elz | Entries tagged with ao3

Five and a half years after the first one, we have our millionth work on AO3! Champagne time! We had a crowd in our chatroom this morning refreshing the front page over and over - hopefully some of them are actually getting some sleep now. :)

Crossposts: http://elz.livejournal.com/348901.html

(To anyone who doesn't care about OTW: I'm so sorry? Also, maybe we should hang out more. That would be refreshing.)

Just to clear up a couple of misconceptions here: Naomi isn't the AD&T chair this year (and hasn't been since 2008), and thus she's not the manager of AO3-related coding projects. Amelia and I are the co-chairs, and we're the ones responsible for what goes on. Concerns about management of AD&T or coding or testing volunteers should be directed to us, to the volunteers committee, or to Kylie, our testing lead.

lim is a highly competent adult who has the right and ability to speak for herself and to make her own decisions. She volunteered to do the CSS overhaul, which is a project she'd undertaken twice before in the past. We don't ask anyone to do anything they don't have the time and energy for, and if we stopped people from working individually on big projects that interested them, nothing on the site would ever have gotten built.

I am incredibly grateful to Naomi and lim, the 10 other coders, and the dozens of testers who worked on our last release. There are some quality improvements in there: our CSS has been streamlined and reorganized, you can now write a site skin that doesn't include any of our CSS, you can add skins on top of one another, prompt meme listings are more readable, we have an enormous new tag set and challenge nominations feature (which has now had a successful first run with Yuletide noms!), news posts can now be tagged and filtered, and we fixed an enormous slew of bugs. And I know most people can't see the admin side of the site, but oh man, that is SO much better now. There were over a hundred tickets and a thousand code commits involved in this release. It sucks massively when bugs make it through to production, but even though we're always working to make our process better, it's never going to be flawless. I believe in constructive responses: you fix the problem, you do your best to fix the problems that led to the problem, and you keep going. As an example, we haven't had a formal structure in place for doing mobile testing, and due to circumstances which were as much my fault as anybody else's, the need to re-test the site on our phones before we deployed got lost in the shuffle. It's certainly not the fault of the testers for not doing something they weren't aware they needed to do, and it's easily addressed for the future. In this case, we were able to fix the bug within a day. We do our best, simultaneously, to communicate everything that's going on; sometimes it takes a day or two for a full post to appear because the people who would write it are hard at work fixing the bugs or answering support requests. There's not a huge team here. If you'd like to change that, come and volunteer.

Crossposts: http://elz.livejournal.com/342515.html

I'm really not up to reading anything about anything at this point (I'm building a blanket fort and hunkering down with this season of Merlin), but here are some fun behind-the-scenes stats from AO3:

In October 2011, AO3 had almost 500,000 unique visitors and almost 19 million pageviews. Right now, there are over 2,600 people in our invite queue. (We hope to lower that soon!)
We started doing self-hosted analytics in July, and the average number of pageviews per day has almost tripled just since then. We hit about 860,000 in a 24-hour period this Sunday, which was up from about 760,000 the Sunday before.
Traffic is always highest on Sundays. Posting is generally more evenly distributed across the week, although it is a little higher on weekends.
The most popular fandom on the site (by traffic) is Homestuck, and it has been for as long as I've been checking the stats.
The fandom with the most works is (unsurprisingly) Harry Potter, with 15,495.
If you want to rack up the hits, write a long Sherlock or XMFC AU WIP. Bonus points for mpreg or kidfic!
Relatedly (apart from the mpreg, as far as I know), abundantlyqueer's Two Two Bravo Baker is its own phenomenon, with over 1,800 comments and almost 80,000 hits.
About half the users of the archive (13,000) have posted at least one work.
There are 602 works over 100,000 words long. The longest work in the site is 863,000+ words. And that one's a WIP! (Glass Houses by Viridian5 in Weiß Kreuz fandom)
In addition to 25,000 users and 245,000 works, the site is home to 230,000 bookmarks and 10,000 series. There are about 200,000 tags in our system, of which about 100,000 are official versions.
AO3 includes works written in 24 different languages, from Spanish (1,400+) and Russian (600+), to Latin (5) and Esperanto (10).
Kudos were introduced on the archive last December, and in that time, people have left 1.1 million of them for one another! ♥

Crossposts: http://elz.livejournal.com/342130.html

Nnnrrgh. Been doing AO3 work for about 12 hours now - we've been making some changes to try to alleviate the load on our database, and this required some fine-tuning, which still isn't quite done yet. We'll have a real news post out tomorrow, but we did add the long-awaited filtering by whether a work is complete or not, filtering by language on main pages, and sorting by the date things were actually posted, so that if you're stalking a fandom, you can see what the new backdated works are. We also fixed the dreaded 500 error that came up if you were the first person to download a file! And we finished transitioning all of our javascript over to jQuery, which was a pretty significant project. And a bunch of other things - there were 57 issues in this release. Go team!

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In other news:

-Here is a fic about the Brotherhood of Mutants adopting a kitten. You're welcome.

-I am finally all caught up with Fringe again! Olivia is my favorite, forever and ever, amen. And I'm very happy that we get to keep Lincoln. Too sleepy to have any deeper thoughts.

Crossposts: http://elz.livejournal.com/340515.html

So I'm pretty sure AO3 went up and over some kind of turning point in the last few months - there are now 1130 people in our invite queue. Which is a terribly intimidating number, and it just keeps going up. We'd love to bring that back down - the invite system is there purely to keep traffic from exploding to a point that we can't handle, not to discourage anyone from creating an account, but site load's been pretty heavy already lately. We came up with a plan to help ameliorate *that*, and some great work's been done already, but we're still in the process of testing everything. So basically at the moment, I'm just stuck wincing whenever I run into a 502 error. Woe! But you don't really want to rush major back-end changes if there's any alternative, and hopefully we'll have that out soon.

Meanwhile, check out the proposed Terms of Service changes updates with regard to fanart and pass along your feedback!

Crossposts: http://elz.livejournal.com/340186.html

I volunteered with OTW as a coder at the beginning of 2008, and since then I've become a senior coder on the archive project, a member of the AD&T committee, and now the AD&T co-chair. (AD&T = Accessibility, Design and Technology, the committee responsible for archive design and development.) I've put an enormous amount of time and energy into my work, and I spend a lot of time hanging out in the OTW chatrooms. I've been lucky enough to meet some of my OTW cohorts offline as well!

Ira, one of our board members, has a post up about The OTW Server Poll and Fannish Diversity, and I just wanted to post some of my thoughts on the OTW and this particular issue, from an equally personal and unofficial perspective. Also check out Helka Lantto's post from the POV of someone involved in our International Outreach work.

( cut for length )

Plug: we're always eager to get new volunteers to help with almost anything, but our AO3 support and testing teams are particularly short-staffed right now. No technical expertise required! Contact our Volunteers Committee if you're interested.

Crossposts: http://elz.livejournal.com/336810.html

So I'm the co-chair of the OTW Accessibility, Design and Technology Committee this year, which I keep meaning to post about, and which I keep being distracted from posting about by ever-increasing amounts of AD&T work. (AD&T is the committee responsible for design, coding and testing for the Archive of Our Own.)

In that capacity, and in honor of the current OTW drive, and a bit in honor of the Fandom Appreciation Challenge, I just want to say thank you. Thank you to our beta users for being so patient with us. Thank you to the OTW donors who fund the hosting costs. Thank you to everyone who's created an account and posted a work. Thank you to everyone who leaves comments and kudos and makes authors' days a little brighter. Thank you to everyone who's started a collection or run a challenge. Thank you, THANK YOU to everyone who sends in support requests alerting us to problems and suggesting new features.

In short, thank you to everyone who keeps making work for us, and thank you to fandom for continuing to inspire us to keep making things better. We've got a really amazing team of volunteers this year, and there will be some great features and improvements rolling over the next few months - some within the next week! We'd love to hear from you about what else you'd like to see, and our doors are always open to new volunteers, whether you're an artist, a designer, a coder, a good organizer or communicator, or just someone with a lot of enthusiasm. AO3 is a community project, build, funded, maintained and used by fandom, and we all make it happen together.

...okay, back to work. *g*

Crossposts: http://elz.livejournal.com/336256.html

OTW has a poll open to name our new servers, and voting ends tomorrow! There are a lot of fan favorites on there, and I'm one of the people who has to use these names to remember which server to log in to for what, so this is of more than academic interest to me. :D

Also, after having a bit of a wait during the fall and winter, AO3 is back to the point where anyone who requests an invite should receive one within about 2 days. All fans (authors, artists, newbies, readers, lurkers) are welcome, and we have some great improvements planned for this year!

Crossposts: http://elz.livejournal.com/335658.html

The better-performing Yuletide backup: http://archiveofourown.org/static/collections/yuletide2010/fandoms

(The Fandoms bit in the header is both a link and a dropdown menu.)

Those pages actually won't be going poof, so it's fine to link to them, and if you're trying to access a story on the regular archive and unable to get through, you can just stick the '/static/' bit in front of 'collections' in the url. They're also not adding to the hit count in real time, but we have a plan to go back and credit the story with the hits that it gets.

Also:
Chromatic Yuletide 2010
due South Seekrit Santa Exchange 2010