Cesy: the chocolate girl

The OTW drive is in progress! Please signal-boost, comment on the posts to let us know what you want to know more about, and donate. The AO3, Fanlore, academic journal and legal support for fans are all entirely funded by fans.

This year we particularly need not just donations from people who donate every time we have a drive, but we want to spread out and reach people who may use Fanlore to look things up occasionally, or may read stories on the AO3, but who aren't familiar with the OTW and haven't donated before. We rely on donations from fans to keep these fannish projects going - we have no advertising funding or anything like that.

Essentially, we're like Dreamwidth, with a small number of donors, like paid accounts, and a larger number of users who can't afford to donate, like free accounts. That's normal. Our percentage of donors is very small, though - 800 members vs. 40,000 AO3 users and 7,000 Fanlore editors, i.e. 3%, whereas Dreamwidth has nearly 10% paid accounts.

OTW membership is only $10 a year, less than a Dreamwidth or LJ paid account - we'd love for people to support their fic host the same way they support their journal host. We don't offer extra icons, just a vote in board elections and some shiny swag if you donate enough.

On a back-of-the-envelope calculation, we're spending approximately $1 per AO3 user per year. So if one in 10 users donates $10 a year to be a member, and a few of them donate a bit more, we're fine. That's a very, very rough calculation, and it doesn't actually scale linearly, but it gives you the idea.

http://archiveofourown.org/collections/bandom_prompts

I think that URL says it all, right?

This is mainly aimed at people who are already on the OTW coders list, but we're considering running some sessions in our public chat room, so if you're interested in maybe learning coding and volunteering, let us know, and come and find out what kind of work would be involved.



You should be able to vote with any OpenID/LiveJournal account - you don't need a Dreamwidth account.

Edit: I can't edit the poll now I've posted it, but just to clarify: for actual tag wrangling training, sign up as a tag wrangler and they'll do all of that - a lot of coders pick one small fandom, to get familiar with the system without it being too much work. The coder training would be more about how it works behind the scenes, so would also be interesting for tag wranglers from a technical background.

I think I've mentioned this before, but I've been coding the new prompt memes feature for the AO3, which is due to go live "soon". It's now reached the next stage of testing (ready to be deployed to our test server again), so I figured it's a good time to post about it, particular in light of Brownbetty's post about kink memes and AO3.

( Cut for wall-of-design-rambling )

There is a poll open for naming the new servers! It's on the OTW website.

Also the first version of my code for prompt memes just got accepted for testing. Several key features still need adding, but it's a big step in the right direction :)

And Elz just did the first version of the first bit of subscriptions, which I am ridiculously excited about. Soon you will be able to get notifications whenever your favourite author posts a new story!

I know I haven't talked about OTW stuff much lately. There has been stuff that I can't talk about, that upset me enough that I didn't feel like talking about any of it. But it's been a while, and I do have something unrelated and good to talk about now.

So, automated tests. I have been banging on about cucumber tests for a while now. Every time I get impatient for a shiny new feature like subscriptions, the thought process in my head goes something like: "Subscriptions require better performance. Performance requires new servers and better caching. Better caching requires regression test. Regression test requires more automated tests, since it takes forever to do manually. WRITE MOAR TESTS." So I go and write more cucumber tests, or train more people to write them, or whatever.

And now I have finally managed to set it up so that the automated test suite runs automatically, once a week. (I had a bit of a battle with bash and cron. It has been a while since I actually did anything complex with the command line, though I use the basics pretty often.) This means that even if developers forget or don't have time to run all the tests before they commit new code, we will still catch anything they broke. Which is a good step for a growing organisation, industrialising processes and all that, and will also help baby coders who aren't sure how to run the tests yet. We already encourage developers to run them frequently, and we always run them before deploying new code to the live site, but it's good practice to run them more often if we have a big gap between deploys. I'm not sure how often Dreamwidth run the full suite - they were failing for ages and I didn't hear anything about it until szabgab came along to help - but I know my RL work run our core set on every new full build (once every few days).

Also, obligatory recruiting spiel - we have just revamped all the training to make it more streamlined and easier to get to the important bits, so if you were thinking about learning to program, now is a good time. We also always need more testers (which doesn't require any skill other than using the Archive to read stuff) and translators for most languages. If you happen to be a DBA, we will bribe you quite a lot to spend a couple of hours giving us some tips.

I haven't done an AO3 update in a while. We've been plodding along quietly - skins are nearly there, at least the alpha version (I'm still working on the wizard). I've also added a "Mark to read later" feature, so you can flag particular fics and then find them in your reading history. I need to add filters on that, though - at the moment they're hard to find if you read a lot. Naomi is working on epub and mobi download formats, for which she needs testers - PM me with an email address if you're keen to help out. We also need more testers for skins, if you fancy playing around with CSS.

We're hoping to get a new release out soon, so we can actually get on with the refactoring, which has been on the back burner a bit. Then our next big projects are the Yuletide import and making sure we're ready for Yuletide this year - we don't want another last-minute panic, and there's going to be the whole thing on the Archive this time, not just posting.

AO3 stuff has been progessing steadily.

( What I'm working on )

Here's more on the AO3 and open source. (See Part 1 and Part 2 for context.)

( Paste from Word in the RTE and prompt challenges )

One of the things we talked about at Con.Txt was the AO3, and stultiloquentia said she found it interesting to hear some of the behind-the-scenes stuff and explanations, so I'm going to give it a go.

( I appear to have written a lot )