Archive of Our Own ^beta

Are you fluent in a Chinese dialect? Do you want to help people use the AO3? Or would you like to wrangle AO3 tags? The Organization for Transformative Works is recruiting!

We're excited to announce the opening of applications for:

• Communications Staff: Weibo Site Moderator - closing 04 September 2019 at 23:59 UTC
• Support Staff - closing 04 September 2019 at 23:59 UTC
• Tag Wrangling Volunteers - closing 04 September 2019 at 23:59 UTC or until 80 applications have been received.
• Tag Wrangling Volunteers (Chinese) - closing 04 September 2019 at 23:59 UTC or until 30 applications have been received.

We have included more information on each role below. Open roles and applications will always be available at the volunteering page. If you don't see a role that fits with your skills and interests now, keep an eye on the listings. We plan to put up new applications every few weeks, and we will also publicize new roles as they become available.

All applications generate a confirmation page and an auto-reply to your e-mail address. We encourage you to read the confirmation page and to whitelist our email address in your e-mail client. If you do not receive the auto-reply within 24 hours, please check your spam filters and then contact us.

If you have questions regarding volunteering for the OTW, check out our Volunteering FAQ.

Communications Staff: Weibo Site Moderator

The Communications committee is recruiting a Weibo Site Moderator to manage the OTW's presence on Weibo, the Chinese social networking site.

For this position, we require someone fluent in both English and a Chinese dialect who can read and write in Simplified Chinese. Being Weibo site moderator involves posting regularly on Weibo about topics related to the work of the OTW. It also involves interacting with Weibo users to help them find answers to their questions about the OTW's projects. Additionally, it involves being the link between the OTW and the Weibo community, providing updates on trends and events within Chinese fan communities.

Communications is the main information distribution team for the OTW. We distribute information both internally to OTW personnel and externally to the general public, media, and fans. We also serve as the general first point of contact for those contacting the OTW.

The position of Weibo Site Moderator would be a good fit for someone who is an experienced social media moderator, is familiar with Weibo and the OTW, and has roughly 4-5 hours of available time throughout the week. If you're interested in doing outreach to Chinese-language fandom communities, this is the position for you!

Applications are due 04 September 2019

Support Staff

If you've spent time figuring out how to make the Archive dance (or are willing to press the button to see what happens), are patient in the face of strange questions, can self-motivate, and are interested in helping your fellow fans, we would love to hear from you! The Support team is responsible for handling the feedback and requests for assistance we receive from users of the Archive. We answer users’ questions, help to resolve problems they’re experiencing, and pass on information to and from coders, testers, tag wranglers and other teams involved with the Archive.

Applications are due 04 September 2019

Tag Wrangling Volunteers

The Tag Wranglers are responsible for helping to keep the millions of tags on AO3 in some kind of order! Wranglers follow internal guidelines to choose the tags that appear in the filters and auto-complete, which link related works together. (This makes it easier to browse and search on the archive, whether that’s Shěn Wēi/Zhào Yúnlán with ABO Dynamics, Pepper Potts/Tony Stark with angst, g-rated Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam fluff, or Jeon Jungkook & Kim Taehyung | V Are Childhood Friends.)

If you’re an experienced AO3 user who likes organizing, working in teams, or excuses to fact-check your favorite fandoms, you might enjoy tag wrangling! To join us, click through to the job description and application form.

Please note: You must be 18+ in order to apply for this role. Additionally, we’re currently looking for wranglers for specific fandoms only, which will change each recruitment round. Please see the application for which fandoms are in need.

While all wranglers need to be fluent in English, we welcome applicants who are also fluent in other languages, especially Chinese (中文), Russian (Русский), Spanish (Español), Italian (Italiano), Polish (Polski), Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia), Brazilian Portugese (Português Brasileiro), Korean (한국어), Thai (ไทย) and Hindi (हिन्दी).

Applications are due 04 September 2019 or until 80 applications have been received.

Tag Wrangling Volunteers (Chinese)

The Tag Wranglers are responsible for helping to keep the millions of tags on AO3 in some kind of order! Wranglers follow internal guidelines to choose the tags that appear in the filters and auto-complete, which link related works together. (This makes it easier to browse and search on the archive, whether that’s Shěn Wēi/Zhào Yúnlán with ABO Dynamics, Pepper Potts/Tony Stark with angst, g-rated Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam fluff, or Jeon Jungkook & Kim Taehyung | V Are Childhood Friends.)

If you're a fluent Chinese speaker who likes organizing, working in teams, or excuses to fact-check your favorite fandoms, you might enjoy tag wrangling! To join us, click through to the job description and application form.

Please note: You must be 18+ in order to apply for this role. We’re currently looking for applicants who are fluent in both English and Chinese (Traditional and Simplified both welcome). The work will involve both regular Tag Wrangling work and translating tags from Chinese into English.

Applications are due 04 September 2019 or until 30 applications have been received.

Apply at the volunteering page!

Now that the 2019 election is over, we're happy to share with you our voter turnout statistics!

For the 2019 Election, we had 9939 total eligible voters. Of those, 2234 voters cast a ballot, which represents 22.5% of the potential voters. We're proud to say that our voter turnout is higher than that of last year, which had a turnout of 14.6%. We also saw an increase in the number of ballots cast, from 827 to 2234, which represents a 270% increase and gives us the highest turnout we've ever had!

Elections is committed to continuing to reach out to our eligible members to encourage them to vote in elections. Whoever is elected to the Board of Directors can have an important influence on the long-term health of the OTW's projects, and we want our members to have a say in that.

For those who might be interested in the number of votes each candidate received, please note that our election process is designed to elect an equal cohort of Board members in order to allow them to work well together, so we do not release that information. As a general rule, we also won’t disclose which of our unsuccessful candidates received the fewest votes, since we don’t want to discourage them from running again in the future when circumstances and member interest might be different. However, as there were only 3 candidates this year, revealing that information is unavoidable.

Once again, a big thank you to everyone who participated at every stage of the election! We hope to see you at the virtual polls again next year.

The Organization for Transformative Works is excited to announce that the Archive of Our Own has won the 2019 Hugo Award in the category of Best Related Work! This is the first time an OTW project has won — or been a finalist for — a Hugo Award!

The award was given on August 18, 2019, as part of Dublin 2019: an Irish Worldcon, the 77th World Science Fiction Convention. You can check out detailed results for all award categories on the Worldcon website.

Naomi Novik, one of AO3’s founders, gave a speech as she and other OTW personnel accepted the award, and she gave everyone in the AO3 community a well deserved thank you:

All fanwork, from fanfic to vids to fanart to podfic, centers the idea that art happens not in isolation but in community. And that is true of the AO3 itself. We’re up here accepting, but only on behalf of literally thousands of volunteers and millions of users, all of whom have come together and built this thriving home for fandom, a nonprofit and non-commercial community space built entirely by volunteer labor and user donations, on the principle that we needed a place of our own that was not out to exploit its users but to serve them.

Even if I listed every founder, every builder, every tireless support staff member and translator and tag wrangler, if I named every last donor, all our hard work and contributions would mean nothing without the work of the fan creators who share their work freely with other fans, and the fans who read their stories and view their art and comment and share bookmarks and give kudos to encourage them and nourish the community in their turn.

This Hugo will be joining the traveling exhibition that goes to each Worldcon, because it belongs to all of us. I would like to ask that we raise the lights and for all of you who feel a part of our community stand up for a moment and share in this with us.

We were proud and excited to see how many Worldcon attendees stood up to represent AO3 and accept our Hugo Award — and this award belongs to you, too! The AO3 is founded on the love and work of all of our users, and we at the OTW are delighted to share this award with you. Thank you!

Our latest releases bring improvements for tag wranglers and site admins, along with a handful of user-facing bug fixes.

Credits

• Coders: Ariana, cosette, Elz, Enigel, james_, redsummernight, Sarken, Tal Hayon, ticking instant
• Code reviewers: Ariana, james_, Naomi, redsummernight, Sarken, ticking instant
• Testers: Alison Watson, antonomasia09, bingeling, cosette, doughtier, Dre, Hvalrann, james_, Lady Oscar, Matty, Paula, redsummernight, Sammie Louise, Sarken, Scott, ticking instant, and the entire Support and Policy & Abuse Committees!

Details

Site Administration

• [AO3-5126] - When an admin searched for a user, the results would be accurate, but the tally would be too high. Turns out the code was counting the total number of pseuds for every user whose email address matched the search query! We made it count the users now.
• [AO3-5097] - Speaking of admins searching for users, some of the code for it was very long and messy and in places it had no business being -- in short, an abomination. (Direct quote from the issue description.) It is now much cleaner, properly located, and less abominable!
• [AO3-5099] - We've made it easier for admins to search for users by letting them specify whether to search by username or email address and by giving them an option to only get results that are exact matches.
• [AO3-4159] - Our Policy & Abuse team used to need to ask our database admins to check when and from what IP address a user had last logged in. This was terribly inefficient for everyone, so we've put that information in the admin interface now.
• [AO3-5549] - We send spam reports to our Policy & Abuse team, but sometimes these emails failed due to a spam user deleting their account. Now the emails should go out even if that happens.

Tag Wrangling

• [AO3-2452] - It used to be possible for wranglers to add the wrong sort of parents to a tag, e.g. making the fandom Big Hero 6 a parent of the media tag Movies. Worse still, when this happened, the incorrect parent couldn't be removed. We made a bunch of changes to the tag code to prevent this and cleaned up all of the existing incorrect parents.
• [AO3-5697] - Our code checks to make sure no tags acquire duplicate meta tags, but code isn't a foolproof way to ensure something is unique, so now we've added a check at the database level as well.
• [AO3-4682] - We were missing a success message that would let wranglers know they had successfully unassigned a wrangler from a fandom. We've added one!

Collections

• [AO3-3953] - When browsing works in a collection, following one of the tags in the work blurb would take you to other works in the collection that had that tag. This was all well and good in theory, but sometimes those collection-scoped links would escape, and you'd be browsing works outside a collection only to end up trapped in a random collection. We've changed it so tag links will always take you to the full work listing for that tag, even if you're in a collection.
• [AO3-4592] - Back in 2016, it was possible for collection maintainers to invite works to anonymous or unrevealed collections, and those works would immediately be marked anonymous and/or unrevealed without their creators' knowledge. We fixed the bug when it was discovered, but the fix didn't apply retroactively, so we wrote a little clean-up task to fix all the works that were still affected by this bug. Turns out there weren't any!
• [AO3-5720] - Under certain circumstances, it was possible for a collection maintainer to add someone's work to their collection without that someone's approval. We've made that un-possible now.

Miscellaneous Fixes

• [AO3-5699] - When Open Doors uses the mass importing tool, it's supposed to send an email to everyone whose work was imported. That was broken for a bit, but now it's working again!
• [AO3-5694] - The orphan_account's dashboard had mysteriously stopped loading. We made an educated guess that the code for tallying the fandoms on dashboard pages was to blame, and we were right! The page loads now, but it will be sans fandom list until we can speed up the code. (Other accounts, and even any pseuds for orphan_account, will still have fandoms listed on their dashboard.)
• [AO3-5039] - If you were up to some sneaky HTML manipulation, it was possible to add a tag that wasn't canonical as a Favorite Tag. We've put the kibosh to that now.
• [AO3-5691] - When a user tried to change a work's publication date to the future, the error message would say "translation missing," followed by a bunch of nonsense. Now it correctly says something more like, "Hey, you can't do that with the publication date."

Infrastructure and Security

• [AO3-5695] - We updated the gem for our error monitoring service.
• [AO3-5678], [AO3-5682], and [AO3-5689] - We use a nifty tool called Brakeman to warn us about potential vulnerabilities in our code. Sometimes, though, it misses some context and worries about things that aren't actually problems. We did some refactoring to make it realize three such issues were all in its head.
• [AO3-5480] - The company our Support and Policy & Abuse teams use made some changes to their code, which required us to make some changes to our code if we wanted the Support and Abuse Report forms to keep working. We decided that was kinda important, so we made the changes.

I. AO3 MILESTONES: 5 MILLION FANWORKS & 2 MILLION USERS

In July, the Archive of Our Own celebrated two big milestones: 2 million registered users and 5 million fanworks! Coincidentally, this milestone comes a year to the day after AO3 hit 4,000,000 fanworks on 20 July, 2018 -- the fastest growth in AO3's ten-year history.

The OTW marked these milestones with festivities including AO3 Fanwork Bingo (#AO3Bingo), a cross between regular bingo, a fanworks rec list, and a scavenger hunt. Prizes were cool badges for the winning players and lists of fanwork recs for the rest of us! Thanks to Communications and Translation for getting the word out; and, as always, many many thanks to all the creators, writers, readers, and volunteers who make this community what it is today!

II. ELECTION 2019

July saw the OTW Board of Directors Election season in full swing. Thanks to everyone who submitted questions for the candidates and took part in the live chat. The election is now closed and the results have been announced. Thanks to everyone who voted, and congratulations to our new Directors! Their terms begin on October 1st.

III. LEGAL ADVOCACY NEWS

In July, the Legal committee joined allies for an active month of advocacy. They collaborated with others to file an amicus brief about the fair use doctrine in the case of Smith v. Drake, which concerned the musician Drake’s use of a sample from a spoken word piece in a rap song. The brief argued that fair use should apply to uses of substantial amounts of a work when those uses have a different meaning, message, or purpose from the underlying work.

Legal also joined allies and experts to make a joint statement of principles about Section 230 of the U.S. Communications Decency act, which provides protections for Internet platforms; and joined allies to submit a letter to the U.S. Senate opposing the CASE Act, which would create a Copyright small-claims tribunal that could impose penalties of up to $30,000 on alleged infringers without due process.

IV. AT THE AO3

In July, Open Doors completed the import of the yaoi and shounen ai fanfiction archive soul circuit and finished searching the AO3 for existing copies of works from the Vin Diesel archive, VinXperience, and a Star Trek archive, Side By Side, marking substantial progress in the duplicate search queue. Open Doors would like to thank their special project volunteers for all their help!

Finally, Support tickets are holding steady, thanks to the hard work of the Documentation and the Coding teams, at approximately 1,500 tickets in July. A substantial number were very positive, due to a Tumblr post that welcomed positive feedback. Policy and Abuse also received approximately 1,500 tickets this month, and Tag Wrangling handled approximately 225,000 tags.

IV. IT'S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

As of 26 July the OTW has 718 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below.

New Committee Staff: Sammie Louise (Support), 1 other Support staffer, Cayce Stevenson (Strategic Planning) and 2 other Strategic Planning staffers
Development & Membership: amy2, Injo Davi, Rachel "Metallic_Sweet" and 4 other staffers
New Translation Volunteers: Deeksha Devik, and 3 other volunteers

Departing Committee Staff: Annamarie, C. Ryan Smith and JessicaLovesSocks2658 (Policy & Abuse), galvelociraptor (Support) and 5 other Support staffers
Departing Open Doors Volunteers: 2 volunteers
Departing Tag Wrangler Volunteers: BruceWayne, JessicaLovesSocks2658, Saloni and 3 other volunteers
Departing Translation Volunteers: Cynassa, firey and 1 other volunteer

For more information about the purview of our committees, please access the committee listing on our website.

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.

The Elections Committee would like to thank all of our candidates for their hard work in this year's election. With that, we are pleased to present the results of the 2019 Election.

The following candidates (in alphabetical order) have been officially elected to the Board of Directors.

• Kirsten Wright
• Rebecca Sentance

The new members of the Board will formally begin their term overlap on October 1. We wish them well with their terms.

With that, the election season comes to a close. Thank you to everyone who got involved by spreading the word, asking the candidates questions, and, of course, voting! We look forward to seeing all of you again next year.

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 telescopicpoems, who volunteers as a staffer on the AO3 Documentation Committee.

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

I’ve been part of the AO3 Documentation Committee ("Docs" for friends and family) since late 2016. Docs is mainly responsible for writing, revising, and updating the FAQs and Tutorials found on AO3 (for the most part, it’s whatever can be found in the Archive FAQ). We’ve also been working with Open Doors on updating their user-facing documentation. Our goal is to help the people who use the Archive understand how everything works and use it to its full potential!

Other than that, I’m also an Open Doors staffer, still on my training wheels, learning to help keep both fanworks and fandom history alive.

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

Open Doors work is more sporadic and it involves a lot of replying to emails, which I usually can do on (IRL) "work days". Every now and again I’ll have to do something that’s more labor intensive which I leave for the weekends (more often than not it has to do with new archives that we are looking to import).

My Docs work is done almost exclusively on weekends, as I need a lot of time to think things through. I usually have an ongoing task to work on, but if I’m waiting on a response from a beta or an author, I’ll pick up a new task: that can be drafting a document (which might mean either writing it from scratch or updating it) or doing beta. Other than the Alpha review round, which is done by one of our chairs, we have three rounds of beta checks, with each round consisting of two different types of beta that happen simultaneously.

On the first round we make sure everything is working as it's described and that a document is as accessible as we can possibly make it. That might mean using "fanworks" instead of "fanfics"; not assuming gender; or assuming that the user is based in the US, so using examples from, say, the Sailor Moon fandom instead of the Harry Potter fandom and so on.

Since that first round might end up with a document being significantly altered, it's only on the second round we start looking at it from a "format" point of view: we'll go over grammar and what's its reading level; if all the other documents that are linked in it are working fine; and if everything that you could possibly need referring to is being referred to.

Finally, there's the Free for All and External rounds. Free for All is the last chance for all Docs staffers to go over a document. External gives other committees a chance to read it so we can make sure that everything on there is nice and accurate.

Ideally, every Docs staffer should have gone through the documents at least once over the course of these three rounds. So it ends up being a lot of collaborative work, a lot of checking and double checking and discussing all sort of things, from testing issues to what should be capitalized and when.

What made you decide to volunteer?

I was actually away from fandom for quite a while before I decided to volunteer, even if I kind of kept tabs on it. On a random day, I spotted a post on Tumblr about volunteers being needed for some committees, Docs included, which made me think this could be a really awesome learning experience, as it has been! That and, to be honest, I also happened to be looking for a new job at the time and thought it would look good on my resumé.

What's the most fun thing to you about volunteering for the OTW?

As cliché as it is, and, well, that doesn't exactly count as fun, but I love what the OTW stands for, that it’s made by and for fans, and that it’s a non-profit. (Weird as it sounds, it's important for me to know that no one's getting rich(er) at the expense of my work -- or that of any volunteer).

Not only that but since the busyness of life is what made me step away from fandom stuff in the first place, I also really like that volunteering for the OTW keeps me in touch with it, so it’s always part of my life one way or another, no matter how lazy and/or busy I’ve been to actually participate in it. Plus it really helps that there are also some really cool people in here!

What fannish things do you like to do?

I had a very intense fandom phase maybe ten years ago, but have been in an on and off relationship with it ever since, so I usually chase after whatever I’m fancying at the time, which varies a lot. I also have a special liking for those fandoms with six people and a shoelace, so there’s that. Generally speaking, I'm quite the lurker and for the most part I read fanfic, will maaaybe write something, and look at awesome fanart I could never make myself.

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.

The election has opened!

Every OTW member who joined between July 1, 2018, and June 30, 2019, should have a ballot by now. If you didn't get one, please check your spam folder first, then contact us via our contact form.

The election will run through 23:59 UTC on August 12, 2019; check this time zone converter to find out what time that will be for you.

Once you've voted, you can head over to Twitter and use the hashtag #otw2019 to let us know!

If you used a Yahoo email address when you donated: On July 15, Yahoo purged accounts that had not been logged into within the past year. As a result, many ballots from the election that were sent to Yahoo emails bounced. If you signed up for membership with a Yahoo email address, please check that you can log into your Yahoo account and received a ballot. If you cannot log into your Yahoo account, go to the elections contact form and select "Is my membership current/Am I eligible to vote?" in order to submit an alternate email request. In the request, include your original Yahoo email address and the new one where you would like your ballot sent.