address registered with the imported archive. (Previously, manually transferring works to current AO3 users generated a co-author notice which in turn generated confusion; for new users, invitations to the Archive needed to be sent separately.)

The Open Doors committee will also be able to change the redirect URL for works on the imported archive's original site, which is handy for users who have accidentally deleted the imported copy of their works or want to redirect readers to an existing copy of the work on AO3. (This is an interim fix until the merge tool is developed, which will allow authors to pick one version of the work to keep, and combine hit counts and reviews of both works.)

Note: If this is something you want Open Doors to arrange for your Smallville Slash Archive imports, please use this contact form to get in touch. Make sure to include your AO3 username as well as links to your work(s), both here and on the original archive. Open Doors staff will take care of it!

Last but not least, Open Doors will also be able to quickly look up what works have been imported under a particular email address, and block works associated with a particular email address from ever being imported, at an author's request.

Known Issues

We're currently experiencing some significant performance problems. We're working on the issue - now that we have deployed the code from this release we're able to start testing the big changes to search and browse, which should help a lot. You can read more about the performance problems and what we're doing to fix them at our post on AO3 performance woes

See our Known Issues page for current issues.

Note: This page recently underwent a thorough update, as well as a restructuring of the available information for better scanning. We have added workarounds where possible and will keep adding information as it becomes available.

Release Details

Features

• Stats page
• Email batching
• Mass Import improvements

Bug fixes

• Importing
  • The code to manage redirects from imported collections to works on the Archive was optimized to better handle valid and invalid URLs
  • Tweaked the wording of emails sent out to authors whose works were imported by an archive mod, it's now clearer that initially restricted (members-only) works can be unlocked by the author or archivist
  • Trying to import a work with one or more chapters longer than our limit (500,000 characters in a chapter) caused imports to just fail - as a stopgap, the imported work is truncated and a warning message is added at the end
  • Some invitations to claim imported stories were not being delivered properly; these should now go out without a hitch
  • Stories by two co-authors should now import correctly: both authors should receive an AO3 invitation and be able to claim the story as theirs independently from each other

• Works & Chapters & Comments
  • On multi-chaptered works, the word count would include unposted draft chapters; this has been fixed to only count posted chapters
  • When previewing a new chapter, then going back to edit and post the chapter, the chapter would get stuck as a draft; this has been fixed
  • We've received some user reports about whole works being accidentally deleted instead of single chapters; we have now renamed the "Delete" button on work pages (which also appears when viewing a single chapter) to "Delete Work" to avoid confusion
  • The character counter for comments wasn't working when editing a pre-existing comment; this has been fixed for all form fields, including the text box for challenge instructions (where the counter wasn't working to begin with)
  • The links in comment notifications (to reply, to see the whole thread, etc.) were broken in various ways, this should be fixed now

• Skins & Cosmetics
  • On user pages, the link to the profile was in an easily overlooked position below the user name, it has now been moved to the sidebar navigation
  • One Point Faux skin: on user dashboards, the list of top five fandoms wouldn't show up in some browsers; this has been fixed
  • One Point Faux skin: on user dashboards, the text on the Bookmark button was greyed out to discourage clicking until implementation of this feature
  • One Point Faux skin: in the header, a | symbol was appended to the "Hi, example!" greeting, this has been taken care of
  • Reversi skin: on the Manage Chapters page, the chapter titles were white-on-white and thus unreadable; this has been fixed
  • When adding several works as an inspiration (e.g. for a remix or fanart), the list of "current parent works" was misaligned; this has been fixed (the same fix applies to a similar issue with works in more than one series)
  • On prompt meme dashboards, the "Manage Items" option would show up twice for maintainers; the unnecessary duplicate has been removed now
  • Updated the help text for searches by Date on the Advanced Search form to go with a recent bug fix
  • Renamed the "Full text:" label to "Any field:" (everything else on the form plus summaries and notes), as full work searches were disabled for performance reasons a while ago
  • Changed the wording of the "only available to registered users of the Archive" message (displayed to guests without accounts) to encompass all restricted works, not just stories
  • On the Preferences page, the text on the help pop-up explaining the "Hide the share buttons on my work." option was adjusted to match the wording of the preference

• Error Extravaganza
  • When trying to download a .pdf version of a work that hadn't been generated (yet), users would get an error 500 instead of seeing a helpful error message; this has been fixed
  • There was an issue with an old reference to Javascript code that would cause errors 500 when trying to access the tags index; this has been resolved
  • Subscriptions as well associations between a work and its author weren't properly removed from the database when a work was deleted - resulting, for example, in errors 500 when trying to manage subscriptions; this has been fixed
  • Trying to access the bookmarks index for a nonexistent (e.g. misspelled) user or tag, or dashboard pages for a nonexistent pseud or Collection would throw up an error 500; it now gives the proper error message

• Misc.
  • The login link in the header was unreachable in keyboard tab navigation, making it inaccessible for users of screen reader software; we apologize for this and will take even greater care about keyboard accessibility in future releases
  • The directory for work downloads (such as .epub and .mobi files) was organized by author only, resulting in a gigantic list of folders and potentially slowing down performance in the future; subdirectories have been added now
  • On the Abuse Report form, the "link to the page you are reporting" field didn't recognize https:// URLs as proper Archive links; the validator now allows those as well
  • Tidied up a small bit of code for gift exchanges and prompt memes
  • Added a note about recommended measurements (100x100px) to the icon upload form for user profiles

As pretty much all of our users have no doubt noticed, we've been experiencing some problems with Archive loads: slowdowns and the appearance of the dreaded 502 page have become a regular occurrence. We're working on addressing these issues, but it's taking longer than we'd like, so we wanted to update you on what's going on.

Why the slowdowns?

Mostly because there's so much demand! The number of people reading and posting now is overwhelming - we're glad so many people want to be here, but sorry that the rapid expansion of the site is making it less functional than it should be.

We now get over a million and a half pageviews on an average day, often clustered at peak times in the evening (particularly when folks in the Western Hemisphere are home from work and school) - we were using a self-hosted analytics system to monitor site traffic, and we had to disable it because it was too overloaded to keep up. The traffic places high demands on our servers, and you see the 502 errors when the systems are getting more requests than they can handle. Ultimately we'll need to buy more servers to cope with rising demand, but there's ongoing work that we've done and need to continue to do to make our code more efficient. We've been working on long-term plans to improve our work and bookmark searching and browsing, since those are the pages that get the most traffic; right now, they present some challenges because they were designed and built when the site was much smaller. We've learned a lot about scaling over the years, but rewriting different areas of the code takes some time!

What are you doing to fix it?

Our Systems team are making some adjustments to our server setup and databases. Their first action was to increase the amount of tmp space for our MySQL database on the server - this has alleviated some of the worst problems, but doesn't really get at the underlying issues. They're continuing to investigate to see if there are additional adjustments we can make to the servers to help with the problems.

We're also actively working on the searching and browsing code: that's been a big project, and it will hopefully make a significant impact. Because it affects a lot of crucial areas of the site, we want to make sure we get everything right and do as much testing as we can to ensure that performance is where it needs to be before we release it. We're switching from the Sphinx search engine to elasticsearch, which can index new records more rapidly, allowing us to use that for filtering. That will offer us more flexibility, get rid of some of our slower SQL queries, and take some pressure off our main database, and it also has some nice sharding/scaling capabilities built in.

We also try to cache as much data as we can, and that's something we're always looking to improve on. Systems and AD&T have discussed different options there, and we'll be continuing to work on small improvements and see what larger ones we may be able to incorporate.

When will it be fixed?

It's going to take us a few weeks to get through all the changes that we need to make. Our next code deploy will probably be within the next week - that will include email bundling of subscription and kudos notifications, so that we can scale our sending of emails better as well. After that, we'll be able to dedicate our resources to testing the search and browsing changes, and we're hoping to have that out to everyone by the end of June. We rely on volunteer time for coding and testing, so we need to schedule our work for evenings and weekends for the most part, but we're highly motivated to resolve the current problems, and we'll do our best to get the changes out to you as soon as we can.

Improving the Archive is an ongoing task, and after we’ve made the changes to search and browse we’ll be continuing to work on other areas of the site to enable better scalability. We’re currently investigating the best options for developing the site going forward, including the possibility of paying for some training and/or expert advice to cover areas our existing volunteers don’t have much experience with. (If you have experience in these areas and time to work closely with our teams, we’d also welcome more volunteers!)

Thanks for your patience!

We know it's really annoying and frustrating when the site isn't working properly. We are working hard to fix it! We really appreciate the support of all our users. ♥

As we recently announced, the much-loved Sentinel Adult Fiction Archive, 852 Prospect, is moving in with the AO3! You can find details about the move in our announcement post; however, if you have more questions about the move, or if you're just curious about Open Doors, you can join our Open Doors team for an open house this week.

The open house will take place on May 25, 2012 at 01:00:00 UTC (see when this is in your timezone) in our Public Discussion chatroom. It will last approximately one hour. You can access the chat at: https://fanarchive.campfirenow.com/eb4b6 - just click the link to drop by. Everyone welcome!

The OTW Community Survey closed on Thursday 2nd May after its two-week run. An amazing 5986 people responded, which surpasses our wildest expectations. We'd like to thank everyone who took it and who helped to spread the word for making it such a huge success! We'd also like to apologise for the delay in posting about our preliminary results. We had originally intended for this post to go up the day after the survey closed, but unfortunately the mass of data involved and some unexpected commitments on the part of some key staffers meant that we weren't able to do this. We're sorry that we didn't post an update about the delay -- improving our processes to cover stuff like this is one of the things we're still working on. Thank you for your patience and your overwhelming response to the survey!

We wanted to cover lots of bases and get a broad picture of our userbases and their needs, which meant that this was a long survey! So we're especially pleased (and relieved!) that the completion rate was 82.2 % -- that is, 4921 people actually finished the entire survey and clicked the "done" button. (Don't worry if you were one of the other 18% -- we'll still be counting the results from partially completed responses.)

The high number of respondents corresponds with a humungous amount of data. Some of this will be reasonably easy to collate, while some of the free text responses will require more in-depth analysis. The final question ("Anything else you'd like to tell us?") alone yielded the equivalent of an epic Big Bang story: 60.000 words!

We've formed an internal workgroup who will help evaluate and publish the results. Due to the amount of data we're working with, this will be a gradual process, but we'll try to keep you up-to-date with the details as they emerge. We thank you for your patience while we get to grips with it all. The really meaty data may take us a while to collate, but here are a couple of tasty morsels to whet your appetite!

Where is everyone?

We had responses to the survey from fans all over the world - and a few from beyond this world (hello to the fan who responded from Narnia!) The top ten countries, by number of respondents, were as follows:

What types of fanworks are people enjoying?

Fandom is a diverse and wonderful place, and people are accessing a whole range of different types of fanwork. The vast majority of respondents (5613 of a total 5716) said they read fanfiction, but other types of fanwork such as fanart and fan videos of various kinds weren't far behind - and we can't wait to delve into the free-text responses to this question!

Stay tuned for more!

We're working hard on analysing the rest of the data and wrangling it into a nice accessible format. We really value all your input, and we'll do our best both to publicise it and respond to it. The response to the survey was beyond our wildest dreams -- we're feeling a teeny bit overwhelmed, but also excited about having such rich results to work with! Thank you to everyone who responded, publicised it, and worked to make it such a huge success.

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW blog. Find related news by viewing our tag cloud.

Sentinel fans remember with nostalgia how Blair moved in with Jim. We have good news for those who know and love 852 Prospect, the Sentinel Adult Fiction Archive; it's moving in with the Archive of Our Own!

In this post:

• a bit of background explanation
• what this means for authors who have work on 852 Prospect
• and what to do if you still have questions

Background explanation

The first iteration of the Automated Archive software was written by astolat for 852 Prospect back in 1997, but for some years that software has been growing increasingly creaky, and now requires all updates to be done by hand. As a result, alice ttlg, 852 Prospect's archivist, has been looking for a sustainable new home for the archive. That new home will be as an Integrated Collection in the AO3.

In its new home, 852 Prospect will be a separate, searchable collection with its own identity. We're currently exploring the possibility of doing a complete archive transfer, in which we could preserve old rec links by creating redirects at the original site. The archive will move in early June.

What does this mean for authors who have work on 852 Prospect?

If you have work on 852 Prospect, and you still have access to the email account associated with those stories, then when the import happens, you'll receive an email letting you know you can come and claim your works. If you already have an account on the Archive of Our Own under that address, you'll receive an e-mail letting you know that those stories have been added to your account.

If you don’t have an account on the Archive of Our Own, you will be invited to create one, and will be able to claim your imported works and associate them with that account.

All imported works are set, by default, to be viewable only by logged-in AO3 users. Once you claim your works, you can make them publicly-viewable if you choose. After 3 months, all unclaimed imported works will be open to all visitors, just like 852 Prospect currently is.

If you no longer have access to the email account associated with those stories, contact the Open Doors committee and we'll help you out. (If you've posted the stories elsewhere, or have an easy way to verify that they're yours, that's grand; if not, don't worry, we'll figure something out.)

If you have a story on 852 Prospect which you've already imported to the AO3, once the 852 Prospect import happens there will be two copies of the same story on the archive. This situation is temporary! Down the line, we’re planning to implement a way of merging two copies of the same work, so that you can keep your comments and kudos on the version you've already uploaded, *and* the redirect from the old archive address will still work. (Alternatively, we can change the redirect to point toward the copy you have already imported to AO3. Just claim the new copy of the work, and contact Open Doors with your AO3 account name(s), Prospect 852 account name(s), and links to the works that you want the redirect to point to.)

Once the stories from 852 Prospect are on the AO3, you can then edit, delete, etc, the same way you would with any work you posted on the AO3. Or, if you don't want the works to be part of 852 Prospect in its new home, you can choose to delete the imported works or to orphan the imported works. (Orphaning leaves the works on the Archive, but removes them from the control of any user account. You can choose whether to remove the name they were associated with on the old archive, or leave it displaying as a pseud.)

If you would like to prevent any works associated with a particular e-mail address from ever being imported into the Archive, please submit that e-mail address (and any info that can be used to verify your identity) to Open Doors.

If you still have questions...

If you have further questions, try the Open Doors FAQ; if the FAQ doesn't offer the answers you need, you can contact the Open Doors committee or leave a comment on this post and we'll respond as soon as we can.

We're also planning to hold two public chats on Campfire (the online chat platform the OTW uses): Sunday, May 19, at 18:00 UTC, and Thursday, May 24, at 01:00 UTC (click the links to see when the chats are held in your timezone). You can access OTW's public chatroom using this link.

Anyone who has questions about the process is welcome to join the Open Doors team at those chats, and we'll do our best to answer you.

Many of us in the OTW are longtime TS fans who really care about having these stories preserved for new generations. We're delighted to welcome 852 Prospect aboard the AO3!

-- The Open Doors team

Dear friends of the OTW,

Thank you. Your generosity over the last eight days has made this the most successful membership drive in OTW history.

Between April 18 and 25, we received 1,256 individual donations totaling US$35,744 — numbers that will grow once we've had a chance to count the donations sent via postal mail. On top of that, you successfully secured for us a $2,000 matching grant from our anonymous donor, bringing the current grand total for the drive to $37,744. And on top of that, more than 120 people have come forward to offer their time, energy, and skill as OTW volunteers (and 150 more have joined a waiting list).

These numbers are astounding, and they're all thanks to you. We are tremendously grateful to each and every one of you who donated, volunteered, or helped spread the word to make this drive such an enormous success.

Thank you, too, to all the OTW staffers and volunteers who supported the drive by writing and betaing posts, responding to donor inquiries, designing graphics, sending e-mail blasts, mitigating server traffic, monitoring donation receipts, contacting new volunteers, and myriad other tasks. This was truly an organization-wide effort.

Although this membership drive is over, it's never too late to contribute to the ongoing work of the OTW. In addition, our OTW Community Survey remains open through May 2 and is a great way for you to share your feedback with us. We also encourage you to check out our Strategic Planning Roadmap to learn about how we're working to enhance the long-term success and sustainability of the OTW and its projects.

Like all fan creations, the OTW relies on fans for its existence — and in the last eight days, your support has been inspiring. Because of your generosity, the OTW's efforts to preserve fanworks and fannish history, advocate for fans' legal rights, and promote positive representations of fans in academic and mainstream media discourse will continue to thrive.

On behalf of everyone at the OTW, we thank you.

Aja, Alex, Anna, Kat, Kristen, Lesann, and Liz
OTW Development & Membership Committee

Title - Tag Wrangling: It’s Your Right To Tag However You Like (You Can Even Be Your Own Spotlight)

At the recent April Showers Import Party, the topic of tagging came up. Unsurprisingly — there were fanworks finding homes on the Archive of Our Own, after all. And one of the most amazing things about the AO3 is definitely its tagging system.

What makes this particular tagging system so amazing? It's specifically designed so that users can use any tag, in exactly the form they want it on their works, while keeping those works as organized as they would be in a strictly classification-based archive. Perhaps even better organized, since AO3 tagging not only allows users to search for works using tags based on traditional classifications like fandom, character and relationship, but also tens of thousands of canonical "additional tags" that go far beyond the limits of genre. And the more you tag, the better it works overall (more on why that's so later).

So, you may be asking, what’s a canonical additional tag? And how does a tag come to be one?

First, a bit of tagging history is in order. The indexing of information using keywords isn’t a new practice, of course. When del.icio.us launched in 2003, the new part of their model wasn’t the link collections or the keywords themselves — those had been around on the Internet pretty much since the start. Their innovation was to give users the power to attach keywords to those link collections. Nearly ten years on, the AO3 has made a great start at putting that sort of descriptive tagging power in the hands of fan creators when it comes to archiving their fanworks.

A great deal of that power comes from additional tags (originally called freeform tags). They're tags that don’t fall into the standard fandom/character/relationship groupings, and include kinks, tropes, genres, story elements, word counts, recording lengths, video formats, fan art media, POVs, episode tags, additional warnings, and whatever else users can think of! And all those additional tags gain their useful descriptive power when they're made canonical, appearing in the search filters and the auto-complete box as the most useful, general forms of particular tags, with many other synonymous tags linked to them. Tag wranglers — fans who have volunteered to curate the tags belonging to particular fandoms — do the linking, so for a tag to have been made canonical means that a wrangler has either recognized it as complying with tag wrangling guidelines or created it in compliance with those guidelines specifically so they can attach another tag to it.

What that means is that when an additional tag appears in the archive, a tag wrangler assesses whether people searching for works would like to be able to search for works tagged with it. Often the answer is yes, but sometimes it's no — and that's fine! That doesn't mean that you shouldn't tag your works using whatever tags you like; those tags will still bring up works, after all, even if they aren't canonical! A tag wrangler making your tag canonical just means that they judged it a useful addition to the filters — and one that other people might want to have the option of tagging works with, as well.

So if you can tag with whatever you want, how do you effectively use additional tags to shine a spotlight on your work?

This is where we return to the question of how more tagging makes the system work better. You see, additional tags make it possible to bring up works tagged everything from Accidental Marriage to Zombies — and everything else in between. So, using tags which highlight tropes or kinks (among other things), means that people interested in these topics can more easily find your works containing them. And this isn't just limited to fanfic — there are additional tags which describe aspects of other types of fanworks that people might be looking for, as well — whether it’s a crochet pattern, a short podfic, or an example of digital fan art.

What it comes down to is this: your were-creature accidental marriage fic/podfic/painting/quilt with zombies and a female BAMF character of color lead might be exactly the work Fan X was looking for. And they might never know it exists, if you don't tell the world exactly what awesome stuff it contains. There're a lot of awesome fanworks featuring a lot of awesome stuff on the AO3 just waiting for people to spotlight those awesome qualities, so go forth and tell people that your fic is epistolary or your comic features a mythical being or creature or that your podfic is a cast recording.

While many of us love the diversity that additional tags bring, if you don't like seeing additional tags on works, you can always choose to ignore them, or even hide them completely using a custom skin and the Blurblings Hide freeform tags skin.

If you'd like to know more about tagging on the AO3, or about what tag wranglers do, the Tag Wrangling Committee is having an open house on Sunday, April 22, from 19:00 to 21:00 UTC (see when this is in your timezone) in OTW's public chatroom on Campfire. The chatroom can be accessed at: https://fanarchive.campfirenow.com/c6440 Feel free to drop by at any time during the session to ask questions or just to hang out.

The AO3 and its tagging system are funded by fans, for fans. To help keep it growing, please donate today.