kaie's journal

This post may also be found on the Archive of Our Own which is commentable by anyone with or without an AO3 account. I am disabling comments elsewhere as I would like people to be able to share any discussion with each other.

OMG we did it people! It's almost exactly 2.5 years (17th May 2007) since a certain someone said we should build an Archive of Our Own and I am so proud of us!We didn’t have a meeting this week unless you count staying logged into the chatroom continuously from Friday afternoon to Monday morning (I lie, I left to sleep occasionally). We *did* have a number of passionate discussions which revolved around performance, squee, bugs, more squee, support, and you know, squee. More details after the cut!

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Mirrored from an original post on the Archive of Our Own.

Dear AO3 users and interested parties,

Zvi, in a moment of inspiration has written up a fabulous explanation of how Tags Wuzzles work and has generously offered to let us post it. If you've been wondering how it all works, read on after the cut!

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For the past few years, wizefics has run the Holiday Recathon. The premise? Simple. Get as many people as possible to reccomend their favorite fics in the chosen fandoms, then post those recs, one fandom per day, from December 13 through December 24.

It's an awesome undertaking, and it needs lots of recs. LOTS.

That, my dear f-list, is where you come in. Take a gander at the Holiday Recathon page. Read through the FAQ. Then, definitely rec your fave fics in this year's fandoms, which include:

• Crossovers (any crossover, any time. If it crosses over two (or more!) fandoms, it's eligible here!)
  
• Doctor Who (any Doctor, any time.)
  
• Firefly/Serenity (as you might have been able to tell from the banner above...)
  
• Highlander
  
• Iron Man (any 'verse)
  
• Leverage
  
• The Magnificent Seven
  
• NCIS
  
• Star Trek Reboot
  
• Supernatural
  
• Torchwood
  
• X-Men (any 'verse)
  

Each of the above links takes you to the thread (please note: all comments are screened!) for that fandom's recs. Go ahead and rec that fic. If you don't, someone else might not either.

Even if you don't read in any of the above fandoms, or know of a crossover that knocked your socks off, spread the word. Pimp it out to your f-list. If you do have fics you want to rec, please do go ahead! The more recs, the better the recathon.

Thanks!

We're now in the second day of Open Beta for the Archive of Our Own! It's been a crazy weekend! Here are a few updates on how it's all going, below the cut.

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We're now eight hours into Open Beta for the Archive of Our Own, and we're really excited to see people signing up and using the Archive. So far, we've seen new 493 accounts created, and our new users have added more than 1500 new works in over 150 fandoms! Our lovely front-end coder and support volunteer Cesy has been tracking our progress with some beautiful graphs: New users and fandoms since Open Beta and New works since Open Beta.

If you have questions about what Open Beta is and how to get an account, please check out our Announcing Open Beta post \0/

Open Beta is still beta, and as such the site still has a few kinks. We really value the feedback that our new users have been giving us, and our lovely Support team are working hard to respond to queries as fast as possible. In order to keep our users informed, we'd like to highlight a few of the more common issues and questions here:

Invitation queue

If you sign up via our invitation queue and have trouble entering your email address, check there aren't any extra spaces before or after it. This has been causing a few problems with our validation - it's a bug that will be fixed very soon.

If you joined the invitation queue and when you check back it says you're not in the queue, then please check your spam for your invitation email. If it hasn't shown up, then submit a support request and we'll get back to you as quickly as possible.

Invitation codes

If you receive an invitation via email, you can just click on the link to get to the sign-up page and your code will be entered automatically.

If you are an existing user of the Archive and you'd like to give a code to a friend, then you need to give them an invitation link, not just the raw code. You can choose to send them an email via 'Invitations' on your user home, and this will happen automatically. If you want to share a code without sending an email, then go to 'Manage invitations' and you'll see an option to 'Copy and use' your existing codes. Click on this to copy the invitations link - it's this that you need to share with people.

Account names

The Archive of Our Own allows you to post under various pseuds. However, these are linked to your account name, and this name will be displayed publicly on the site. Therefore, ensure your user name is one you don't mind other people seeing! Please also take care entering it, as it's difficult to change once it's been created.

We'll be improving the information text on the account creation page shortly to make this clearer - sorry to those of you who were confused.

Problems with special characters

We are experiencing some problems with special characters such as em-dashes (the long 'double hyphen'), umlauts and accents. In some cases, these characters will cause posts or imports to be cut off. If this happens to you, a workaround at present is to use the raw html coding for the special character (see this list of html entities for reference). We're working hard to put in a proper fix as soon as possible. (We hope it won't discourage posting in languages other than English in the meantime - we're excited to see works in Czech, German, French and Spanish already!)

We'll keep updating our Known Issues page on the Archive of Our Own with any further bugs that arise, and you may also find the Archive FAQ helpful. We'll also be posting regular Archive News Posts on the AO3 (mirrored on the OTW News blog and mirrors) to keep everyone up-to-date on new developments.


Despite a few inevitable bugs, Open Beta has been going really well! The shiny AO3 servers (owned by fandom, y'all!) are holding up really well under the vigorous workout they're receiving, and we're totally jazzed to see people using and enjoying the Archive. Thanks so much to everyone who got us here! <3

Mirrored from an original post on the Archive of Our Own.

The Archive Of Our Own is now in Open Beta! *\0/*

This means that you can now request an invitation! Get all the details and answers to your questions in our Open Beta information post.

Thank you to everyone in fandom who made this possible! We're incredibly grateful to everyone who got us this far – all the OTW staffers in their many roles, those of you who supported us with your donations, and fandom at large for being awesome.

FANDOM OWNS THE SERVERS, GUYS! Come and join the party!


<a href="http://transformativeworks.org/open-beta-here"><img src="http://transformativeworks.org/sites/default/files/invitecat.jpg" alt="OTW: o hai donate" /></a>

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW blog.

This post is also available in Deutsch, Español, Français and Suomi.

The Archive of Our Own Open Beta launch: Saturday 14th November (see the world clock for the launch time in your timezone).

We're thrilled to announce that the Archive Of Our Own will enter Open Beta on Saturday! *\0/*

Now that we're in Open Beta, we're ready to start expanding our user numbers so that fandom can use the Archive for real!

Open Beta – your questions answered!

How do I get an invitation for the Archive?
You can get an invitation in two ways:

• You can add your email address to the invitation queue (opens Saturday 14th November see world clock for the launch time in your timezone) (ETA Invitation queue now open here!). We'll send out invitations to addresses on the queue on a first-come, first-served basis, depending on how many new accounts we can support at a given time. This way, you won't have to know someone who already has an account in order to have a chance of getting one.


• Users who have an account on the Archive will be given a certain number of invitations to hand out to their friends. We know that people like to share the fannish glee and to build their networks on new sites, and we want to give people a chance to do that. Extra invitation codes will be issued to users periodically depending on how many new users the site can manage.

When will the invitation queue open?
The invitation queue will open on Saturday 14th November – world clock for the launch time in your timezone. Our launch post will let you know the link for the queue, and we’ll begin issuing accounts to addresses in the queue right away! (ETA Invitation queue now open here!)

We know that many of you in North America will still be asleep when the queue opens - since fandom is international, it was inevitable that this would be the case for someone. We've timed it this way so that as many of our staffers as possible can be around to provide support. We also anticipate that there will be more users from North America, so we wanted to give folks from elsewhere a chance to get on board before the queue gets out of control.

If you are unable to join the queue because of the timing, a friend can add your email address to the queue for you.

How long will it take for me to get an account?
If you've requested an invitation code, you can check where you are in the queue. Just enter your email address on the invitations page, and you'll receive an estimate of when you will receive your invitation, based on the rate at which we're sending out invitations and the number you are in the queue. Exactly how many invitations we can send out per day will depend on how well the site responds to the extra users.

I already have an account. How do I give an invitation to someone else?
On your user homepage (which you can get to by clicking 'My Home' when you’re logged in), you'll see a new tab called 'Invitations'. You can manage all your invitations here, and if you've run out then you can request some more.

To send an invitation to someone, just enter their email address and select the invitation you’d like to use. They'll be sent an automated email. You’ll be able to keep track of which invitations have been used on your 'Manage Invitations' page.

What can I do if I have questions or need help?
If you have questions about the general process, feel free to leave a comment on this post and we’ll get back to you as quickly as possible. (So that everyone can share in the same discussion and see one another's questions, we're disabling comments everywhere except the main OTW blog. Please hop over there to comment!)

If you have questions about the Archive, then you might find the answer in our Frequently Asked Questions. You can also check out Known Issues to see if you’ve hit a bug we’re already working on.

If your question isn't answered in the FAQ then please submit a support request and our support team will get back to you as quickly as possible.

Finally, during the first few days of Open Beta, we'll be offering live support through our Support Chatroom. We'll keep this staffed as much as possible – OTW staffers can be identified by the OTW on the end of their names. Of course, non staffers should also feel free to help one another out – if you can answer someone else's question, then don’t feel shy!

I have Opinions about the Archive. What should I do?
The Archive is by fans, for fans and we love to hear your feedback! Open Beta is still a work in progress, and we'll be adding new features, fixing bugs and making enhancements in response to your feedback. Send us your comments via the Support and Feedback form.

If you'd like to be more involved, we always welcome volunteers. No previous experience required!

The Archive of Our Own is for all fans – please spread the word in your fandoms near and far, and come and join the party!

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW blog. Comments are disabled elsewhere - please join in the conversation there!

This post is also available in Deutsch, Español, Français and Suomi.

All the latest news about the Archive of Our Own can be found under the cut.

This post may also be found on the Archive of Our Own which is commentable by anyone with or without an AO3 account. We are disabling comments elsewhere as we would like people to be able to share any discussion with each other.

( Read more )