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I. UPDATES TO AO3 COLLECTIONS
In late September, Accessibility, Design & Technology updated AO3's collections feature by introducing collections tags—allowing more granular filtering and browsing between collections. This update also generally improved collection performance, introduced the ability to mark collections as "Multifandom", and added Subcollections to the Collections filtering page.
For more details on recent AO3 releases and code changes, check out the most recent release notes.
II. ARCHIVE OF OUR OWN
Besides updates to Collections, AO3 committees also continued work in a variety of areas.
Open Doors finished importing My Mongoose, a The Sentinel ezine archive, and announced two new import projects: Faerie: Tolkien Fanfiction and Forging Ghost, a Spike/Angel archive.
Tag Wrangling continued their work on creating new "No Fandom" canonical tags and announced another batch of tags in mid-September. On the @ao3org Tumblr, Tag Wrangling also announced changes to Critical Role fandom tags in light of the upcoming Campaign 4. They hope these changes will help users in finding and filtering for the works they want to see.
In August, Policy & Abuse received 3,863 tickets, while Support received 4,319 tickets—the current record for the most tickets either committee has received in one month. Tag Wrangling wrangled over 579,000 tags, or over 1,200 tags per wrangling volunteer.
From mid-July to mid-September, User Response Translation helped Support and Policy & Abuse with 38 translation requests.
III. ELSEWHERE AT THE OTW
Fanlore's Stub September editing challenge was a big success! Thank you to everyone who took part. For October, Fanlore is currently running a book-themed month. Check out the Help page for how to take part and claim a book-themed badge!
TWC's Transformative Works and Cultures has released issue No. 46, a general issue! It includes the launch of a new special section, New Currents. This section collects articles on new topics or approaches at a smaller scale than a special issue. In this issue, New Currents focuses on how fans and fan studies scholars engage with AI as a tool for transformative engagement with fannish texts.
In September, Legal responded to a number of user queries; they also joined allies in filing an amicus brief in the United States Supreme Court in the case of Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment. The case deals with when internet service providers can be held responsible for the actions of their users.
Legal's brief discussed the importance of internet access as a practical necessity of daily life and argued that holding service providers liable for users’ copyright infringement based only on accusations of infringement, rather than actual proof of infringement, would threaten innovation and creativity by creating an incentive for service providers to deny service to creators without requiring evidence or providing due process. There is no date set yet for when the case will be argued before the Supreme Court.
IV. GOVERNANCE
Elections closed out the 2025 election—congratulations to the OTW's new Board Directors: Elizabeth Wiltshire and Harlan Lieberman-Berg!
In preparation for October's membership drive, Development & Membership has been organizing new donation gifts, Finance has been compiling the pre-drive 2025 budget update, and Communications and Translation have prepared the associated news posts.
Board coordinated with Communication's Con Outreach division to attend EagleCon in Los Angeles, USA, and received the Lemonade award on the OTW's behalf. Elsewhere, the Board Assistants Team (BAT) continued work on OTW website updates, prepared for the quarterly Board meeting, and completed a report on non-profit training.
Organizational Culture Roadmap, in conjunction with BAT, Board, and Volunteers & Recruiting, continued work on the cross-committee review of the OTW's Code of Conduct. A survey was sent out to all volunteers soliciting their feedback for potential Code of Conduct updates.
V. OUR VOLUNTEERS
This month, Volunteers & Recruiting conducted recruitment for 3 committees: Fanlore, TWC, and Tag Wrangling.
From August 21 to September 24, Volunteers & Recruiting received 171 new requests and completed 174, leaving them with 46 open requests. As of September 24, 2025, the OTW has 991 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below.
New BAT Volunteers: Cait B, Deimos Crow, MelMel, MustardPot, and Sullie Tosho (BAT Volunteers)
New Communications Volunteers: 2 Chair Assistants
New Development & Membership Volunteers: Kae Coolen, Maddie64, and Mako (Graphic Designers); Danielle G., jennybug, LizLeaf, and 2 other Development & Membership Volunteers
New Open Doors Volunteers: AuroraT, Kayla G, and vinnawis (Chair Assistants); and Julie Bozza (Senior FSHP Volunteer)
New Strategic Planning Volunteers: Harlan Lieberman-Berg (Cybersecurity Delegate)
New Systems Volunteers: E.V. Moebius (Systems Volunteer)
New TWC Volunteers: 1 Review Editor
Departing Committee Chairs/Leads: 1 Board Assistants Team Chair
Departing AO3 Documentation Volunteers: 1 Editor
Departing BAT Volunteers: Harlan Lieberman-Berg (Cybersecurity Delegate)
Departing Communications News Post Moderation Volunteers: 1 News Post Moderator
Departing Fanlore Volunteers: 1 Policy & Admin Volunteer
Departing Open Doors Volunteers: Julie Bozza (Chair Assistant) and 1 Import Assistant
Departing Strategic Planning Volunteers: 1 Strategic Planning Volunteer
Departing Support Volunteers: SlantedKnitting (Support Volunteer)
Departing Tag Wrangling Volunteers: Mayrin, Yuechiang Luo, and 7 other Tag Wrangling Volunteers
Departing Translation Volunteers: 1 Translation Volunteer Manager and 3 Translators
For more information about our committees and their regular activities, you can refer to the committee pages on our website.
The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.
In September, we deployed a major upgrade to our HTML sanitizer (which interprets formatting tags) and introduced new features to collections! We also made a variety of fixes across different areas of AO3, including clarifying some confusing language and making new site elements translatable as part of our ongoing internationalization work.
Special thanks and welcome to first-time contributors brooke x, Jamis Gelvin, katieyang, Kylia Miskell, ömer faruk, Samridhi, and Yanpei Wang!
Credits
- Coders: Bilka, Brian Austin, brooke x, Jamis Gelvin, katieyang, Kylia Miskell, Jo Kingswood (Littlelines), ömer faruk, Potpotkettle, Samridhi, sarken, weeklies, Yanpei Wang
- Code reviewers: Bilka, Brian Austin, Hamham6, irrationalpie, redsummernight, sarken, ticking instant, weeklies
- Testers: Allonautilus, ana, Aster, Bilka, Brian Austin, Lute, lydia-theda, megidola, ömer faruk, Pent, Sam Johnsson, Sanity, sarken, Teyris, therealmorticia
Details
0.9.427
On September 5, we deployed some improvements to get our HTML sanitizer up to date for HTML5 and fix a number of tiny but annoying parser-related bugs.
- [AO3-5801] - We changed the sanitizer and parser to use Nokogiri's newly available native HTML5 features.
- [AO3-3282] - If your summary or notes had formatting followed by blank lines, extra blank lines would appear each time you edited those fields. Now the spacing stays the same, like it's supposed to.
- [AO3-4599] - We prevented the parser from modifying the formatting inside of <pre> tags, since that defeated the point of marking text as preformatted.
0.9.428
On September 8, we deployed a lot of changes by first-time contributors. If you're interested in contributing code to AO3, check out our GitHub Contributing Guidelines.
- [AO3-5552] - We removed some unused code as well as the tests for it.
- [AO3-7110] - We fixed an automated test for the database data we use for development, which was failing intermittently.
- [AO3-6921] - We made it so the commas used in series browser page titles are now translatable.
- [AO3-6924] - The browser page title translations for some user-related pages (e.g., the Change Password page) were in the wrong place, so we moved them to the right locale file.
- [AO3-7089] - We cleaned up some duplicate code in our automated tests.
- [AO3-5769] - We updated the phrasing of the text you see when you hover over the "Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings" icon in the work blurb.
- [AO3-6581] - We changed the title on the page that lists works you've marked for later to "Marked for Later," so you don't get it confused with the overall history page.
- [AO3-6914] - We clarified the error message site admins may see when updating language codes.
0.9.429
On September 15, we did a small release to improve the technical implementation of how certain AO3 pages are accessed.
- [AO3-5953] - Some actions, such as marking a work for later or switching back to the default site skin, could be performed by simply visiting a URL. That isn't great for a number of reasons, including security, so we've updated those actions to use more standard routing.
0.9.430
On September 26, we moved collections to Elasticsearch and added collection tags and better filtering options when browsing collections.
- [AO3-6026] - We added collections to Elasticsearch for better filtering capabilities, made it possible to tag them, and also automatically added tags to existing collections.
- [AO3-3748] - We changed the Collections page to also list subcollections, not just top-level collections.
- [AO3-7122] - We updated the default value of two database columns in the collections table to work better with Elasticsearch.
0.9.432
On September 28, we made two more changes as part of our collections upgrades as well as a few low-impact updates that were easy to get done at the same time.
Additionally, our deploy script accidentally bumped us a release ahead and skipped 0.9.431 so this ended up being released as 0.9.432 instead!
- [AO3-7141] - When we moved collections to Elasticsearch, we inadvertently started sorting items on users' Collections pages and collections' Subcollections pages by date. We've changed the sorting back to alphabetical order.
- [AO3-6133] - The service we were using to deploy code to our testing environment will be discontinued in 2026, so we switched to using GitHub Actions instead. This switch also brought us some sweet speed improvements and better integration into GitHub and Jira, so it's a win all around!
- [AO3-7117], [AO3-7118] - Our friendly dependency updater bumped the version of two GitHub actions.
- [AO3-4698] - We added a missing hyphen to the browser page title for the New Challenge Sign-up page.
- [AO3-7123] - We added the ability to filter for collections based on whether they are marked as multifandom.
We've just given the code for collection browsing and filtering a much-needed overhaul! In addition to some long overdue performance improvements, this update introduces collection tags — a new way to find collections featuring the fandoms, relationships, tropes, and other topics you enjoy.
How do collection tags work?
Collection owners can now use up to 10 tags of any type (What are the different types of tags?) to describe their collection. The tags are listed on the collection blurb, and the collection filters have a new "Filter by tag" autocomplete field to help users find collections matching their interests.
While it is possible to use brand new tags on collections, we strongly encourage owners to use existing canonical tags or their synonyms. This makes it easier for users to find your collection using the autocomplete options in the collection filters.
We've also added a "Multifandom" option specifically for collections that feature a wide variety of fandoms. Collection owners can select this option to help users find collections where the focus isn't a specific fandom, but rather a theme like fanvids of old films or fic written in first person. We think this will be particularly useful for users whose fandoms don't have their own prompt memes or gift exchanges, but who want to find challenges they might be able to participate in.
Please note that while we encourage collection owners to start using the "Multifandom" option right away, there are a few more changes we need to make before it will be possible to filter collections based on their multifandom status. We'll update this post when multifandom filtering becomes available.
What about existing collections?
Together with the collection tags feature going live, we automatically tagged existing collections with the fandoms from their works and bookmarks, as well as any works or bookmarks in their subcollections.
Additionally, collections with more than one unrelated fandom were automatically marked as multifandom. We used our tag wrangling system to determine whether fandoms are related, just like we do when marking works as crossovers. Collections with more than 10 fandoms (the limit for collection tags) were marked as multifandom but did not have any fandom tags added.
Collection owners are welcome to edit their collection and change any information we automatically added.
Other changes
As part of the browsing and filtering overhaul, there are a few other noticeable changes to collections.
- Subcollections are now listed on the main Collections page and included in the results when filtering.
- In order to make room for collection tags, we've combined the list of owners and moderators in blurbs, similar to the way they're combined on the collection profile. Because we know this distinction may be important to some users, we've made it possible to style owners and moderators separately by using the
a.owneranda.modselectors in a site skin. (Your styles will apply in the blurb and on the collection profile.) - The Open Challenges page, including the Open Gift Exchanges and Open Prompt Memes pages, now list collections that are closing the soonest at the top of the page.
Update 12:14 UTC 28 September 2025: The multifandom filtering options have now been added to the filters!
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