Archive of Our Own ^beta

Sunday 7am! I chaired AND wrote up the minutes this week *is grown up* I'm kinda seeing the next two weeks as the calm before the storm. We want to get everything as polished as possible, create as little new work as we can and concentrate on making sure we're ready for Open Beta. We've put time into building up the Support team, getting in as many critical fixes as possible, building the Invitations code, making the FAQ more comprehensible, making the News Posts so we can communicate and I'm feeling weirdly erm... not flat, but not in an energy spike right at this moment - it's probably because I don't have anything specific to stress about... yet *grins*

• Deploy schedule: Deploy to Beta still on for 8th November (Release 0.7.1) - it was going to just be the invitations code originally but we've snuck in a bunch of fixes too.
  • Fixes: link in TOS, lots of IE7 stuff including nested bulleted list styling for meeeeee (yay cesy!), some Importer fixes, increase of character limit on Notes field, autocomplete on tags, html link in emails from admin comments and MORE.
  • Invitations: Works! My first invite queue invite emails turned up - it's down to 25 on Test (we've used up all our secondary, tertiary and err quaternary? email addresses faking up an invite queue) - which is exciting!
• Open Beta: Mid November.
• Stuff coming up:
  • Allowed html: we're cleaning up the help on this to make sure they are all consistent (works, notes, summary, comments etc.)
  • Permalinks: we've a very reasonable request for them on works and we think it's a good idea.
• WANTED:
  • JS Coder: We need a person with JavaScript skills. We need you for IE7 optimising and in general. We can offer a community of passionate coders, the fannish level of engagement of your choice and an opportunity to lose valuable sleeping hours in good company - what's not to love!

OTW-All-Org Meeting

Monday 7am! I was kindly allowed to steal the first slot so I could report for AD&T then drift in and out as I made breakfast and dressed for work. I want some sort of permanent internet connection implanted so badly.

The Board has welcomed two new members, had an election, a fundraising drive and a baby. Hah, no-one multi-tasks like these women. Web are cross-training and documenting (activities dear to my heart), VolCom are doing admin and preparing for 2010 and looking for people, Translations are looking into international outreach *loves*, Systems are SO BUSY! Open Doors gave out 41 Archive invites and screencapped ~60 websites as part of finding new homes for Geocities users and archivists. *moment of silence for the animated gifs* Legal is waiting on a ruling on our DMCA proposal and Journal is 'chugging along, getting ready for No. 4' which in no way describes their awesome. Finance is handing over from Susan to our incoming Treasurer Sheila (who says 'we're just cruising along, being...you know...financial. \$/'). Elections didn't get to run an election but we have two, count em TWO new Board members as does Docs... well, two new members. Docs doesn't have a private Board that I'm aware of although they are a stealthy, ninja committee who are everywhere so who knows?. DevMem are justifiably proud of the results of the fundraising drive and are busy planning for the future *loves* I kind of need a lolcat to appropriately celebrate them. Comm is continuing to spreads words - mine as well, it's ever so slightly intimidating :p

• People wanted: *puts on OTW Committee Chair hat* the OTW needs people, particularly the Volunteers Committee (VolCom) and the Wikimittee; Translations and Finance would also love to welcome new volunteers. Some of our people have been serving on committees for two years now, we have knowledge and skills we'd love to share - and we need ongoing support to keep the committees rolling. If you've got skills, or passion (because we can teach the skills!) we'd love to hear from you.

If there are things you want to do/say - feel free to share either in comments, or by volunteering, or by messaging or whatever medium you're comfortable with. You are invited to this party :)

Previous posts on Dreamwidth (bysamvara the 2009 committee chair) and the Organization for Transformative Works website (by the Accessibility, Design & Technology committee)

Sat 11pm meeting. I was sick and slept instead but had peppered the agenda with comments and the latest schedule updates (hopefully coherent ones) and sent out a plea for someone to chair the meeting. The lovely bingeling came to my rescue and stalking the transcript after says they don't need me at all :p

• Deploy schedule: Next deploy to Beta currently scheduled for 8th November (Release 0.7.1). Also I gotta stop saying 'push it back' when talking scheduling because it doesn't mean the same thing to all of us and I should know better :(
  • Admin News Post comment email: the link in the email doesn't work, we've put the underscore back in the right place for this deploy.
  • AO3 Logo: Temporary logo is on Test. Official Logo competition deferred until we can recruit someone to run it. Heh, the front page in Test is currently displaying: "Latest work: This is a story with very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very verylong title" *loves on testers*
  • Autocomplete: Stopped working for the Post New form when entering tags. We've got a fix for that - it's on Test - and can I just say rustler is awesome :)
  • Invitations: the code is on Test (yay elz!) , it can do all sorts of things. I turned the invitations queue on and off, entered some email addresses into the queue, checked my predicted invite time and bounced around excitedly. I also issued invite codes to my user account, sent them to other testers and generally poked things. It still needs some enhancements (this is the first version of a whole new feature and a big piece of work) but we're very happy with it so far.
• Open Beta: Mid November. We think we can squeeze the planned stability period (where you deploy code then stare at it and wait for it to explode) down to one week . We wanted two but that was when we were doing one deploy containing EVERYTHING rather than splitting it into 0.7.0 (on Beta now) and 0.7.1 (coming to Beta soon).
• Test Team: Are amazing! A piece of work we do after a code deploy is to go through all the issues and confirm that the changes got deployed and are working as expected. That means they do all the testing/verification they did on Test again on Beta (except without creating junk data). There were 89 in total (there were 90 but one fix failed testing) and we're already down to only 39 waiting for verification.
• Stuff coming up:
  • Admin Stats! Yes, I know I'm the only one who cares but OMG I care a lot! *cradles the JQuery plugin tenderly*
  • Languages: We're at the point where we can talk to the Translation team about what languages to add so that people can specify what language they are posting in.
  • Notes: *grins* Yes, you may have 5k character Notes, we're extending the limit.
  • Task Queue: We're conscious that one of the first things you do with a shiny new account is import your back catalogue of works, this hasn't been a problem in Closed Beta because we add people in such small amounts. Performance testing suggests the AO3 can handle quite a lot before it slows down but we're looking at ways to make this not an issue. Long term we'll probably set up a task queue so you can start importing and it will import when it can if it can't straight away.

If there are things you want to do/say - feel free to share either in comments, or by volunteering, or by messaging or whatever medium you're comfortable with. You are invited to this party :)

Previous posts on Dreamwidth (bysamvara the 2009 committee chair) and the Organization for Transformative Works website (by the AD&T committee)

Sunday 7am for me and we didn't stop for 2.5 hours - see bingeling it's not just you :p We talked a lot about schedules, communication (especially Support and Tag Wranglers) and held us a workshop on some of the finer points of the Collections design - should they be bookmarkable (we think yes), should the description field be compulsory (we think no).

• Deploy Schedule: the AO3 has been updated and we're now on revision 1585 \o/ Our next deploy is planned for about three weeks from now and will contain the Invitations code and any fixes to existing problems that we can squeeze in - this is the Open Beta drop, we won't be able to add any more code before we launch.
  • AO3 Logo: We've agreed on a temporary logo. I think it's very pretty and it's certainly a lot better resolution than our poor little 'house' favicon. Our energy is pretty centered around Open Beta right now so finding someone to run a logo competition is going to have to wait - suggestions and volunteers welcome ;)
  • Filters: We're going to change the filers slightly, we'll change the Rating and Warning Category tickyboxes to radio buttons to reflect the fact that if you try to select more than one you always get zero results (can't be Rating=E AND Rating=T at the same time). This way, you can only ever pick one at a time anyway and will hopefully stop people having the frustrating experience of thinking they can have both then finding out they can't. erm, I really hope what I said made sense - poke me if it doesn't.
  • Invitations: I can see the code being added to our code repository in great big chunks and elz greeted me this morning with a design question. Yes, some of our features get developed when I'm half awake and half dressed - it's an excellent system I swear!
• Open Beta: Mid November. Our Support team are gearing up, we have plans, plan, plans and I'm only panicking every second hour :p
• Stuff coming up: Open Beta! Code Optimising, Yuletide importing (OMG)

Previous posts on Dreamwidth (bysamvara the 2009 committee chair) and the Organization for Transformative Works website (by the AD&T committee)

Welcome to Revision 1585, up from 1398. Yes that's right, 187 changes! This represents a huge amount of work by the entire AD&T team; we've designed, coded, tested, deployed and been very, very organised at each other to get here and I'm so proud of us.

Our next deploy will probably be in three weeks, this will be the necessary code to launch Open Beta.

I'll be making my weekly updates posts to the AO3 itself in the future, but will continue to post links on my Dreamwidth.

Highlights

• Admin posting - we can now post Release Notes direct to the Archive of Our Own plus we have a FAQ , and a Known Issues page!
• Bookmarks have been rebuilt - they now show work information (author's summary, tags, icons), they aggregate (don't show duplicates) and they show a lot of information! We plan to develop cut down views - Full/Medium/Light? but we want to know what you want to see in these views before we do this.
• Import from URL has been rebuilt - you can now import ten works at a time or up to 200 chapters of a single work.*coughs* There are some bugs with this!
• Notes - these can now be at the beginning and at the end of a work
• Post work - choosing a Category is now optional, that means you don't have to specify Gen, F/F, M/F, M/M, Other etc.
• Site Map - we have one!

Known Issues

See separate post :)

Next Projects

• Open Beta
• Ongoing work on Collections & Challenges (Yuletide pilot)
• Ongoing work on optimising for IE7
• Performance - fast page loading, fast searching etc.

Release Details

Bugs

• Fixed problem with Bookmarking external works for URLs ending in forward slashes
• Fixed User emails should be unique regardless of case
• Fixed User logins should be unique regardless of case
• Fixed User should always have a default pseud
• Fixed User shouldn't be able to create more than one pseud with same name
• Fixed Weird character on people page
• Fixed Series links should be shown at end of work as well as start
• Fixed Series show page should show total word count for series
• Fixed Edit link on series blurb
• Fixed Series page should load even if it only contains a draft
• Fixed Delete series if all works in it are deleted
• Fixed Authors should be restored to series where they were previously missing; creating a new series by editing a posted work should no longer result in an authorless series
• Fixed Show warnings should work for series, bookmarks on works and series, and still work on works (both blurb and show pages)
• Fixed Sanitize should no longer strip links

New Things

• Added work info to bookmarks (author's summary, tags, icons)
• Added ability to view all bookmarks on single work, with work blurb at top and stripped down user bookmarks below
• Added bookmark aggregation on main bookmarks page and tag bookmarks page (ie should show only most recent visible bookmark for single work/series/external work). User and pseud bookmark pages should show all bookmarks on a single work.
• Added ability to click a tag on bookmarks page to take you to all bookmarks with that tag, plus all bookmarks on works with that tag
• Added 'Save' link on bookmark blurb, should work for bookmarks on works, series and external works
• Added ability to mark a bookmark as a rec, and filter bookmarks to view recs only
• Added ability to bookmark a Series
• Added ability to create/edit multiple bookmarks on a single work
• Added option to transfer bookmarks to default pseud or delete them when deleting a pseud
• Added Javascript option to show most recent bookmarks
• Added character counters on external work bookmark form
• Added limit and validation for author name to the external work model, and counter to the form.
• Added ability to edit multiple works when importing
• Added ability to import works with multiple chapters and multiple works at once
• Added character counters on chapter form
• Added link to top (works and chapters)
• Added alternate instructions for chapter re-ordering with Javascript off
• Added Notes at end of works and chapters
• Added Admin 'manage user' page to handle unvalidated accounts, warn, temporarily suspend and permanently suspend user (we could do most of this, it's prettier now)
• Added Admin ability to post FAQ, Known Issues, updates
• Added explanatory note on signup form re case of usernames
• Added additional links to works, bookmarks and series on dashboard
• Added minimal html allowed for pseud description
• Added Comments should be transferred to default pseud if pseud is deleted, anonymised if user is deleted
• Added Explanatory text on comments form
• Added text to Series, should say 'author' or 'authors' depending on number
• Added should be able to set preference to hide freeform tags, applies to works index and show pages
• Added link to preferences on Reading History page
• Added explanatory text if search would return over 1000 results
• Added integration with 16bugs for Support and Report Abuse forms
• Added Site map
• Added new homepage

Changes

• Changed main bookmarks page to only show bookmarks created in the past month
• Changed 'Recs' in main navigation to 'bookmarks', including on 404 and 500 error pages
• Changed Importer - Story parser should download chaptered stories from ff.net; download stories from lj from behind the adult-concepts warning; preserve original story posting dates; prevent work from being uploaded multiple times
• Changed backdating: if a chapter is deleted, the work's 'revised at' date should show the most recent date among the remaining chapters.
• Changed label on story field on work and chapter forms
• Changed default rating, warnings and order on work form
• Changed work notes and summary so they only appear at top of work when viewing chapter by chapter
• Changed Category field to optional (Gen, F/F, F/M etc.)
• Changed 'Warnings' label (on work blurb, among other places) to have a link to relevant section of ToS faq
• Changed References to 'letters' to 'characters' on work and chapter forms
• Changed Admin ability to hide and delete bookmarks (links on bookmarks index page) and external works (also bookmarks index page)
• Changed Admin 'find user' page to increase usability
• Changed Default pseud should be loaded by default for a comment
• Changed footer links
• Changed display of ambiguous warnings text (for example author has selected 'None of these warnings apply', this should be displayed as 'No Primary Warnings Apply'
• Changed how appear unwrangled fandoms on media page
• Changed Reading history formatting
• Changed Edit pseud and show pseud styling
• MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF INTERNET EXPLORER 7 OPTIMISING \O/