We're now eight hours into Open Beta for the Archive of Our Own, and we're really excited to see people signing up and using the Archive. So far, we've seen new 493 accounts created, and our new users have added more than 1500 new works in over 150 fandoms! Our lovely front-end coder and support volunteer Cesy has been tracking our progress with some beautiful graphs: New users and fandoms since Open Beta and New works since Open Beta.

If you have questions about what Open Beta is and how to get an account, please check out our Announcing Open Beta post \0/

Open Beta is still beta, and as such the site still has a few kinks. We really value the feedback that our new users have been giving us, and our lovely Support team are working hard to respond to queries as fast as possible. In order to keep our users informed, we'd like to highlight a few of the more common issues and questions here:

Invitation queue

If you sign up via our invitation queue and have trouble entering your email address, check there aren't any extra spaces before or after it. This has been causing a few problems with our validation - it's a bug that will be fixed very soon.

If you joined the invitation queue and when you check back it says you're not in the queue, then please check your spam for your invitation email. If it hasn't shown up, then submit a support request and we'll get back to you as quickly as possible.

Invitation codes

If you receive an invitation via email, you can just click on the link to get to the sign-up page and your code will be entered automatically.

If you are an existing user of the Archive and you'd like to give a code to a friend, then you need to give them an invitation link, not just the raw code. You can choose to send them an email via 'Invitations' on your user home, and this will happen automatically. If you want to share a code without sending an email, then go to 'Manage invitations' and you'll see an option to 'Copy and use' your existing codes. Click on this to copy the invitations link - it's this that you need to share with people.

Account names

The Archive of Our Own allows you to post under various pseuds. However, these are linked to your account name, and this name will be displayed publicly on the site. Therefore, ensure your user name is one you don't mind other people seeing! Please also take care entering it, as it's difficult to change once it's been created.

We'll be improving the information text on the account creation page shortly to make this clearer - sorry to those of you who were confused.

Problems with special characters

We are experiencing some problems with special characters such as em-dashes (the long 'double hyphen'), umlauts and accents. In some cases, these characters will cause posts or imports to be cut off. If this happens to you, a workaround at present is to use the raw html coding for the special character (see this list of html entities for reference). We're working hard to put in a proper fix as soon as possible. (We hope it won't discourage posting in languages other than English in the meantime - we're excited to see works in Czech, German, French and Spanish already!)

We'll keep updating our Known Issues page on the Archive of Our Own with any further bugs that arise, and you may also find the Archive FAQ helpful. We'll also be posting regular Archive News Posts on the AO3 (mirrored on the OTW News blog and mirrors) to keep everyone up-to-date on new developments.


Despite a few inevitable bugs, Open Beta has been going really well! The shiny AO3 servers (owned by fandom, y'all!) are holding up really well under the vigorous workout they're receiving, and we're totally jazzed to see people using and enjoying the Archive. Thanks so much to everyone who got us here! <3

Mirrored from an original post on the Archive of Our Own.

Things I Should/Want to Do Today:
Clean the kitchen/do dishes
Clean the living room/vacuum
Clean my room
Finish laundry
Go to the bookstore
Work on my thesis project
Help Kirsten with hers
Go to Petsmart for snake food
Go grocery shopping
Pay bills

Reality:
Still feeling too sick to do any of it.
Will nap instead.

Pell: so guys
Pell: i just broke 15
Pell: do i get a cookie?
Kirk: ...
Kirk: p-pell
Sweets: You get this complimentary straight jacket.
Pell: XD YAY!!!
Sweets: PELL IS SUPERWOMAN
Pell: MY CAPE IS AT THE CLEANERS
Kirk: m-magical
Sweets: you get a complimentary cape as well
Sweets: to go with your straight jacket
Sweets: now you can fight crime
[08:27am] You were promoted to half-operator by ChanServ.
Sweets: Also temporary halfops until you disconnect for hilarity
Pell: \o/
Pell: i need a sidekick
Pell: who's next highest?
Pell: ryuuken?
Kirk: ... no I think that's me
Pell: SIDEKICK
Kirk: sob
Sweets: ... how convenient, you're together on the userlist
Kirk: it was DESTINY

Can someone please tell me how to make stupid Internet Explore stop telling me that IE is operating with add-ons disabled every damn time I open a window or a new tab or refresh a page or follow a link or basically anything that does not involve leaving it sit on the same damn page and doing nothing. I nix the stupid bar, but it keeps fucking coming back, and I can't find anywhere in the options to disable the stupid notifications, and I wouldn't even be using this dumbass browser if my netbook did not insist on crashing when I open Safari.

/glower I hate this stupid fucking browser...

I DON'T WANT TO BE UP BUT THIS BASTARD WON'T SHUT UP

Edit: NANO. WHAT WAS I THINKING?

That needs to be a t-shirt

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SmartBitchesTrashyBooks/~3/XbRsa-Ook40/

http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com/index.php/weblog/comments/free-digital-short-story-from-avon/#When:10:49:10Z

Avon is offering a free PDF short story - and I realize this has been news for a few days now, so my apologies for the late breaking-ness.

Deeper Than Desire is a free companion short story to Caroline Linden’s December release, For Your Arms Only.

It’s about 48 pages, and while it makes giant jumps in time and moves quickly through the sequence of history that affects the hero and heroine, it also sets up the family and backstory of the December book. If you read it, let me know what you think.

The Archive Of Our Own is now in Open Beta! *\0/*

This means that you can now request an invitation! Get all the details and answers to your questions in our Open Beta information post.

Thank you to everyone in fandom who made this possible! We're incredibly grateful to everyone who got us this far – all the OTW staffers in their many roles, those of you who supported us with your donations, and fandom at large for being awesome.

FANDOM OWNS THE SERVERS, GUYS! Come and join the party!


<a href="http://transformativeworks.org/open-beta-here"><img src="http://transformativeworks.org/sites/default/files/invitecat.jpg" alt="OTW: o hai donate" /></a>

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW blog.

This post is also available in Deutsch, Español, Français and Suomi.

• 20:51 I'm sad @panikmusik is disbanding--I love their music! Also sad: AmazonUS doesn't list their new album, & AmazonDE won't sell it to me. ;_; #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter.

new wswb pg up

Name a character and I'll tell you three (or more) facts about them from my own personal pseudo-canon. (You may also pick original characters).

I GUESS THIS MEANS VERSES? And whatever else. I don't know. WHATEVER YOU WANT IT TO MEAN.

Newtype 12's Kobato. anime article can be found at moe.imouto.

Also, Amazon.jp has a larger image of the Tsubasa Volume 28 hardcover up.

Small Worlds is my kind of game.

Free, entertaining, and I can't kill myself in new and interesting ways that the creators never intended.

This is 509 fic, pairing and title are spoilers, so the information is under a cut.

( Info under the cut! )

Geez, it just fucking figures.
15 years of my life have been spent with lucky Friday the 13ths... however you pluralize that.
Today, i totally forgot about the essay that was to be handed in today...

Well, screw me over and fuck me. I guess I had this coming.

ARGH ARGH ARGH.
*facepalm*