Years ago back when I worked in cubicle land, we were hiring junior software developers. They didn’t have to have a ton of experience, just a willingness to learn, and some demonstration of their software skills. Like: show me a program you wrote (any language) or a web site you designed. Anything.

And there was this one guy I talked with who seemed super sharp, but had virtually zero experience writing software. When it came time to do the show-n-tell part of the interview he whips out his laptop, brings up a website, and spins it around to show me what he made.

A website of tiny ceramic frogs.

Not for sale. Just… all these ceramic frogs, organized into categories. Frogs on bicycles, frogs with hats, frogs sitting on lily pads. It was a virtual museum of ceramic frogs in web form.

I scrolled through his online collection of frogs, slightly baffled.

“This is your website?” I asked finally.

“Yep!”

“You coded this yourself?” I popped into view-source mode and poked around some incredibly well-formatted, well-commented html. I nodded slowly. This guy was meticulous.

“Yep!”

“So… where’d all the frogs come from?”

“I made those too,” he says, beaming. 

And while I’m processing this he rummages in his bag and pulls out a little ceramic frog working at a computer terminal. He places it on the table before us, next to the laptop.

“And THIS one,” he says, “I made for you! As a thank you for the interview.”

It was adorable. I hired him on the spot. I mean, why not? Worst case he’d wash out in 90 days and we’d hire somebody else. He turned out to be one of the best developers on our team. 

And yes, his cubicle was loaded with ceramic frogs.

He knew how to code and he used it to share his passion with the world just for the hell of it. Only an idiot *wouldn’t* hire him

I don't know how many of my followers are furries but we just lost one of ours.

He died because the medical industry in the US refused to help. He was murdered in a million little ways, with a million automated systems.

He was on bluesky no more than five hours ago, now he's gone.

Dragoneer ran FurAffinity, which is more or less the furry art site. It looks like its' from the early aughts, has no native pdf support, and has zero discoverability or algorithmic function. It's home to me, it's always been home.

No matter how often I moved or how often my life radically changed, there was FA. I met my husband on the forums. Through the majority of its' life, Dragoneer kept it running. He never sold us out, never tried to keep up with trends. It's a community.

And there is something bitter about losing someone who was key to keeping one of the relics of the internet before corporations took over.

We have our home, but it's lost its' keeper.

Good night, Neer. You kept the lights on.

There's a little ritual FA has. The dead aren't forgotten or deleted, nor is the passing unmarked.

Normal, unbanned accounts are tagged with a tilde before the username, like this

In the event of a death, the symbol is changed to an infinity sign. My friend Anna passed three years ago

I guess it's one more user added to the list

Here for a little time, remembered in the community forever.

hey here's a website for downloading any video or image from any website.

works w/ youtube, soundcloud, twitch, twitter (gifs and videos), tumblr (video and audio), and most other websites you're probably lookin to download stuff off of.

“if i wanted to get into [obscure doctor who spinoff], what would be the best way?” there is no good way. pick a random book and hope it’s not the one that costs $20,000. put one of the audios available on spotify on shuffle. watch torchwood backwards or something

This post really made me want a website that selects random Doctor Who stories to force myself to get out of my comfort zone, but there wasn’t really a good one online. And then I was like, Hey, I’m a computer science student.

… so I coded a website.

I used a massive database for it. Like I’ve been consuming Doctor who content for over a decade and I still don’t recognize most of these. It was really fun to make (I encouraged people to try it out and share it :)

found this site that lets you like, look at all the radio stations around the world, lets you connect to them and listen in

and obviously you can flit around between all the big stations, but it’s quite fun to go to the isolated green dots

I discovered a new band thanks to a station in cyprus, and now I’m listening to ‘chillout’ music being broadcast from kazahkstan

(http://radio.garden/)

ok i found this russian station way out in remote siberia which apparently according to the website is somewhere that looks like this

i cant understand a word of what’s said during the breaks but its fun

you just tuned in to my computer by mistake

that’s when my evening went from good to great

This is weirdly soothing to know what all of these people are doing around the world at this particular moment, who’s waking up and who’s going to sleep…

i’m listening to a station in barrow, alaska. they’re playing ‘my boyfriend’s back’.

Okay I really love this

And they also have an app!!!

I found several new amazing songs

I’d like ao3 to know that I love and appreciate its service to the fan community

You can tell AO3 you appreciate us by sending a support ticket with whatever it is you’d like to say, using the link at the bottom of any page! We really enjoy getting nice support tickets, it makes for a pleasant change, and we anonymize them and share them with the rest of the organization, and store them for anyone in the org to view whenever they’re feeling down. 

Signed, a Support co-chair who likes having nice support tickets to read once in a while.

Hey guys reblog this version because that’s really cool!

aw this is rlly nice!

I imagine that it would be like getting a really nice review out of the blue. They put in all this work for us, and the number of users versus the amount of written thanks they get is probably really disproportionate. Send ‘em a thank you note

Send them a support ticket!!!

So lately there’s been a lot of scary things happening in media (journalism is dying and there’s huge media layoffs, Amazon, Disney and Netflix are taking over everything, etc). I want everyone to remember how truly amazing and unique AO3 is and the sheer amount of organization and work it takes for it to be independent - many of you on here are young and may not know how much it changed being a fan. Read your history.

THANK YOU AO3 💖💖💖

Please, I am begging you, visit the official Captain Marvel website

I would post screenshots but they cannot possibly capture it.

THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT

apparently ppl don’t know about waifu2x??? despite its… concerning name it’s literally the most convenient website i’ve ever come across as an artist

it allows you to resize artwork without it becoming pixellated. this is a MASSIVE help if you, for example, make lineart too small or something. it works best with things that 1. have no textures 2. have smooth lines 3. have cel shading, but it still works really damn well for things that don’t fit that profile

here’s an example:

normal size

2x in paint

2x in waifu2x

so like, there’s that. go wild

Original:

Photoshop scaled:

Waifu2x scaled:

It’s legit!! Tell your friends!

waifu2x-multi is the newer version. It allows for rescaling multiple pictures at a time and to scale them up to 10x the original size. 

Holy shit this is amazing

I just spent 2 hours debating and testing and arguing in circles and bitching about library catalogs with two colleagues and I just want to say

AO3’s website is really, really, really impressive, functional and ergonomic and cohesive. the tag system is INCREDIBLE and AMAZINGLY maintained. this is my professional librarian appraisal.

I’ve found 1 library catalog that meets my standards. even the national library of France’s catalog is shitty in comparison to ao3.

praise.

It’s awesome! As a total ignorant, can I ask what AO3 does and library catalogs don’t?

i might actually type out a longer answer but what it really boils down to is: YOU ACTUALLY FIND WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR

ok so here’s the long unreadable (and probs uninteresting to anyone else than me) version:

- the site design and overall look. it’s easy to read, easy to navigate, and easy to notice what you can click on. Makes good use of fonts and text sizes and styles to make important things stand out and be easily found at a glance, and is just overall very readable. The icons with hovertext! The tags! the amount of info that’s readable at a single glance and actually fits on the same page!

this is BASIC STUFF and it is not a given on a LOT of professional library websites i run into regularly and that drives me INSANE. (Mostly bc one of the very popular, cheap, and easy French-language library catalog softwares has a default online catalog design that sucks and which librarians generally don’t tinker with much.)

- again this seems obvious, but the filters when you’re inside a fandom/tag are SO VISIBLE and SO EXPLICIT. The filters menu makes it instantly clear what it’s for, is easy to navigate and understand and use, intelligently suggests the most popular tags first (which also immediately gives you a lot of information).

My library’s online catalog (which uses the default website set-up I mentioned above) has exactly the same thing, but stupidly executed, unreadable and incomprehensible, and somehow completely unnoticeable despite being exactly in the same place on the page. The site design makes very bad use of the space on the page and basically you just don’t even look over there because it’s so far away from where the rest of the information is and it simply never catches your eye, and even when it does, the vocabulary used is so obtuse you don’t realize what it’s for.

IT’S SO… STUPID AND EASILY FIXABLE… but apparently no public library in the french language can afford a website designer, or they’re all horrifyingly bad

- and finally: THE TAGS. One of the biggest issues we have in catalogs is that people use different words for the same thing. In order for you to find books relevant to your search, we have to apply topic keywords to them (basically: tags), but of course there are Norms so that all libraries, or at least all employees in the same library, use the same keywords. Except despite the norm that still doesn’t happen. I don’t know how it goes in the English-language world but for French language it’s all horribly complicated and surprisingly non-functional, despite how easy it seems in theory, and leads me to complain about the Bibliothèque Nationale de France about once a week at least.

Easy example that I’ve complained about today (for the 6th time this year): ADHD. The term used by the BNF, that we are supposed to use, is “Trouble de l’hyperactivité avec déficit de l’attention” (“hyperactivity disorder with attention deficit”). That’s… not only outdated but flat-out inaccurate (according to French’s current stance on it) — the term people actually use nowadays is the opposite way around, “trouble de l’attention avec ou sans hyperactivité” ( “ADD with or without hyperactivity”), commonly abbreviated to “TDA/H”. The BNF’s system does accommodate for various synonyms, but it appears unaware of this one, so if you search “TDA/H” in the keywords, you won’t find anything. You’d have to look in the title, and if none of our books have it in their title, you’ll find nothing at all, and won’t even be redirected anywhere if we strictly follow the BNF system. (WHAT IS THE POINT OF KEYWORDS THEN, one might ask.)

Tl;dr: you look for the word you and most people actually informed about a topic use, and find nothing at all because some rando has decided that’s not the word you should be using. (Unsurprisingly, this problem pops up a looot for keywords related to minorities, mental illnesses and LGBT+ topics.)

It’s like if you tried to search a site for “fluff” and didn’t find anything because the site has decided to continue using “WAFF” instead. Also, the site has decided that hurt-comfort and guro fic are the same thing, makes no distinction between levels of romance and eroticism so there’s no way to tell cute handholding from smut, and believes that the word “furry” means they get a dog.

=> The system of letting people use their words and linking them — making them synonyms — with what other people have used for the same meaning completely blows my mind. I am in awe of the fact that it works, and that it’s still happening, even though iirc tag-wranglers are unpaid volunteers. I couldn’t imagine doing something like that in just our catalog, and AO3 is massive.

The result is: not only do you find what you’re looking for, but if your search accidentally picks up other things too, you know what it’s actually about because you get it in the author’s words.

AO3′s tag system is an incredibly clever and simple solution to a very real and thorny problem that I run into almost every day.

tl;dr AO3 is just generally a perfectly functional and user-friendly site, instantly easy to use in order to tailor your search to exactly what you want (and even more so with the addition of the exclusion operator to the filters sidebar), and on a technical library-science viewpoint, it’s fascinating.

This is taking me back to when AO3 was first born, and I was having a conversation with someone (@icarusancalion, I think?) about how I didn’t think the tagging system was ever really gonna be useful. 

I knew the kind of top-down tagging system that libraries use was often useless for the same reasons you’re describing here: academics like the idea of a priori systems and exclusive classification schemata, but AO3 tagging is useful precisely because tags can be messy and overlapping rather than strict hierarchies. You’ll never get all fandoms everywhere to agree on a common tag family, I said c. 2008. It’ll be outdated before it’s even implemented. But relying entirely on user-generated tags will be a logistical nightmare, past!Maud also argued, because there would be no way to manage synonyms and near-synonyms and typos that would rapidly bloat the system to uselessness. 

Well, 2008!me was right about top-down schemata but wrong about user-submitted tags, thanks almost entirely to the work of the tag wranglers: human curators who take the time to link and nest related tags as they come up, without relying on a pristine (and utterly dysfunctional) a priori system to do so. 

Would real-world academic libraries benefit from tag wranglers? Absofuckinglutely, but I really don’t think most of them would ever implement them for the same reason past!me was skeptical of them. Maybe if they were shown how well it works on AO3 (where the wranglers are all volunteers!) they might be persuaded to hire some workstudies or under-employed PhDs to wrangle for them. And then the world would be a better place. 

@wrangletangle just thought you’d like to see this absolutely deserved praise.

Aw, so kind!

I agree that coders have done an amazing job with the design. That took years and many volunteers to build, and I’m sure it will continue to be tweaked.

If any library in the world is interested in our wrangling skillsets, we have hundreds of fully-trained curators who speak dozens of languages! Many of them are indeed students who would probably like a paying job. :)

Yesss this^^^

Thanks to @melannen on DW for pointing this out: The Archive of Our Own was ONE VOTE SHORT of being on this year’s Hugo Awards ballot for Best Related Work.

Normally “related works” are books, but it doesn’t have to be a book; the official rules say, “a work related to the field of science fiction, fantasy, or fandom … The type of works eligible include, but are not limited to, collections of art, works of literary criticism, books about the making of a film or TV series, biographies and so on.”

(when Hugo people say “fandom” they mean not transformative fandom or people who write fanfic, but a much broader spectrum of fans including professional SFF publishing)

It kind of blows my mind that the AO3 as a piece of software and a publishing platform would be eligible, but it makes so much sense; the AO3 is, in fact, a hugely innovative site, the work of hundreds of designers, programmers, database managers, and staff, that benefits the SFF community and writers as a whole in a unique and outstanding way.

It would be so cool to see the AO3 up for nomination next year.

This sounds great, but actually having hundreds of designers, programmers, and database managers would be even better than any award, imo. The majority of OTW volunteers are Tag Wranglers and Translators. AO3 has very few technical staff. If you want to generously calls us wranglers data managers, okay, cool, but we’re still not database managers.

AO3 is always looking for skilled technical staff. If you can program in Ruby or are a Sysadmin with some spare time, please come say hello!

(We’re also looked for tag wranglers right now (September 2, 2018). The skills you need are mostly language and logic skills. If you can use the Post Work form on AO3, you have enough technical skills to become a wrangler.)

I would love to see AO3 be nominated especially as Worldcon is in Ireland and I will be going, and a couple of us hope to do a talk. 

Systems ( we look after the machines, the OS, the networking, the support software, exim, elasticsearch, mysql, redis etc ) is about 5 people right now in total with us all doing different amounts of work. ADT the programmers has 20 people who have had a commit merged this year ( https://github.com/otwcode/otwarchive/graphs/contributors?from=2018-01-18&to=2018-09-02&type=c ) 11 people have had 2 or more commits merged. 

Two people in those two groups are in both systems and ADT.

We have no paid staff, we will need to change that soon but that is the way it is today.

Boost!!!

AO3 through the years

One odd complaint I’ve seen is that “AO3 hasn’t changed”.  First, if something is well designed and working, it shouldn’t need to change constantly (does anyone actually like it when Tumblr makes random changes to things? no.)

Second, even at a cosmetic level, it’s just… not true? Not unless you haven’t been around very long.

AO3 in 2008 - the first decent cap from the Wayback Machine.

AO3 in 2009.  Still in closed beta.  About 5500 works.

AO3 opens for general signups! 2010.  Also, our logo makes its appearance :3

2011 - the tabs appear at the top of the page.  Things looking generally more tidy and less squished.

2012 - a more chipper intro page.  Things shifted around a bit as well.

2013 - looking a little more classy now.  Tweets available on the main page.

2014 - some more subtle changes, including adding the number of works and fandoms in a prominent place.  1.2 million works at that point…

2015 - look how much it’s changed! The categories move to the front page for ease of access.  Recent news updates also on display.  Nearing 2 million works…

2016 - I admit I picked this one because of the news update about buying a new server “after holding together mail with sticks and strings”.  Nearing 2.7 million works.

2017 - cosmetically few changes but look at the works number - 3.3 million works.  This was just about a year ago (October 2017) and the current number today is about 4.2 million.  You can also see from the news post that this was when we were in the middle of upgrading to HTTPS, which was a difficult but important process.

And here we are at more or less the present - 2018 (September to be precise).  I agree fully that if you joined the site in the last 3 years, you might not have seen a lot of cosmetic/interface changes, but that’s because people - volunteers - spent the previous 5-6 years hashing those out to get them into their present state.

More importantly, you might not have noticed the under the hood changes that necessarily come with going up by roughly a million works a year.  You might not have noticed the updates to site security that came with HTTPS, and maybe you didn’t even notice the huge changes to searching and filtering over the past few months.  I get that it’s easy to say “nothing has changed”.  That’s because there’s a team of volunteers who are working hard to make sure pages keep loading quickly, downloads keep working as expected, searches find you what you’re looking for, and downtime is kept to a minimum.  Without them, I guarantee you would notice a lot more changes at this rate of growth, and not for the better.

This is amazing 💖

On the AO3 all these years later

The tenth anniversary of the OTW and all the AO3 discussion going around this week inspired me to go look at astolat’s original post about creating an An Archive Of Our Own, and found my comment on it:

Eleven years and rather a lot of volunteer-hours later, I stand by every single word.

And then I found my original post on the idea that became the OTW/AO3, which says in part:

I am so pleased to have been proved correct. 

(And also, in the category of “women need to ask for every damn thing they want”? I took those words to heart, which is one of many reasons Marna/commodorified and I have been married for going on eight years.)

ETA: I know some of the links are broken, they copied over from my original post and I didn’t have the energy to either delete them or track them down elsewhere.

Asking for it and doing it!!!

So inspiring. And yes - at the time this seemed such a pipedream, but look at it now!

Yup. I remember saying I’d support it regardless, but it would only really be useful to me as a poster if it allowed every kind of content. Heh.

God this brings it back.  People saying we couldn’t do it, that we would never be able to do it, etc. And then there was the sort of six months later moment where people were like, but where is it? (!)  Dudes, we had to found a nonprofit company first! so we could be legal and raise money and pay taxes and have a bank account and enter contracts - and moreover, the archive was written from scratch: from a single blinking cursor on the screen, custom-designed from the ground up.  I remember that I had the job of tracking wireframes in the early days as the real designers figured out how the flow of pages in the archive were going to go. Amazing.

Anyway,  I want to say that the group that came together around the OTW /AO3 in those first years had a track record like WHOA: so many of those people had been archivists, web-admins, fannish fest-runners, newsletter compilers, community moderators, listmoms (kiddies, you won’t know what this is) or had other fannish roles that gave them enormous experience in working collaboratively in fandom and keeping something great going year after year. And  OTW continues to attract great people–and so also, while I’m blathering, let me say that volunteering for the OTW also provides great, real world experience that you can put on your resume, because AO3 is one of the top sites in the world and TWC has been publishing on time for ten years and Fanlore is cited in books and journalism all the time and Open Doors has relationships with many meatspace university libraries and archives etc. so if you think you have something to bring to the table, please do think about volunteering somewhere. It’s work, believe me, but it’s also pretty g-d awesome.

I want to pull this out for a second because I have in fact generally spent much of my life aiming for big unrealistic goals, very few of which I’ve actually achieved, and many of which I didn’t actually want by the time I got close to them. 

The thing about aiming for “unrealistic” goals is that the work you do to achieve those goals doesn’t disappear even if you don’t achieve the goal. We still haven’t accomplished everything on our giant AO3 wishlist. There remains plenty of work to be done (and the OTW and the amazing current team working on the AO3 can always use more help, as Cesperanza says!) 

But because we collectively threw ourselves at this project, there is an archive, and it’s not just good, it’s better than anything else out there. <3

I finally know why I’ve been seeing all the AO3 stuff lately. I’ve shared more things related to it than I expected to, but it’s all been informative and this in particular was really motivational about taking on bigger tasks

THIS!!! THANK YOU AO3 💖

HAPPY TENTH ANNIVERSARY 🎂

hey ao3 can you like give the extra $38k you made from this month’s funds drive to charity

You know it legally is a charity, right?

If x charity aims for £10, but gets £15, would you expect then to give back the extra five or give it then to another charity? No. Any extra costs go into the “rainy day” fund; sometimes servers crash or break, sometimes false reports are made that require the legal team, sometimes you need to hire coders or what not to implement new features or fix bugs or deal with broken code … 

The money they aimed for is the bare minimum, which goes towards things like basic server costs and domain names and legal advice and so forth, but they don’t just “pocket” the rest (as people claim). It’s not a business. It has no advertisements. It needs some “rainy day” cash to function. 

You can’t ask a charity to give money to another charity. 

It needs what it gets to function and improve. 

kiena-tesedale replied to this post

In my experience, people who don’t work in web design and hosting just have no concept of how heavy a load something like AO3 would have. Not only is the traffic absolutely buck wild, but the quantity of data that archive needs to store is fuckoff crazy. I’m talking “more than the library of congress” crazy. The only reason it doesn’t require Netflix levels of data serving is that it’s text based rather than video.

AO3 is in the top 300 websites in the world, and the top 100 in the US. It is the number 2 literature website.

Number 2 in the entire world. JSTOR is 20.

It sees about 6 million people a day. About 250k an hour. Each of those people is loading multiple pages, many are running searches that execute on literally hundreds of potential variables per search. The demands involved are astronomical.

JSTOR, btw, makes 85 million dollars a year.

It’s 18 ranks below AO3′s traffic, and takes in 650 times the amount of money.

But let’s say you think that’s an unfair comparison. Would you say that the Project Gutenberg Literature Archival Group- another text based archive that handles literature operating outside traditional copyright requirements- is more similar?

Because it sees all of 4% of the traffic that AO3 handles.

Care to guess its budget?

Double that of AO3.

AO3 is doing shit on the kind of shoestring budget that I fully, 100% cannot comprehend. And that’s just the archival service.

The 130k also pays for the OTW’s legal team, which they use to defend the right of fandom to fucking exist.

It’s absolutely batshit fucked up that people are fighting to have the OTW defunded and AO3 shut down. They are the only organized group that actually stands directly between fandom- all the art and the fics and the vids and the music and the chats and the memes and everything we love about interactive, transformative work- and an incalculable amount of lawsuits.

FUCKING THIS!!!!!

good website

lol

twitter: wow this website is terrible! in the new update all the videos autoplay now :( this is an inconvenience to me. oh wait i can turn this off actually its fine. still gonna complain about it though 

tumblr: i wonder what this month’s outrageous mistake will be. ah yes, an ocean of blank comments. just another day on the social media platform that is programmed by howler monkeys 

Lol yup XD