Fictitious Endeavours

Posted by choux

https://www.transformativeworks.org/ao3-releases-0-9-409-0-9-413-change-log/

https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=265742

In May and June, we made some security additions for user accounts by adding email notifications when an account’s username or password is changed. We also made some improvements around tag sets and challenge signups. As one more security change, we also permanently disabled image embedding in guest comments.

A special thank you to our new contributors Ashley Tan, dismayonnaise, Grayson von Goetz, Jen Mann, kitbur, and ryelle!

Credits

• Coders: Ashley Tan, Bilka, Brian Austin, Ceithir, Connie Feng, dismayonnaise, EchoEkhi, Grayson von Goetz, Hamham6, Jen Mann, kitbur, marcus8448, ryelle, Sarken, Scott, slavalamp, weeklies
• Code reviewers: Bilka, Brian Austin, Ceithir, james_, lydia-theda, redsummernight, slavalamp, Sarken, weeklies
• Testers: Bilka, Brian Austin, choux, Deniz, Eskici, LilyP, Lute, lydia-theda, Maine, megidola, Runt, Sam Johnsson, Sarken, Scott, Tal, Teyris, therealmorticia, wichard

Details

0.9.409

On May 11, we deployed some improvements to tag sets and added an email notification whenever the username on your account is changed.

• [AO3-5513] – Admins can now successfully create and rename media tags without running into 500 errors or caching issues.
• [AO3-5714] – When a canonical fandom and a non-canonical character or relationship were added to the same tag set, the non-canonical tags were automatically listed under the fandom. However, this is just how the tags were displayed in the tag set. They weren’t really connected to the fandom, which meant they weren’t included in autocompletes and couldn’t be used in challenge sign-ups. We’ve stopped automatically listing the non-canonical tags under the fandom and will instead only do it if the tag set moderators set up an association (which will also make the non-canonical tags usable in sign-ups and help ensure they appear in the autocomplete).
• [AO3-5919] – We updated the code for kudos emails to avoid using a method that wasn’t particularly efficient.
• [AO3-6757] – When an admin hides a comment, any embedded images in the hidden comment will now be replaced with the image URLs.
• [AO3-6844] – We fixed a whole bunch of display and page structure issues on pages that list the tags in a tag set.
• [AO3-6977] – We’ve started spam checking edits to comments from new users and stopped spam checking any comments a work creator leaves on their own work.
• [AO3-6981] – To improve account security, we now send you an email when you (or someone logged in to your account) change your username.
• [AO3-6984] – Our dependency updater bumped our version of net-imap to 0.5.7. It’s not something we use, but keeping dependencies up to date is good.
• [AO3-6988] – We started caching the package installs involved in our automated tests, making each test run faster.
• [AO3-6990] – We bumped our version of the rack gem to 2.2.14 to get the latest security fix.

0.9.410

On May 16, we added an email notification whenever the password of your account is changed. We also made a number of small improvements all around the site.

• [AO3-5712] – Under certain circumstances, it was possible to sign up for a challenge using a character or relationship that wasn’t permitted by the challenge’s tag set. Now you’ll get an error if you try to do that.
• [AO3-6267] – If a draft chapter was added to a work in your History, your History would lie to you and say an update to the work was available. Now it will only tell you an update is available if a new chapter has been published since you last accessed the work.
• [AO3-6627] – Whenever a site admin tried to update the roles for a user who already had roles outside the admin’s purview, those existing roles would be removed. (For example, when a Tag Wrangling admin gave the tag wrangler role to a user who had the Open Doors archivist role, the user would lose their archivist role.) We’ve fixed it so any existing roles will stay in place.
• [AO3-6994] – We fixed an issue that was causing our spam checker to run on comments from accounts with recently changed email addresses.
• [AO3-6005] – We used feature tests somewhere we should’ve been using unit tests, so we changed them over.
• [AO3-6975] – At some point the admin setting for how long to keep around unactivated accounts had become disconnected from the code it was meant to control. We fixed this so the setting once again affects the right piece of code.
• [AO3-6970] – When the Policy & Abuse committee hides a work, you get an automatic email to notify you. To prepare for some future changes, we’ve updated the email text to allow for multiple works in the same email.
• [AO3-6973] – Another account security enhancement: you’ll now get an email when you (or someone accessing your account) change or reset your password.

0.9.411

On May 24, we deployed an improvement to word counts for multichapter works on the Statistics page. We also took steps to fight abuse in guest comments by preventing them from ever displaying embedded images.

• [AO3-3818] – On some specific browsers on certain devices, leaving comments or submitting support tickets would result in an error. We’ve now fixed that.
• [AO3-4190] – Every time invitations were sent, the log on the site settings page updated to say the settings had been modified. We’ve fixed it so it will only say the settings have been updated when an admin updates them.
• [AO3-7000] – One of the external links in the Creating a Skin help pop-up pointed to a site that had been taken over by a crypto magazine, so we’ve replaced it with a new resource for learning about CSS.
• [AO3-6995] – In a previous release, we tried to drop an unused database column. Unfortunately, we had to put it back when it turned out Rails was still looking for the column due to caching. We’ve now made a code change that will let us drop the column for real after a future release.
• [AO3-5270] – The yearly word counts on your Statistics page will now only count words written in chapters posted in that year. That means if you add a chapter to a WIP you started last year, the words you wrote last year will still count toward 2024’s total instead of being added to 2025’s total.
• [AO3-5347] – The notification you get when someone cites your work as a related work has now been prepared for translation.
• [AO3-6092] – A while ago, we unintentionally fixed a bug where the chapter title didn’t display in Entire Work mode if the work only had one posted chapter. Now we’ve added an automated test to make sure we don’t unintentionally break it again.
• [AO3-6684] – The close button on the banner we use for sitewide announcements uses an ×, which typically makes sense if you’re looking at the page, but which gets read as “multiplication sign” if you’re using a screen reader. That was confusing, so we’ve made sure screen readers will now say “hide banner” instead.
• [AO3-6967] – We’ve added a second save button to the top of tag edit pages to make things a little more convenient when the page is long and a wrangler is just changing something at the top of the form.
• [AO3-6987] – Under certain circumstances, we strip embedded images from certain fields. We used to just show the image URL when we did that, but now we show all of the HTML.
• [AO3-6991] – As a safety measure, guest comments with embedded images will always show the HTML instead of embedded images. (This includes existing guest comments.)

0.9.412

On June 5, we deployed a small release with some bug fixes.

• [AO3-6166] – If you knew the ID of an unrevealed work you could access a few subpages of the work, such as the collections page, and find out the title of the work that way. Since that’s meant to be unrevealed, we’ve changed these pages so you can no longer access them if the work is unrevealed.
• [AO3-6937] – We changed the browser page title on inbox pages to a format that matches other user pages: “username – Inbox | Archive of Our Own.”
• [AO3-6953] – We made sure you’ll get an error message if you attempt to clear your History and it fails.
• [AO3-6993] – The Edit Multiple Works page will no longer display a bunch of unusable options when you don’t have any works. Instead, it will simply tell you you don’t have any works.
• [AO3-6550] – When displaying work titles, we used to call a function on them that had already been called. We’ve stopped doing that since it’s redundant.
• [AO3-6948] – We added some code to enable us to monitor the performance of the job that sends invitations to people in the invitation queue.

0.9.413

Our June 16 deploy added the ability to embed media from audio.com in works.

• [AO3-6515] – We fixed an error 500 that occured when a work with end notes was marked as published, but only had draft chapters.
• [AO3-6912] – We changed the browser page title for unrevealed works to include the site name at the end.
• [AO3-6437] – We removed some unused database tables.
• [AO3-6996] – We finally dropped that unused database column and removed the code we added to make that go smoothly.
• [AO3-6235] – Admins from the Policy & Abuse committee can now turn invitation requests on and off from the site settings page.
• [AO3-6588] – Admins from the Open Doors and Support committees can now give users the role that disables password reset emails for their account.
• [AO3-7003] – You can now add embeds from audio.com to your works.

https://www.transformativeworks.org/ao3-releases-0-9-409-0-9-413-change-log/

https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=265742

Posted by callmeri

https://www.transformativeworks.org/otw-signal-june-2025/

https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=265723

Every month in OTW Signal, we take a look at stories that connect to the OTW’s mission and projects, including issues related to legal matters, technology, academia, fannish history and preservation issues of fandom, fan culture, and transformative works.

In the News

The Conversation’s article “The lore of ‘lore'” explores how fandom fueled the reinvention of a 1,000-year-old word:

Now essential online slang, [“lore”] can be traced back to Old English, where it referred primarily to learning, as in the act of teaching or being taught. Over time, lore came to be associated with more informal knowledge, passed on through word of mouth … [but then it] largely slipped out of common usage … So, how did “lore” come to hold such contemporary relevance?

“Lore” still carries shades of its original meaning, but just as fans expand and transform canon, modern usage reimagines it. Oxford University Press—which shortlisted “lore” for their 2024 word of the year—explains:

In recent years, people have been using “lore” in different ways and in new contexts. For example, they might now talk about the lore surrounding a particular celebrity, or a character in a book or film, or even refer to their own personal history as their lore. Online cultures and social media have seen the emergence of new kinds of celebrities and highly-engaged fandoms, and the word has been applied much more widely.

From its popularity in K-pop to the semi-eponymous Fanlore, the rise of “lore” is a great example of how fans build cultural meaning through shared language and creative reinterpretation.

The Geekiary’s article on fandom holidays speaks on how fans mark time within their communities. Be it May the Fourth (Star Wars Day) or Destiel’s confession anniversary, fandom holidays are not an uncommon phenomenon. Some humorous, some profound, these unofficial yet widely beloved holidays are often tied to moments from canon (such as a character’s birthday or an in-universe event) and serve to foster community building.
These observances turn the ordinary calendar into a timeline of shared emotion and meaning. As an act of tradition, they become ritual anchors that give structure to the fan’s calendar, offering a sense of comfort and familiarity in an ever-changing world. The article notes how this act of building new traditions and creating opportunities for community bonding forges a sense of cultural memory for fans.

In her book Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom, Abigail De Kosnik describes how “Memory has gone rogue in the sense that it has come loose from its fixed place in the production cycle. It now may be found anywhere, or everywhere, in the chain of making”. Celebrating holidays online or by digitizing photographs/experiences allows these memories to be accessed later on, rather than be fixed to just a specific person or place. It lets our fandoms live outside of us as individuals.

Like lore, fandom holidays demonstrate how participation itself becomes a form of authorship—each contribution adding another thread to the tapestry.

OTW Tips

Fandom is global, and many amazing fanworks are written, drawn, or subtitled in languages other than one’s own. Whether you’re tagging fanfiction in your native language or collaborating with international fans, your efforts enrich fandom’s diversity and inclusivity.
The OTW is recruiting for Tag Wrangling Volunteers (Russian), Internal Complaint and Conflict Resolution Volunteers, and Support Volunteers (Chinese).
Consider volunteering for one of the OTW’s teams to support and celebrate global fan participation!

We want your suggestions for the next OTW Signal post! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or news story you think we should know about, send us a link. We are looking for content in all languages! Submitting a link doesn’t guarantee that it will be included in an OTW post, and inclusion of a link doesn’t mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.

https://www.transformativeworks.org/otw-signal-june-2025/

https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=265723