An Open Letter to the AO3 Team
Sunday, November 13th, 2011 05:12 pmwith thanks to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kass :
Dear everyone involved with the Archive of Our Own,
Thank you.
Thank you to everyone who's ever written a line of code, fixed a bug, wrangled a tag, answered a support ticket.
Thank you to the back-end coders and thank you to the front-end coders.
Thank you to everyone who's ever brainstormed about what the archive might do, and thank you to everyone who's poured their hearts, souls, and spare time into trying to make the archive do all of those things and more.
I use the AO3 every day. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for building it for me and for everyone who uses it -- and for everyone who doesn't use it yet but might use it someday.
This archive isn't something to which fandom is entitled. It's a labor of love. You make the archive as your gift to fandom, and I appreciate that gift so, so much.
Even though it isn't finished yet. Even though it isn't perfect yet. It's still awesome, and your hard work is tremendous and admirable, and I just want to say thanks.
(Dear everyone else: if anything in this post resonates with you, feel free to signal-boost or repost.)
So this thing happened on AO3 this weekend - the site looks different, but for me, it was very similar in look and feel. I didn't have any access problems, nothing disappeared, I don't use a fancy skin, so nothing broke. The stuff I searched for popped up quickly. I guess I was in the lucky minority, or I just didn't hit it at the right time to experience all the wrongs. I'm not a huge fan of the light gray background, but it wasn't horrible. I'm just grateful that I can reliable go one place and reliably find lots of fanworks. I used to love the "Complete Archive of Slash" hosted by Minotaur, but it was clunky to use, and too much work for one person anyway. It just seems like when one person creates something, people will be more forgiving, or they won't go there. Maybe the color scheme sucks, or you don't like the tagging system, but hey, it's still a valuable resource, so you can put up with those things. But since AO3 was created by an organization, it's been de-personalized in some ways. But askass reminds us, it's ALL personal. So really, please remember to be kind to everyone who's giving so much so you can enjoy your corner of fandom a little more easily.
kass : Dear everyone involved with the Archive of Our Own,
Thank you.
Thank you to everyone who's ever written a line of code, fixed a bug, wrangled a tag, answered a support ticket.
Thank you to the back-end coders and thank you to the front-end coders.
Thank you to everyone who's ever brainstormed about what the archive might do, and thank you to everyone who's poured their hearts, souls, and spare time into trying to make the archive do all of those things and more.
I use the AO3 every day. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for building it for me and for everyone who uses it -- and for everyone who doesn't use it yet but might use it someday.
This archive isn't something to which fandom is entitled. It's a labor of love. You make the archive as your gift to fandom, and I appreciate that gift so, so much.
Even though it isn't finished yet. Even though it isn't perfect yet. It's still awesome, and your hard work is tremendous and admirable, and I just want to say thanks.
(Dear everyone else: if anything in this post resonates with you, feel free to signal-boost or repost.)
So this thing happened on AO3 this weekend - the site looks different, but for me, it was very similar in look and feel. I didn't have any access problems, nothing disappeared, I don't use a fancy skin, so nothing broke. The stuff I searched for popped up quickly. I guess I was in the lucky minority, or I just didn't hit it at the right time to experience all the wrongs. I'm not a huge fan of the light gray background, but it wasn't horrible. I'm just grateful that I can reliable go one place and reliably find lots of fanworks. I used to love the "Complete Archive of Slash" hosted by Minotaur, but it was clunky to use, and too much work for one person anyway. It just seems like when one person creates something, people will be more forgiving, or they won't go there. Maybe the color scheme sucks, or you don't like the tagging system, but hey, it's still a valuable resource, so you can put up with those things. But since AO3 was created by an organization, it's been de-personalized in some ways. But as
kass reminds us, it's ALL personal. So really, please remember to be kind to everyone who's giving so much so you can enjoy your corner of fandom a little more easily.
