Archive of Our Own ^beta

Today’s post in the Archive of Our Own’s 10th anniversary series is from Matty, who has been with the AO3 since it launched. You’ll read in her contribution about the many departments she has been part of since she began volunteering with us 10 years ago. There have been a lot of long work hours, particularly for the volunteers who were with the OTW in the early days, and we are so grateful for Matty and all of the others who contributed their time to help us make AO3 a reality.

I joined the Organization for Transformative Works as a tag wrangler back in 2009. I had been following the development of the OTW and the Archive since their inception and was thrilled to be able finally to help in a concrete way.

Tag wrangling in those days was both exciting and nerve wracking! One wrong push of the button could cause havoc. Early wranglers may remember the frantic searching when we repeatedly lost the Justin Timberlake tag, the terror of sharing a single spreadsheet that tracked all the fandoms on the Archive and the volunteers who wrangled them (and the screaming when someone sorted the sheet while others were trying to type), and the many, many, many long discussions that took place on our mailing lists while we tried to write our policies.

After Tag Wrangling I moved to Support, before sliding over to the Policy and Abuse committee (PAC). It is funny to compare how much things have changed between now and then. For the first few years PAC received less than 50 tickets a year. Now we sometimes receive 50 tickets in an hour, or more! The types of reports we receive have also changed. Initially, the vast majority of reports were about plagiarism. These days we see more reports about non-fanworks (such as RP ads, fic searches, etc). The size of the committee has also grown enormously; when I joined we had 3-4 active volunteers and now we have over 40! While the work can be overwhelming at times, it has also been incredibly rewarding.

I am so incredibly proud of the Organization and its volunteers for making our projects so successful. While there have been some growing pains over the years, we've built something amazing that we all should feel proud of!

When asked to write up a few words about his time with the OTW and AO3 in particular, james_ had so much to say that he had trouble sticking to the word count. (He’d like to thank Priscilla for helping him to edit!) Below you can read about some of the tougher times that james_ has seen during his time as a member of the Systems and Accessibility, Design and Technology committees. You can also hear about the rewards he’s gained from his hard work to keep our vision clear and our morale high. As you can see below, james_ was amongst the staffers who accepted the Hugo Award for Best Related Work on behalf of AO3.

Volunteering for the OTW in the early days was exciting, stressful, exhausting, and demoralising, but also worth it. At that time we were working with five servers and we were constantly adjusting the load between the few systems we had. We reached out to our friends at Dreamwidth (thanks, Mark) and they helped us. We were learning even as the tsunami of growing AO3 traffic beat down upon our shore.

While there are always people willing to try and pull you down, they are greatly outnumbered by those supporting us and buoying us up. I am grateful to each person who donates to the OTW. Your donations mean that we can afford the machines that keep the Archive running stably, and that nowadays I rarely get woken in the middle of the night due to unexpected downtime.

Something else that has had a significant impact in my volunteering life were the recurring conflicts both my committees had with previous iterations of the OTW Board of Directors. These were a source of great frustration and I even contacted the Legal committee to see how OTW members could call the board to account. After the resignation of the entire 2015 board, things have been much better. No organization is perfect, but I believe everyone in the OTW is very much happier today. I hope this will continue and believe the best way to do that is to ensure that every election is properly contested; I stood for election myself in 2016 and would do so again if necessary to make sure that there were enough candidates.

Our successes have been external as well as internal. This year, I had the pleasure of standing on the stage at Worldcon as AO3 won a Hugo Award and it was such a joy.

As for the future, I believe that we will need to raise significantly more than we do today in order to hire paid employees. We cannot sustainably run forever on purely volunteer labor. We get roughly 5% of Wikipedia's pageviews and our budget is about one-third of one percent of theirs.

Rebecca Sentance is the chair for Fanlore, a staffer for Docs, and a layout editor for Transformative Works and Cultures. We’re hearing from her as the second part in our five-part series celebrating ten years since the launch of AO3. Whilst she hasn’t been at the OTW quite as long as our previous poster, Francesca Coppa, Rebecca has made a big name for herself as an OTW volunteer involved in many of our different committees. Here is what she has to say about her experiences working for us:

I first became involved with the OTW as a volunteer in 2015, but I’d wanted to volunteer for years before that. A combination of being a full-time student and always just missing the window for recruitment kept me from doing it until the summer after I’d finished my Masters degree. I’d finally decided to get serious about volunteering, and had set up an alert on the OTW Volunteering page to monitor it for any changes. The first committee that opened recruitment after I did that was the AO3 Documentation Committee (Docs for short). I applied, and the rest is history!

Being one of the people responsible for drafting and editing AO3’s help documentation (FAQs and tutorials) has given me an exciting front-row seat to some of our big coding changes over the years. My proudest moment so far as an OTW volunteer – apart from when AO3 won a Hugo Award! – is having been involved in testing the massive upgrade to AO3’s searching and filtering that was released last year, and getting my name in the release notes. I am also fond of the Unofficial Browser Tools FAQ, which I had to beta for my first task as a Docs committee member. It gave me the opportunity to download and play with a lot of fun userscripts and tools.

When I created my AO3 account in 2011, I was mainly attracted by the tags, and the way that users could create new fandoms and relationships just by tagging them. I was proud to publish one of the first fics in the Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides fandom! Nowadays, I write a lot of fic for a small podcast fandom, and there’s still no greater joy than creating a tag that’s never been used before.

We're beginning our 10th anniversary celebration series about the AO3 by hearing from Francesca Coppa. Francesca is a founding member of the OTW and its longest-running board member (serving for five years). She is still with the OTW today.

Francesca was very enthusiastic about contributing to this series! Here’s what she had to say:

I have been in school nearly all my life and the OTW has been, hands down, the best school I ever went to: like they say, “everything I really needed to know I learned in the OTW!” I have such fond memories of those early days in the summer of 2007, after the call for an Archive of Our Own. The meetings lasted for hours! Naomi Novik and Michele Tepper were evaluating technological tools and drawing up user experience blueprints, and Rebecca Tushnet and Susan Gibel were working on our nonprofit paperwork and creating the legal and institutional structures governing our existence. (I think Susan is the unsung hero of the early OTW.)

Meanwhile, I was organizing our volunteers into committees. We'd asked those who were “Willing to Serve” to tell us about their skills and interests, and it was the most impressive and moving thing: we had lawyers, coders, public relations professionals, database analysts, professional fundraisers, sysadmins, journalists, management consultants, accountants, and technical writers; just so much expertise and so many kinds of expertise, and all of it offered to us out of love.

That is the thing that stays with me, and the thing I think most about now: that the OTW and the AO3 are about the collective, the network of fandom with its strong ties (“I would die for you”) and its looser ties (“Hey, we were in a fandom together once”), and then just the ties of shared identity (“you have once loved a thing as I have loved a thing!”) that make us recognize each other when we see a t-shirt, a sticker or an open tab. All of us are pulling together toward a common goal. We are what the web was meant to be: a network of people coming together to build something and keep it going.

When the Organization for Transformative Works was founded in 2007, the AO3 was just an idea. In July this year, we reached 5 million fanworks and 2 million registered users and on 14th November this year, we will be celebrating the AO3’s tenth anniversary. We have chosen to mark the occasion with a series of posts from long-time members and founding volunteers, sharing a glimpse into what the archive looks like from the inside.

So prepare yourselves for a series of posts over the next two weeks. We have five big contributors from the OTW’s long list of volunteers, and they won’t be holding back! We asked each of them to share some stories about what things were like in the early days of the AO3, their experiences as a volunteer with the OTW, and where they think the organization may be headed in the future.

In the upcoming days, you’ll hear from Francesca Coppa and Michele Tepper about the collaboration and the range of skills that were necessary to launch AO3 and the OTW’s other projects. You’ll also hear from one of our long-time staffers Rebecca Sentance about how she came to volunteer for the AO3, from james_ about what it was like to accept a Hugo award onstage, and from Matty about wrangling the AO3’s very first tags.

We hope that these posts will give you some insight into the history and day-to-day operation of the AO3, and that you are as excited as we are by what the site has become. We are proud of everything the AO3 represents as an open and inclusive place for fans to host their work, and we can’t wait to see how it develops and grows over the next ten years and beyond.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with Olivia Riley, who volunteers as a graphics creator.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

That old idiom that “a picture is worth a thousand words” tends to hold particularly true on the internet, where users face an info-overload on a daily basis. The OTW needs visuals in order to break through the babble: bright, easily digestible messages to catch audience’s eyes and draw them into the larger conversation. That’s where we graphics volunteers come in!

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

Part of the fun of being a graphics volunteer is that it’s always changing! The most frequent graphic we make is headers for the “This Week in Fandom” post, but aside from that, it depends on what events are going on in the OTW that need visual accompaniment. So, I’ll get a message from the folks in Communications, who wrangle requests for graphics from the other arms of the OTW, and they’ll give me the basics on what they need. I’ll draft an image up and share it, and then it’ll go off to be approved by the relevant committee. If it needs some tweaking, I’ll edit it, and then the new version will go off into the cyber-world!

What made you decide to volunteer?

I’d been studying AO3 & the OTW as the centerpiece of an undergraduate research project for a while, so when I saw a call go out for volunteers, I really wanted to do something to give back to this awesome organization that had so benefited both my personal and academic lives. I’d recently taken a class introducing me to graphic design and realized that the graphics volunteer gig was a perfect opportunity to use those skills!

Do you have any favorite graphics you've created?

The “This Week in Fandom” graphics are always fun! They give me a reason to experiment with new graphic design tips and tricks. This one is a particular favorite…

What fannish things do you like to do?

It pretty much runs the gamut! I love to vid (Gotham and Hannibal, lately), I write a good bit of fic, and I’ve tinkered around with making gifsets and drawing fanart. I’ve recently started listening to a lot of podfic and would like to try making some of my own!

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out earlier Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

We're excited to announce we've recently added support for the <audio> and <video> HTML elements! With this change, you'll be able to use these tags to embed your self-hosted audio or video fanworks on AO3.

Unlike the Flash-based audio player we already offer, these new elements will work in all modern browsers, and they will continue to work even after Adobe ends support for Flash in 2020. (While we have no plans to remove Dewplayer at this time, we strongly recommend updating to the <audio> tag.)

Basics

There's still a lot of design, policy, and coding work to do before we can host audio and video files, so for now you'll need to upload your files to your own web space. Once you've done that, you can embed the file in your work with a small bit of HTML:

• <audio src="AUDIO URL"></audio>
• <video src="VIDEO URL"></video>

That's all it takes! Exactly how the resulting media player looks depends on the browser being used to access the work. We do, however, make sure that playback controls are available and adjust the width of videos using CSS to ensure big videos will fit on everyone's screens. We also make sure autoplay can't be enabled, and we add the preload attribute to gently suggest browsers save bandwidth by not loading the full file until you press play.

Complex examples

If you'd like to do something more complex, we support that as well. For example, you can include a poster for your video using the poster attribute (poster doesn't work for audio, but you can still include an image above your audio player):

<video src="VIDEO URL" poster="IMAGE URL"></video>

Because some older browsers don't support these elements, you can also include fallback text on either element to provide a download link:

  
<audio src="AUDIO URL">
  <p>Your browser doesn't support streaming with the HTML5 audio tag, but you can still <a href="URL">download this podfic</a>.</p>
</audio>

Because different browsers support different file formats, you might want to use the <source> element to include multiple formats.

  
<video>
  <source src="WEBM VIDEO URL" type="video/webm">
  <source src="MP4 VIDEO URL" type="video/mp4">
</video>

If you'd like to include captions or subtitles to improve the accessibility of your media file, you can do that with the <track> element:

  
<video>
  <source src="VIDEO URL" type="video/mp4">
  <track src="SPANISH SUBTITLE URL" kind="subtitles" srclang="es" label="Spanish" default>
  <track src="ENGLISH SUBTITLE URL" kind="subtitles" srclang="en" label="English">
</video>

List of allowed tags and attributes

Here is a full list of the tags we've added support for and which attributes you can use on them.

<video> element

• class attribute
• dir attribute
• height attribute
• loop attribute
• muted attribute
• poster attribute
• src attribute
• title attribute
• width attribute

<audio> element

• class attribute
• dir attribute
• loop attribute
• muted attribute
• src attribute
• title attribute

<track> element

• default attribute
• kind attribute
• label attribute
• src attribute
• srclang attribute

<source> element

• src attribute
• type attribute

You can get more information on using these elements and their attributes in these articles from MDN:

• Video and audio content
• The Video Embed element
• The Embed Audio element
• The Media or Image Source element
• The Embed Text Track element

Edit November 8 at 07:53 UTC: If your audio or video file isn't loading on the Archive, you probably need to enable Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) on your website. Your web host's documentation or support department should be able to help.

Recently we posted that that Yahoo Groups will be permanently closing, and deleting all previously posted material on December 14, 2019. This post is an update to our previous post, to signal boost current preservation efforts.

Before we launch into details, we have two requests.

Many Yahoo Group members and moderators have no clue that Yahoo Groups will be deleting their files, photo and message archives on December 14, 2019. We need everyone who is a member of a Yahoo Group to copy and paste the message below into their Yahoo Groups and to also ask that every other Yahoo Group member who is reading your message to copy and paste the same message to their Yahoo Groups. If we want to save our fandom history, we need to do what we have always done and use our networks of fan friends to help one another.

Yahoo Groups will be deleting our files, photos and message archives on December 14, 2019. Many moderators and Groups remain unaware. Please forward this message and this link: https://opendoors.transformativeworks.org/yahoo-groups-rescue-project/ to all of your Yahoo Groups and ask your fellow Group members to do the same. And then request a copy of your Yahoo Groups data from Verizon at: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/getmydata

The second request is to ask each of you to request a copy of your Yahoo Groups directly from Verizon before Dec 1, 2019. The request is a simple, one click from within your Yahoo account. When the data arrives, hold on to it and check back here for next steps.

And that’s it: Alert your Yahoo Groups, ask your fellow Yahoo Group members to alert their Yahoo Groups and tell everyone about Verizon’s “GetYourData” one click backup option.

Now our update on the various preservation efforts.

Open Doors

Open Doors is working with the OTW's Board and Legal Committee to determine what we can store and/or import to the AO3. Meanwhile, we are accepting preservation requests from moderators and members of Yahoo Groups, and we are assisting them to backup their groups. Contact us if this is you!

Yahoo Groups Fandom Rescue Project

A fan group working to get information out and preserve what they can from fandom Yahoo groups. See this document for current ways you can help - including backing up groups, requesting data from Yahoo/Verizon, nominating groups for rescue and more.

Archive Team

The Archive Team is working on taking backups of public groups, with the intent to submit the data to the Internet Archive. You can submit a request for them to backup a group using their nomination form. The nomination form also has an email where moderators can give permission for their Groups to be archived. They’ve also developed a Chrome extension to simplify and coordinate signing up to at-risk groups and have moved many fandom groups to the top of their queue (note: the extension also helps them download non-fandom groups).

Helping these teams

If you’re a moderator who’d like to potentially import your group to the AO3, contact Open Doors and we’ll talk to you about options. For more updates on what’s happening, see announcements or check back on this page.

If you’d like to directly help rescue teams and you want to save only fandom groups, you can use this form to nominate fandom groups OR you can go directly to the public spreadsheet to find nominated groups that still need downloading. (General downloading instructions are here.) If you want to help save fandom groups and many other non-fandom groups, see Archive Team's chrome extension. Both are worthy efforts and both face a hard deadline of Dec 14.