Archive of Our Own ^beta

Welcome to Release 0.8.5. Normally in this introduction, we'd also be telling you which revision the Archive was on, but we have recently changed the way we manage our code and deploy process, so this information is no longer relevant. We'll just be using release numbers from now on!

New coding and deploy methods!

We used to host the Archive project on Google code, where we managed our version control with Subversion. This worked fine when we were a small project, but as we have grown and welcomed more developers into the fold we needed something a little more flexible. Subversion is great if you want to add ALL THE CODE to the live site at once, but if you want to skip some additions (for example, because someone has committed code that's not quite ready for primetime), things get complicated. So, we're moving to a new tool, git, which allows for lots more flexibility and makes it easier to collaborate, and we're hosting the project on Github. You can see our new otwarchive project on Github.

This means a lot to coders, but not so much to users - with one important exception! Because git makes it super-easy for us to pick and choose what we want to put on the live site, we'll no longer have to wait for different projects to be ready. Instead, we're moving to a regular monthly deploy where we push out the stuff that is ready, while keeping the other projects going in their separate git homes (known as forks). So, you'll be able to expect a new code deploy at the end of each month. Remember, you can follow our Twitter feed AO3_Status

Highlights!

Challenge improvements

Challenge mods often want to reveal the list of prompts/requests at the end of the challenge so that participants can write extra gifts. Now they can! The prompts are hidden by default - once mods have chosen to make them visible they are browsable. There is currently a known issue which means that the link to view the prompts is visible even when the prompts are not - this will be fixed next month!

Importer improvements

Stalwart coder Rebecca is continuing her work on our import function. She's made some further improvements to imports from the Yuletide Treasure site, and continues to review this functionality. We currently have specialist support for Livejournal, Dreamwidth (& other LJ clones / forks), DeviantArt, Fanfiction.net and Yuletide Treasure, along with general support for other sites. As always, we welcome feedback about the import function via our Support and Feedback form.

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page.

Release Details

Features

• Tag wrangling: Added a note to comment emails for tag wrangling to make it clear the comment is on a tag.
• Tag wrangling: Changed the order of 'Character' and 'Relationship' on the New Tag page to reflect wrangler workflow
• Upgrade: Switched to the latest version of the will_paginate gem (this should have no effect on what users see)
• Changed order of categories on Media page so that 'Uncategorized' always comes at the end

Bug fixes

• Admin features: Fixed admin permissions so admins can edit user emails and change user roles on the Archive
• Importer: Changed error message for failed imported to read 'work', not 'story'
• Importer: Improved imports from Yuletide to strip headers correctly
• Importer: Improved imports from Yuletide to work with New Years' Resolution stories
• Importer: Fixed error message for attempted imports from Google docs (currently not supported) so that it gives a proper error message instead of just giving an error 500.

Welcome to Revision 3609, up from 3520. Two small deploys to fix bugs with potential security implications, one giant bug fix release and one emergency fix for that thing where we decided to reinvent the alphabet on fandom listings. Cesy, Elz, Enigel, mumble, Pixel, Rebecca and Sidra all contributed code to this release.

Reminder: Archive downtime this week

This week, we're moving over to our brand new servers! This requires several periods of downtime as we move the old servers to their new rack (now with extra power!) and then switch on the new servers. Our first extended downtime was yesterday (when we deployed this release); the next two will be today, Monday 7 February, c. 17.00 UTC, for approximately 30 minutes (What time is this where I am?) and Thursday 10 February, c. 18.00 UTC, for approximately 6 hours (What time is this where I am?). For regular status updates follow our Twitter AO3_Status.

If you're at a loose end while the Archive is down, you might want to join in our server naming festival. We're looking for creative ideas for names for our seven beautiful machines.

Highlights

History feature

We've polished our history feature a little bit so that clicking the 'Mark to read later' button on a work results in a 'to-read' list on your 'History' page (instead of just marking the individual work). We have lots more improvements planned for the history feature in future (tag filters YES PLEASE) but while we work towards those we think that this small tweak will make a lot of difference to how useful the history feature is.

Importer

The lovely Rebecca has done lots of work spiffing up our import function. The problems with importing from Livejournal and Dreamwidth have now been fixed, and we've added import from DeviantArt (it still gets stuck on the adult content warning at present, though). We've also added an option to manually set the encoding for a site when you import - our importer tries to recognise the encoding itself, but sometimes that's not possible. If you get strange characters when you try to import, try manually setting the encoding and try a few different options to see which gets the best result.

Kudos

We've had lots of discussion on how and where kudos should show up (it was turning up in some unexpected places!) In order to keep it simple, we've made it belong to the work as a whole, not to individual chapters. This means a few kudos will disappear as we tidy up and make all consistent. Don't be alarmed! Your love has still been registered, but it will no longer show up multiple times.

Media page - new order!

Our Media page has been alphabetized - instead of the random order it was it before it now starts with Anime and Books & Literature and ends with Video Games. We're planning some more changes to this page in the future in order to make it more useful to users and more international in nature.

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page.

Release details

Features

• added a button to the History page to only show to-read items, removed unnecessary preferences button
• importing works: a custom import for DeviantART posts has been added, other features have been tweaked
• CSS classes are now allowed in notes as well
• more automated tests for new features and bug fixes
• made media category page alphabetical

Bug fixes

• fixed a security hole with user logins
• fixed a glitch that made private bookmarks visible in some circumstances


• kudos can now be left for the whole work only (and not on a chapter-by-chapter basis), but the list and button will still show up on every chapter for more convenience
• cosmetic fix to prevent kudos section from spilling over the hearts icon
• fixed a pesky bug that would prevent proper unrevealing of works in a gift exchange challenge
• gift counts should now be accurate even if a work is a gift for two pseuds of the same user (if your gift count has changed, this might be the reason)
• systems: changed re-indexing to run once a day, not every two hours
• systems: some deploy branch maintenance
• importing works:
  • importer now properly ignores LJ metadata
  • DW import has been unbroken
  • tweaks to the Yuletide story importer
  • importing stories from fanfiction.net now sets the proper posting date
  • timeout during import now produces a meaningful error message
  • importer doesn't eat special characters anymore
  • span and div tags in imported works will now be preserved
  • in case you run into problems, you can now manually set the encoding for your work
  • usage hints on the import page have been tidied up a bit
  • fixed a glitch where a fic for 'General Audiences' would get imported as 'Mature'
• neatened up homepage title a little
• added a "try clearing your cache" note to the maintenance 503 page
• fixed a bug where putting in non-canonical tags for a work would give an error message meant for challenge signups
• autocomplete for tags is now prioritising the most used tags again (A side effect for this fix was a temporary jumbling of the fandoms pages - if you were disconcerted to see formerly alphabeticized lists in a strange order, this was why. It was swiftly fixed by our awesome coder, Elz.)
• fixed a bug that would only find/allow characters and relationships for the first fandom if more than one fandom had been specified in a new work or a challenge signup
• unbroke tag comments and links in comment notifications for wranglers
• signing up as a tag wrangler for an unassigned fandom now fills in the fandom in question for you
• fixed a HTML glitch on the abuse report page
• closed an open div on work preview pages that would lead to wonky-looking bottom navigation
• made the media type dropdown on fandom indexes stand out a bit more
• if a media category from the dropdown is empty, a "No fandoms found" message is shown
• the 'reason for your request' box for invites was shrunk to a less intimidating size
• abuse reports are now listed by date
• fixed a bug that made it possible to create posted work with no posted chapters
• when you post a new work, the "Does this fullfill an assignment" ticky box will not display challenges that you defaulted on or already posted your assignment for
• fixed a bug that would prevent some users' series pages from loading
• the external bookmark form now fills in the URL and title field
• small cosmetic fixes for chapter editing and previewing
• fixed a glitch that would lead to wildly unrealistic wait times for invitation requests
• improved handling of cookie errors
• setting the posting date for a work to the future now doesn't silently uncheck the "Set a different publication date" ticky after preview

This edition of the release notes compiled by AD&T staffer mumble \0/.

Welcome to Revision 3520, up from 3483. This is actually a few different releases bundled together, because we had a little flurry of activity over the holiday period which we didn't post release notes for.

Most Archive users will have noticed that the Archive was experiencing very heavy loads during the holiday period, as Yuletide and other holiday challenges brought high traffic to the site. We know that our sad little 502 page was showing hir face more than any of us would have liked! However, our coding and Systems teams deserve a MASSIVE shoutout for their tireless work keeping the site up and dealing with the performance issues. They worked right through the holiday to keep pushing code improvements and tweaking server setups. We'd especially like to thank sysadmin Sidra for the incredible amount of effort she put into coaxing our poor beleaguered servers into working: her work helped get the number of 502s down from over 9000 (on 25 December) to just 9 a few days later. Go Sidra!

If you're wondering whether the Archive will be this slow NEXT year, then we hope the answer is no! The stress test this year taught us some more about how to configure things for the best possible performance. Even better, we're about to buy some new servers which our hosting service described as 'beasts'. More news on that coming soon...

Highlights

Static pages for collections

As part of our performance enhancements, the wonderful Elz worked till the eleventh hour to put in static pages for collections (you may have seen us mention these a time or three on @AO3_Status). These are pages where the whole page is created once and then saved, so it is served up quickly for the next user. They can't have any dynamic information (comment counts, hit counts), but they are MUCH faster at peak times.

All collections have static pages - the url is http://archiveofourown.org/static/collections/COLLECTIONNAME. They generate when people access the urls, so they are only noticeably faster for heavily visited collections. Check out a few of the following:

• DSSS_2010
• yuletide2010
• yuletidemadness2010

Share via Twitter (or not!)

We've noticed lots of our users sharing recs for AO3 works via Twitter. We thought you might appreciate a quicker way of doing this, so we've added a Twitter button which fills in the title and url for you! Just click the 'Share' button to see the button.

We know not all our users will be comfortable with a feature that makes it really easy to share links on external services, so we've included an opt-out - just check out your preferences to select this. If you opt out, it will disable the Twitter option on your works now, and if we introduce sharing options for other external services in the future it will also disable those. (However, opting out won't actually prevent people from sharing links to your work anywhere, it will just make them do more of the work themselves. If you want a higher level of control over who sees your work, you can restrict your works to Archive users only.)

Improvements to kudos

Since we introduced the 'kudos' option a couple of weeks ago, over 51,000 kudos have been left and we've had a ton of great feedback about it. We've fixed a few things that were not quite right with the feature: it's now 'kudos' everywhere (no weird singular usage) and you can opt out of kudos notifications without turning off your comment notifications.

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page.

Release details

Features

• Added server-relieving caching options to collections and challenges
• Added static pages for collections (fandom pages, work pages, etc).
• Added ability to leave kudos from static work pages
• Ensured that static pages would persist across deploys.
• Added 'Share on Twitter' button
• Added the ability to opt-out of allowing sharing of your works on external services (e.g. Twitter).
• Changed kudos-related wording in notification emails and on work pages to take care of the singular/plural issue - no more strange singular 'kudo'!
• Removed revision number from page titles
• More automated tests, continuing our mission to test ALL THE THINGS.

Bug fixes

• Removed author names from "share" box for anonymous works (whups)
• Fixed byline bug causing names of anonymous authors to appear in static files and downloads
• Made it possible to edit a work in a closed challenge without being kicked out of the collection
• Fixed collection links in anonymous work blurbs showing up as unparsed HTML code
• Fixed a bug where you couldn't edit tags on a work if they were related to a meta tag
• tweaked collections pages for display in Internet Explorer
• Cleaned up story notes section, fixing issues which were causing links to endnotes to be encased in invalid HTML and thus look weird.

Systems changes

• Added option to turn off kudos notifications
• Change thinking sphinx delta delayed jobs into an hourly cronjob (relieved load on the server)
• Changing reindex to every two hours (relieved load on the server)
• Gave delayed job its own restart
• Made it possible to run deploy quick on otw2 server (saves some work during repeated deploys)
• Updating static sweeper

Welcome to revision 3453, up from revision 3435! This release contains some minor bugfixes as well as a few nice feature enhancements! Thanks, as always, to the wonderful coders and testers who contributed to this release.

Highlights

Kudos improvements!

The new Kudos feature is very popular! However, a number of people found that they had accidentally added Kudos to their own works and felt a little bashful about it. In response to user feedback, you will no longer be able to add Kudos to your own works. Additionally, existing self-applied Kudos have been removed.

In other Kudos news, we've also added notification of Kudos being given for your works. You will receive these notifications so long as you have comment notifications turned on in your Preferences. You will also be able to search for stories by number of Kudos.

Improved Fandom Index Pages!

Fandom index pages have been redesigned with the addition of handy alphabetical jump links to help you find your place in the listing more quickly.

Admin Post Translations

This release also adds an improved system for the translation of Admin Posts, no longer requiring manual linking to the translated versions. Non-English posts will not show up in the RSS feed, but you will be able to subscribe via RSS to posts in the language(s) of your choice.

Non-English admin posts will be automatically linked from the English version, and will show up under the url for the language in question, e.g. the German posts will be at http://archiveofourown.org/languages/de/admin_posts. To get the rss feed, simply append .rss to the relevant url: http://archiveofourown.org/languages/de/admin_posts.rss.

Note: Change to Search Function

For performance reasons, you will no longer be able to search on the full text of works content. Summaries and notes are still searchable.

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page.

Release details

Features

• Improvements for fandom index pages (sorted alphabetically, with quick jump links)


• List of fandoms in collections and challenges can now be filtered by media type


• Added ability to search for stories by number of kudos


• Added notifications for kudos (unless you turned off comment notifications under Preferences)


• Added a fix that will prevent users from adding kudos to their own works


• Made unposted chapters in a chaptered work more noticable


• Enabled comment management for admins (mark as spam, delete)


• Better system for admin post translations (different versions of an admin post don't have to be manually linked anymore)

Bugs

• Fix for updating all unposted stories in a challenge as defaulters


• Fixed a bug causing some users to be without default pseuds; if you found that you got multiple 500 errors when logged in (couldn't view profile, works, or sign up for challenges) then this should have fixed your problem

Welcome to revision 3435, up from revision 3403! We have a bunch of fun things in this revision along with some much-needed performance enhancements! Thanks to all the wonderful coders and testers who contributed to this release, and a special thanks to mumble, who put the release notes together!

Highlights

RSS feed for admin posts

If you want to keep track of what we post about the site, you can now follow our admin posts via an RSS feed: add http://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts.rss to an RSS reader of your choice.

CSS styling for works!!!!

For a long time our users have been asking for better ways to style their works on the AO3. We really wanted to give users greater control over their font choices, positioning, typography, etc, but accessibility is also a major concern for us, and we wanted to make sure that it would be easy for users to override more complex styling if they wanted or needed to. We’re thrilled to announce that we have now introduced ‘work skins’, which allow us to have our elaborately iced, twelve-tier cake with sparkles on and eat it too! For information on the new feature and how it works, check out our Tutorial on styling works (coming soon!).

Kudos

Lots of people have asked us for a quick way to leave love or appreciation for a work, and we were very happy to oblige! You can now leave ‘kudos’ at the click of a button – works with kudos will display this happy little AO3 dude: along with names and numbers of folk who left kudos. We think this will be a great way for people to spread the love during the holiday season, when finding time to read fic in between family commitments can make it hard to leave long comments.

BABY

Finally, we couldn’t let this release go by without welcoming the newest addition to the AO3 family! After a month of producing amazing amounts of code, our senior coder Astolat went one better and also produced a beautiful baby girl! Baby Hypatia was born on the 7th December, weighing 7lbs 4oz. Astolat was coding right up until her waters broke, and sending emails about our new servers while she was in labour! (Our staff are crazy dedicated, OMG.) Mommy and baby are doing well – KUDOS ASTOLAT!

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page.

Release details

Features

• Added the ability to post works without previewing them first (especially handy for editing!)
• Added the option to leave ‘kudos’ on works.
• Made ‘leave comment’ box visible by default.
• Added new styling option for works via ‘work skins’:
  • Renamed “Light Style” to “Hide/Show Creator’s Style”
  • Renamed “Disable User Generated Styles” to “Always hide custom styles”
  • Created public “Basic Formatting” work skin
• Made comment form show by default
• Added additional caching to works and chapters for better performance
• Comments now display user’s local time instead of server time
• Entering a wrong collection name in the Post New form now yields an error message
• More improvements and bugfixes for automated tests
• added RSS feed for admin posts (http://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts.rss)
• Tweaks to the “share” option to spiff it up a bit!

Bugs

• Fixed a bug causing 500 errors for some people when posting to fulfil challenge assignments.
• Unbroke OpenID login
• The share box is now disabled for users without javascript so that it doesn’t hog screen real estate.
• Fixed issue causing 500 errors when downloading fics with related works
• Fixed some overlapping issues in the comments section
• Fixed some mangled text on the sign-up page

Welcome to Revision 3403, up from 3295. Since our last set of release notes we've had a bunch of small bugfix releases and added enough extra bits of code to warrant another round-up - we've rounded up the key changes here. These release notes put together for you by new tester mumble - thanks, mumble!

A note on Archive performance

Anyone who has accessed the Archive recently will have noticed that it is very slow. This is due to a combination of different factors - our servers are at more-or-less full capacity (we're getting new ones soon!), some of the changes in our Rails 3 upgrade unexpectedly slowed down code or required some Systems readjustment, and we're experiencing a high level of demand due to holiday challenges including Yuletide.

If you repeatedly receive a 502 error on the same page, but other pages on the Archive seem to be loading fast(ish), it's possible that your browser has cached the error page. Try clearing your browser cache if this is happening to you. (However, unfortunately quite a lot of the 502 errors are real ones.)

We know it's super-frustrating for everyone when the site is slow, and our coders and Systems team are working like crazy (seriously, eighteen-hour days in some cases) to make performance improvements. Please bear with us - we're doing our best!

Highlights

"Share" a work

This was already introduced in the last big release, but got lost in the barrage of new features and fixes. Works now come with a "Share" button above the header, which enables you to quickly paste all relevant information about the fic (title, author, fandom, pairings, word count etc. etc.) into a Livejournal post or similar, to either link to your own work or to a story you want to recommend. The same button can be found on all works you've added to your AO3 bookmarks. No more fiddly copy-pasting or formatting, it's already been done for you!

Challenge improvements

Yuletide proved to be a good test case for creating a challenge with several thousand users and fandoms. Most of the major problems could be solved during the sign-up phase, other bits and pieces are still being worked on. The sign-up form was streamlined to lessen the load on our servers, and the summary page (for an overview of offered and requested fandoms) was rewritten to deal with a large number of sign-ups and an equally large number of people continuously hitting refresh in excitement. Several smaller issues regarding secrecy and fandom stats were fixed as well. This release also added a "See Open Challenges" button to the collections page, which lets you do just that. The list is based on the "Signup open?" ticky box under Challenge Settings, which a moderator has to check or uncheck manually, so if they forget to do this, the challenge might show up even if the dates say it's closed. You can see the current list here.

Spam protection on the Support form

We were getting hit with spam through the Support form, so we installed Akismet to weed out the p3n1s-related messages. This shouldn't affect regular support requests and feedback, but if you run into any problems, please let us know in the comments to this post.

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page.

Release details

Features

• Option to share a work through preformatted header information for easy copy-pasting (since 0.8.2)
• List of all challenges which are currently open
• More improvements to automated tests
• Made the HTML parser behave more consistently
  • the <del> tag works now
  • <br /> tags will be added to all linebreaks, so if you've pasted a work from an email message or similiar, you'll have to strip out any unwanted carriage returns first
  • Formatting tags such as <em> or <strong> that span across several paragraphs will be closed by the parser at the end of one paragraph and re-opened in the next
  • Fixed an issue with <hr /> tags (which should go on their own line with no surrounding text to allow the parser to do its thing)
• Added an email link to assignments that only the challenge owner can see

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a tag wrangling bug regarding the introduction of new fandoms
• Fixed an issue with auto-complete in the fandom field when posting a work
• Fixed several issues regarding collections and challenges
  • You can now post works to a collection before fulfilling your main assignment
  • If you've posted a work to a secret exchange, this work's fandom won't show up on your user page before reveal
  • If a challenge has more than x sign-ups, the summary page will only be generated hourly to make it less of a resource hog (currently x = 20)
• Added an error message when auto-complete can't find characters or relationships for the fandom you entered (or when you forgot to enter a fandom)
• Fixed a bug where the Rich Text Editor wouldn't work after preview
• Fixed a bug where you couldn't dedicate more than one gift to the same user
• Unbroke the tag clouds (which now actually show the most popular and some random tags, respectively)
• Fixed a bug that would delete characters from titles in epub and mobi files

Welcome to Revision 3295, up from 2998. This release is a big one - we've upgraded the framework the Archive runs on to version 3 of Rails, which involved rewriting ALL the code.

7 different coders contributed code to this release, and many, many more people worked to bring it about. Major kudos to Sidra, Elz and Naomi, who did all the heavy lifting when it came to rewriting ALL the code. We're also excited to welcome first commit from new coder rebecca, who contributed lots of fixes to this release! Thanks to Cesy and all the coders who worked to write Cucumber tests, which helped us make this upgrade with confidence. Much gratitude to Eylul and Kylie, our test leads, for their hard work coordinating volunteer testers and testing. And thank you to everyone else who contributed with support, documentation, cheerleading, tag wrangling - and to the users who contributed generously during our October membership drive to help provide a secure financial future for the Archive (next stop - more servers!) \0/

Highlights

Rails 3 upgrade

This release is also known as "OMG Rails 3! \o/" You might see us a little excited by this - so excited we added a special Rails 3 Archive logo for this deploy. :) We have upgraded the framework the Archive runs on to Rails 3 - this basically meant rewriting or tweaking ALL the code. Most of the changes should be invisible to users, but Rails 3 should bring a lot of performance improvements. The awesome testing team and temporary testers have done an amazing job of doing a full regression test in a very short time, making sure that you see only the nice outcomes of the upgrade!

Sanitizer and parser changes

We have significantly changed our HTML sanitizing and parsing. When you post a work on the Archive, we check the code and strip out anything that we can't be sure is safe, and also format it nicely for you. We used to do this when someone viewed the code, but that was a big performance drain! Now we do it when we save the code, and when you edit you'll be able to see the formatted code we produced (don't be alarmed when HTML tags show up on edit!). This should make things much clearer for authors and much faster for readers! For more details of the change and how it will affect you, please see our post on the new parser.

Video embedding

We're super-excited to be able to announce the introduction of something many people have been waiting for - you can now embed video on the Archive! Video embeds are working from Youtube, Vimeo, blip.tv, Dailymotion, Viddler, Metacafe and 4shared. We have to limit it to specific sites for security reasons, but if you use another hosting site and want us to add it, please submit a support request with a link to the site and we'll add it if we can.

AO3.org

We spent some shiny pennies to purchase AO3.org, so now, if you type this into your browser, it will redirect to archiveofourown.org. Less typing for you!

Gift Exchange improvements

Gift exchanges now offer the following dazzling options to moderators setting
them up:
- allow offer/request ANY
- require unique values across prompts/offers (ie "all fandoms must be unique")
- generate fandom, character, relationship, and freeform tag lists based on the average number of uses of the tag on the Archive (so if you want to run a challenge focused on under represented characters you can create an easy list to start with)
- restrict character/relationship/freeform tag autocomplete to those belonging to
the selected fandom (this depends on whether they have been wrangled by our team of intrepid wranglers - get in touch with them via a support request if you have particular needs)

New default font

You may notice that headings on the Archive now look a bit different. We used to use a custom font, Fertigo, which was packaged with the Archive (so every user could see it, regardless of whether they had it installed on their own computer). It was very pretty! Unfortunately, it did not behave well with some non-Latin characters, and was causing a few perfomance issues too, so we have retired it. If you have works in Cyrillic or Greek which previously had weird characters in the title, this change should fix it.

If you miss Fertigo and would like it back, or you want to change the way the Archive looks in other ways, don't forget you can create a custom skin! Check out our tutorial on skins for more information.

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page.

Release details

Features

• Challenges code


• A lot of improvements and additions to automated tests


• Some extra security to tag wrangle filtering


• Renamed user-generated-views to userstuff for conciseness


• Huge overhaul of sanitizing and parsing


• Added custom author parser in preparation for rescuing the whitfic and
  grahamslash archives


• Ability to turn off tag wrangling at times of heavy traffic


• Adding page for fandoms without wranglers


• Styling and sorting for challenge summary page


• Swapped out birthday party icon for another temporary icon celebrating our Rails upgrade!


• Modified styling in the rich text editor so that it displays in the same way as it will look on post.


• Improved accuracy of wordcount feature. \0/


• Modified comment link on downloads so that it goes direct to the 'Add comment' form, for greater feedbacking ease.


• Added ability for admins to edit public skins.


• Added meta section for downloaded works.


• Added ability to delete or post drafts directly from the 'My Drafts' page.


• Added ability to tag works on import.


• Moved 'Mark to read later' to the top of works.


• Retired our old custom font, Fertigo.


• Added a descriptive title for downloads so that all devices list downloads by the work title instead of just by 'download'.


• Added ability to restrict downloading works to logged-in users, for times of heavy load or in case of a DoS attack.


• Changed the list of fandoms on user profile pages so that it only shows fandom tags they have actually used on their works (not the parent metatags) and sorts those in order of the number of works.

Bug Fixes

• Fix for "Chapter 1" heading appearing on downloads of stories with only one chapter


• Unposted chapters included in downloads


• Fixed bug with edit option showing on the work preview page.


• Fixed bug causing some symbol icons to disappear on works listings.


• Fixed bug causing unposted chapters to appear on chapter navigation listings.


• Fix for bug causing no results to be returned when limiting search to a specific category.


• Fixed various encoding issues causing problems with tags which included special characters.


• Fixed a problem causing endless redirects on the preferences page when there was an error.


• Fixed problem causing errors when downloading some works with special characters.


• Modified pdf downloads so they appeared with a plain white background.


• Improved adult content warning behavior so that links to 'Show comments' are preserved when you have to click through the warning.

Welcome to Revision 2998, up from 2850. 8 different coders worked on this release! \0/ [sparkles]

Highlights

Refactoring, performance fixes and automated tests

Our senior coders have been continuing to work on refactoring, performance fixes and automated tests in preparation for our upgrade to a newer version of Rails, the programming language the Archive is made in.

Skins

Skins are here at long last! You can now choose how the Archive displays fonts and colors when you're logged in to your account.

We have a few site skins ready-made for you. You can see a quick preview and the code we use to make them at the skins page. Now, when you look under "My Preferences", there is a drop-down menu that lets you choose a different look and feel for the archive. For more details on how to create and use Skins, please check out our Skins Tutorial.

This is just the beginning. Skins are still in beta, and we have some great plans for the future, including a much better Wizard to help people create their own skins.

Ebook downloads

Lots of fans asked for this, and we're very happy to be able to release it at last - we've added the option to download stories for your ebook reader. You can choose from epub, mobi and PDF formats.

Minimize your user page's inclusion in search engines

We've added a new preference, to minimize your user page's inclusion in search engine results. This isn't a guarantee, as not all search engines respect the guidelines, but it will help. This setting currently only affects your user profile - the next release will apply it to your works as well. However, if you want to make absolutely sure your works don't appear in search engines, you'll need to lock them to Archive users only.

Changing "Pairings" to "Relationships"

In order to reflect the purpose of the field more accurately, we have changed the 'Pairings' label on works to 'Relationships'. We think this better reflects the diversity of romantic configurations as well as encouraging people to include friendships in this field (this was always the plan, but we didn't advertise it well!).

Friendship tags work the same as pairing tags have worked in the past and, once the wranglers have wrangled them, take the canonical form "Sha Gojyo & Cho Hakkai", so this is what your friendship tags will look like in filters!

Known Issues

See our Known Issues page.

Release details

Features

• Introduction of Archive skins! This involved many, many separate code issues!


• Added the option to download works in mobile formats


• 'Read later' button - adds the work to your viewing history (if you have it enabled) and flags it as unread.


• Moved revision number from the header to the footer, for greater prettiness.


• Added sparkly logo for Archive birthday!


• Changed 'pairings' to 'relationships' across the Archive.


• Added lots more automated tests for collections, skins, chapter rearrangement, autocompletes, tag wrangling, visibility, series rearrangement, support form and CSS sanitization.


• Split different advanced search types onto separate pages.


• Added the option to minimize the inclusion of works and user profiles in search engines.


• Added lots and lots of new options for colored text!


• Added the option to mark series as works in progress or complete.


• Added a feature to suggest posting a work or bookmark to users who have nothing on their user homepage.

Bug Fixes

• Fix for broken bookmark autocomplete.


• Text areas (like the post work form) were affected by a very annoying bug in IE8, which made the text jump after every edit. We added an IE8-specific style sheet to get around IE8's bugginess.


• Fix for bug which caused errors when wranglers added synonyms to a canonical freeform tag.


• Importing works: Ensured that the original posted-on date is preserved when a work is imported form another site.


• Fix for bug preventing the creation of new series.


• Fix for bug which erroneously caused works to appear as if they belonged to collections.


• Ensured that users will not see the date in their local time if it is the same as the Archive default time (so they don't see the same date twice).


• Fix for some inaccuracies in character counter.


• Fix for overzealous imports from Yuletide - these no longer import navigation!


• Changed outdated 'challenges' link in site map.


• Ensured that works still get added to history when read chapter-by-chapter.


• Ensured that 'add to collection' link appeared when viewing works chapter-by-chapter.


• Ensured that 'redirect to back' will work without an error for users who have set their browsers not to send referrer information.


• Ensured that running our automated tests does not send test messages to our Support bug tracker!


• Fixed minor inconsistencies in HTML and grammar of our TOS.


• Added a hyphen on the Archive homepage.


• Fixed a problem causing the wrong name to appear in notifications for co-authors.