Archive of Our Own ^beta

The Organization for Transformative Works was pleased to learn that one of our projects, the Archive of Our Own, has been named among the '50 Best Websites 2013' by TIME magazine staff. We are excited to be included in this list and in the company of a number of other great websites.

We would like to extend a thank you to OTW members whose generosity has helped to support the continued development of the AO3 and to AO3 users who provide the content that helps make it one of the 'Best Websites'. We look forward to continuing to build the AO3 to make it even better in the years to come.

There has been a very active and thoughtful response to our recent announcement in favor of allowing meta on the AO3. We'd like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to everyone for raising their concerns, showing their support, and otherwise engaging with us as we work to define our policies, refine our processes, and improve our communication. In addition, we'd like to respond to a number of the issues raised and clarify how this decision was reached and what the process will be from this point forward.

For the purposes of this and the previous post, the term "meta" refers to nonfictional fanworks in all media. While text-based nonfiction fanworks have been a frequent focus, this decision and the surrounding commentary is meant to encompass fanworks in all media; this is one reason why multimedia hosting, posting, and filtering will be referenced frequently in conjunction with the decision to support meta.

There is still a long way to go before meta can be fully supported on the AO3, and we will address a number of the concerns about implementation and timing below. Determining how meta should be supported — for example, the details of how multimedia hosting on the AO3 will ultimately look — is a matter for our committees and users to decide through committee collaboration and user input. However, determining whether supporting meta on the Archive is consonant with the OTW’s mission falls squarely within the Board’s purview and duty.

History of the discussion

When the initial question of meta was posed to Board, it was framed as a request for clarification on whether meta fell under transformative works as we defined them for the AO3, and how to proceed with reports of meta as a violation of our Terms of Service (ToS). The Board voted last August to send the meta issue back to the committees for more discussion, in the hope that the committees could work out among themselves issues that the Board had found insoluble. The decision called for balancing the competing concerns of several committees, and the Board had been unable to reach a satisfactory agreement. However, the execution of that plan dragged on for months as we dealt with Board member hiatuses, resignations, and appointments on top of other day-to-day business, and the vote was never put into action.

When the Board reconvened in 2013, we initially had intended to continue with the plan set out by the 2012 Board, but we quickly realized that — partly as a result of the Board’s dramatically changed composition and partly because of a new focus on clarifying the Board's purview — we no longer felt it to be the best course of action. We looked at the conversations that had been happening within and outside the organization for the previous six months and came to the conclusion that it was in the best interests of both our users and our personnel that a basic decision be made as soon as possible, rather than occupy staff and volunteer time in further stretching out a question that we felt it was our responsibility as Board to settle: the question of the scope of the OTW and AO3's missions with respect to meta.

We had many users who had been waiting all that time to find out if their meta could stay on the Archive, and several committees who needed a determination in order to perform their duties. We took a fresh vote, which was unanimously in favor of interpreting the OTW and AO3's missions as inclusive of owing meta the same protections and support as other fanworks. Once that vote had been taken, sending the issue back to committees for a discussion that would not have changed the Board’s stance would have been disingenuous. We felt it was preferable to state a firm decision and engage the committees in determining how best to carry it out.

We are aware that the Board's decision seemed very abrupt to people both inside and outside the OTW, and we acknowledge that more transparency would have been preferable. The Board’s overall workload and the emotional burnout many of us have experienced as a result of the length and intensity of the meta discussion were obstacles that prevented us from communicating effectively. We regret our shortcomings in this area and will strive to do better in the future; we are working to reduce workload and burnout and clarify policies and purview in an effort to prevent this from recurring.

We are committed to fully engaging committees and users in determining how the decision will be implemented, and a revised Archive TOS and FAQ are currently being drafted under the leadership of the Content Policy Workgroup. As with other TOS and FAQ revisions, they will be posted for public comment before they are formally adopted.

Replies to some questions and concerns

We recognize that this decision will not be popular with all users, members, or even OTW personnel. Conversely, the choice to allow meta — and turning over the ability to define and craft specific policy to our committees — is a decision many support. The concerns raised by those leaving comments are ones the Board spent a great deal of time discussing, and we are happy to share our reasoning and to continue answering questions to the best of our ability. Here are some responses to common concerns and questions:

• Meta does not require new code to be hosted in its bare form — unlike image or video hosting no new code is required for a basic level of service. For example, a nonfiction essay can be uploaded just like a fictional story, or a meta comic can be linked just like a fictional one is now, or a vid focused on commenting on the canon can be embedded like vids that build fictional narratives currently are. While there are ways the AO3 could be better organized to deliver meta, a basic level of hosting is already available.
• The AO3 is intended to eventually have filtering based on work type/medium, allowing meta to be found and filtered. The intention is to expand the AO3 functionality to better host non-textual fanworks (e.g. vids, podfics, art, etc.), and the most-requested behaviors with respect to meta (filtering, tagging, etc.) all intersect with what will be in place for multimedia hosting and posting.
• Refusing to host meta and waiting until we have sufficient code for works types would unduly punish users who have already posted meta works in good faith. In addition to posting meta based on good-faith interpretation of the TOS, users have been posting many types of works the AO3 is not strictly prepared to deal with on a technical and usability level, which includes meta of all media and most non-textual fanworks. Allowing and encouraging users to post all types of fanworks has been a cornerstone of the AO3's philosophy as an archive, and it would be disingenuous and unfair to punish one type of fanwork or creator but not others on this basis.
• While text-based meta faces much less legal challenge than some other fanwork types, it still faces other challenges such as loss of hosting due to failing archives or discontinued blogging platforms. Non-text-based meta, such as meta art and vids, shares many of the same legal challenges as other non-text-based fanworks.
• Fans should be able to archive all their fanworks together. Besides this general principle, there are specific instances of at-risk archives that include meta fanworks. Grandfathering in previously posted meta or disallowing meta except for that taken in through Open Doors leads to an inconsistent policy likely to cause confusion, conflict, and difficulty in enforcement.

We hope this answers some of your comments and concerns. We welcome further input and look forward to working with our personnel and our users in continuing to welcome a broad range of fannish endeavors under the OTW umbrella.

After a long period of discussion, the OTW Board has voted to allow the posting of meta on the Archive of Our Own. We considered a range of issues while making this decision, including how this move would fit into the overall mission of the OTW, the technical and financial resources required, and demand from users of the Archive and members of the OTW. We determined that there is already a demand for meta on the Archive, and that this use of our resources is consonant with our purview and mission.

We're aware that this decision has taken some time, and we sincerely apologize for the delay. We had hoped to reach a decision sooner, but the complexity of the discussion meant we needed to think carefully about the issues. As the term of some OTW Board members ended while the discussion was ongoing, we also needed time for the new Board members to get up-to-speed with all the issues involved.

What will happen next?

Agreeing to include meta on the Archive is just the first step in this journey. The Board will now work with all related committees to define exactly how meta will be handled. Our committees, including AD&T (which will be doing the work on the technical side), Abuse, Support, and others, will be working with our Content Policy workgroup to design a workable policy.

One of the main tasks ahead of us is to agree on some definitions and policies. We need to agree on definitions that are usable and enforceable. While any category is inevitably fuzzy, we want to preserve the Archive as a site for fanworks (so for example, we don't want it to become a general blogging site). Once we've agreed on these definitions, our committees will have a whole range of tasks ahead of them, including:

• Drafting revisions to our Terms of Service and FAQ. Revisions to the Archive TOS will be subject to a public review period (as detailed under Section IB of the TOS) before becoming final.
• Determining technical plans for making meta more accessible. We are already planning changes to posting and browsing on the Archive to allow for multimedia hosting. We do not expect meta to require any additional coding to implement beyond what will be required for these changes, and allowing meta won't change the existing prioritization of these features, but we will need to factor it into our design.
• Determining tagging policies to allow for multimedia and meta browsing.

What will be allowed?

Our Content Policy workgroup will be posting guidelines on what will fall under the 'meta' category and the policies which will apply to it in the next two weeks.

What does this mean for me?

Going forward, we hope that this will mean you can find and enjoy fannish meta more easily (and screen it out if you're not interested).

If you currently have meta posted on the Archive, or you plan to post some in the near future, you should be aware that our policies are still being finalized. As action on existing meta posts was suspended while Board deliberated on this issue, in the coming months some users may be contacted in connection to how their posts fit the new policies. We recommend that users wait until these policies are made public before putting a lot of effort into new meta posts. However, we hope that, long term, meta writers will feel their contributions to the archive are welcome and can join other fanworks in finding an audience at the AO3.

Thoughts?

If you have thoughts and feedback you'd like us to consider, we ask that you comment here on the AO3 version of this post, to make it easier for the various committees involved to answer you and collate your replies.

We announced quite a long while ago that we were phasing out the use of OpenID on the AO3. While the feature was convenient for some users, a very small percentage of accounts were using an OpenID login, and the amount of time spent on maintaining the feature outweighed the benefits of offering it as an option.

When we made the decision to phase out OpenID, we removed it as an option for new accounts. We're now removing the option completely, which means that existing accounts which are using OpenID logins will need to switch to logging in via a username and password combination. Only 57 users are currently logging in via OpenID, so this will not affect many people (we will be emailing all those users who do not currently have a password set up).

If you're currently using an OpenID login, you need to do the following:

1. Check your username (the default name for your account)
2. Log out of the Archive and choose the 'forgot password?' option next to 'Log in'.
3. Enter your username or email address to have a password emailed to you.
4. Log in using your username and the password which was sent to you.
5. Go to your profile to set a password of your choice.
6. Log in using your username and chosen password from now on.

We're sorry to those of you who did find the OpenID option useful. We'll continue to consider different login options going forward, but it's important to us to have something we can commit to maintaining fully. If you encounter any problems during the switch, please contact Support!

It's the season of giving! So, we're pleased to announce that invitation requests are back on the AO3!

Once upon a time (i.e. six months ago), users with Archive accounts could request a few invitations to give out, allowing them to share the Archive with friends and help form communities of like-minded fans.

Unfortunately, earlier this year, as many of you may remember, the Archive was having serious performance issues (we saw the sad 502 page far too often). While our coders and systems team hurried to implement emergency fixes, it was decided that we needed stricter control of the number of accounts being created to reduce the likelihood of unexpected overload. (Generally, people browsing the site without being logged in put a certain amount of stress on the servers, but it's the account perks like bookmarking, subscribing, and accessing a full reading history that contribute to server load to a larger degree.) Back then only 100 invitations were issued to people in the queue each day, so additional user requests could have a serious impact! So, in June, the difficult decision was made to stop giving invitations to existing users. You can read more about what was going on then in our post, Update on AO3 performance issues.

Over the next five months our software upgrades and code improvements caught up with the demand. The queue rate was increased several times, most recently to 750 invitations per day. Given that, we've wanted to go back to giving out invitations to existing users, but there were a few issues to be resolved before we could start.

First, the request form had to be altered to set a maximum number of invitations that a user can request at once. Second, the 1,200 user requests that were in the list when it was shut down had to be addressed. Since we had no limits on how many invitations could be requested back then, we had quite a few requests for very large numbers. Due to limitations in the software, individually lowering those numbers now would require manually editing each request, as would granting only some of the requests at once rather than the whole list.

So, two decisions were made:

1) Everyone with a pending request will receive 1 invitation, just to clear out the backlog.

2) User requests are being re-opened! You can now request a maximum number of 10 invitations at one time. Even with this hard limit in place, we ask that everyone ask for only what they need at a time. Once we've hit the figurative switch and re-enabled this feature later today you will be able to request invitations from your Invite a friend page.

We very much appreciate all of our users, and we are proud of our growth this year, even through the bumpy times. We are glad that once again we can enable you to bring more people on board!

After some discussion, we've decided to stop supporting Internet Explorer 6 and 7 going forward. As of the last deploy, we will not be coding or testing for these two browser versions. While we expect that most aspects of the site will still function, it may appear wonky and functionality will degrade over time.

We know that not everyone has control over which browsers they use, and we do our best to support a wide range of browsers so the site is accessible for as many people as possible. However, with less than 3% of our visitors (and falling) still using these two versions of IE, we do not have the resources to continue active support for the site in these older versions: IE6 and IE7 are so different from modern browsers that they effectively require us to code and test specifically for them.

We know that some assistive technology relies on specific browser configurations. If you encounter any accessibility problems after this update (or at all) we ask that you please contact Support with details: we will gladly do our best to help solve your issues.

Our Open Doors are now opening wide to at-risk archives! The first generation mass archive importer is now ready for testing: this importer will allow us to import archives built on the popular 'Automated Archive' software. Many archives were built with this software over the last 15 years and some are now slowly sinking into the sea: four years ago, one of the things that brought the initial wave of fans together to work on the OTW was the desire to save these archives from extinction. We're really excited to have finally developed the infrastructure and functionality needed to move this work forward.

Here at the OTW, we love the plurality of fandom! There are many individual fannish archives with their own unique flavour and community, and we hope this will always continue. However, fannish archives disappear for a whole host of reasons: sometimes maintainers move on to pastures new, or real life concerns mean they can no longer support the archive. Sometimes a database becomes corrupted through simple use, and the archivist doesn't have the resources (or the technical knowledge) to fix it. Sometimes the money for servers and bandwidth runs out. Sometimes copyright holders launch legal challenges which the maintainers are unable or unwilling to act against. Often it is a combination of all of these things. When archives run into difficulties, they often disappear entirely, taking with them the wonderful creative works created by the fans who use them. Our Open Doors initiative aims to preserve these pieces of fannish history by allowing archivists to import their at-risk archives into the Archive of Our Own.

Our test case for the importer will be the Smallville Slash Archive, which was hosted by fannish legend Minotaur. Minotaur sadly passed away in 2009, and his fannish executors approached us to see whether we would be able to help ensure the site he supported did not disappear with him. They've waited patiently: we're thrilled to finally be able to give them the backup they need.

Imported archives will be set up as collections on the Archive of Our Own. This means that they will have their own profile page and header (if desired by the maintainer), and all works imported will be identified as part of that collection. Collections can be browsed independently of the main Archive, and works in collections are also accessible via the main Archive. If you have work on an archive which is scheduled for import, or you are just generally interested in how this will work, check out the Open Doors FAQ.

The SSA will be imported next week, on Sunday 3rd March! Our second test case will be the Yuletide archive, one of the newest and most complex iterations of the Automated Archive code. Once we've done these two archives and figured out any bugs, we'll be looking to import more at-risk archives: if you have an archive that uses the Automated Archive software and want to transfer it to the AO3 or to back it up in the AO3, please contact Open Doors! (You can continue to moderate or run your archive, which will be set up within AO3 as its own collection. Find out more at our short guide to Open Doors imports and the Open Doors FAQ.)

Our next step will be to try to build a version of this archive importer that works with e-fiction archives, which are also database-backed. If you are a coder who is familiar with e-fiction archives and wants to collaborate on customizing our next importer, please contact Volunteers and Recruiting: please mention specifically your e-fiction experience!

The good news!

Shed your skin! We're about to have a massive deploy of new code that will bring us - among other things - radically new skins! The underlying code for the Archive has been streamlined and modified to make it more accessible and maintainable, and much easier to override. This is going to allow for fantastically beautiful and awesome customizable looks for the archive; fanartists, prepare to go wild! As a bonus, we've also added some skins options for logged-out users (you'll find these in the footer)!

The bad news :(

Since we had to radically retool the underlying code to make this all work well, existing skins are not going to work right out of the box. (We did mention that this was an archive in beta, right?) We're really sorry for the inconvenience, but we had to sacrifice consistency in the short term to make the skins feature more awesome and ensure our code remains maintainable in the long term.

To make sure that no one comes to the archive and finds a broken skin, we'll be temporarily turning off the existing skins when we deploy the new code - don't be alarmed if you come to the Archive to find it looks different! You'll be able to preview your old skins to see how they'll look with the new code, so you can fix the private ones before turning them back on if necessary. We've also already upgraded a bunch of the existing public skins and added some new ones-- for instance a new light-on-dark skin, and a new plain text skin. We'll be posting a list of these skins as soon as the code deploys.

What's so great about the new skins?

LOTS OF STUFF! \0/ One major improvement is that you'll no longer have to use the dreaded !important for most of your overrides to the default skin. In fact, if you want to you can strip away our default skin altogether and write your styles without using any of our CSS at all. But that's only the beginning! There are a whole bunch of new features:

• Modular system so you can make your skin a 'child' of another skin. This means that when you find that skin which has a perfect layout but a color you hate, you can apply that skin for your layout, then add another one on top which just changes the color. (And that's just the beginning of what you can do with the modular skins - we'll have more in a future post explaining the cool possibilities.)


• Make different skins for different devices (this is courtesy of the modular skins) - you'll be able to make a custom skin for when you're browsing on your computer, and another one for when you're browsing on your phone, and have them kick in automatically when you're logged in to your account (providing your phone respects mobile stylesheets). Customization wherever you are!


• An array of images you can use to customize your skins! You can already use images hosted offsite in your own skins (but not in public ones because we need to be sure the images won't change or break). Now you'll be able to pull from a bunch of stock images on the Archive to make your skins even prettier.

Essentially, the new system is aimed at giving you control of ALL THE THINGS! We'll be posting a list of pre-loaded skins as well as loads of shiny new skins over the coming days. We'll also post tutorials and examples so you can get to grips with the new shiny!

O NOES MAH SKINS ARE BROKEN

All may not be lost! If your skins are broken or you think they're likely to be, you can do some things to prepare. We'll be holding a Skins Open House in a week or two where we'll go over how to make new skins and fix old ones - watch this space for news on that.

Accessible skins

One last note - one reason it was important to us to make this change is that it makes it MUCH easier to customize skins to meet specific accessibility needs. If you are using one of the public skins geared towards particular accessibility needs (e.g. low contrast, plain text, etc), then we have either fixed this to work right out of the box under the new system or (where that wasn't feasible) added a new skin to do the same job. We're adding new accessible skins for logged-out users too - you'll be able to access a Low Vision skin and a Light on dark Small Text skin in the footer even when you are logged out. If you need a customized skin for accessibility reasons and our existing skins don't meet that need, please get in touch with support and let us know what you need - we'll do our best to help! (Also, if you run up against an accessibility issue anywhere on the Archive, please let us know - we're committed to keeping the site as accessible as possible, but inevitably there's stuff we miss!)

Stay tuned for more info about skins!