Accessibility, Design and Technology Meeting - 7 August 2011

[zooey-glass04.livejournal.com]

AD&T had a quiet meeting, as quite a few of our members were off on holiday (yeay!) or dealing with various other commitments. This meant that we made it through our agenda in record time, i.e. within the two hours actually scheduled for the meeting. (This is probably only exciting to us, but take our word for it it's a red letter day.)

Meeting highlights!

Site expansion - hello to our new members!

We've seen another increase in new members recently - welcome to all our new members! We know that the recent DDoS attacks on Livejournal have made many fans eager to back up their fanworks with us (as well as bringing lots and lots of readers!), and we're very glad that we're able to provide fans of all varieties a home! We like to think that groovy site features such as downloads and reading history have also played their part in increasing our popularity - our coding team is constantly working on site improvements.

Performance improvements

One of the key areas our coding team is focusing on at the moment is site performance. As the site expands and we welcome more and more users, optimum code performance becomes ever more important. You may have noticed some site slowdowns and occasional 502 errors recently; in addition to tweaking our server setup as particular issues arose, our coders have been working on longer-term improvements. The forthcoming deploy will include a number of things designed to improve site performance and reduce the number of 502s you encounter.

Shoutout to vidders!

As we enjoy the vids which premiered at Vividcon, this seems like a great time to give AO3 vidders a shoutout! At the moment, we can't host vids (although we will introduce this option in the longer term), but you can embed vids hosted on other sites. Currently, video embeds are supported from Youtube, Vimeo, blip.tv, Dailymotion, Viddler, Metacafe, 4shared CreativeCommons, ning and vidders.net. If you use a site which is not currently supported, then drop our support team a line and let us know you'd like it added. You should also feel free to include download links in your vid posts. We're working on a new interface which will allow you to say what medium your fanwork is in, but right now you can just add a tag in the 'Additional tags' field to let people know your work is a vid (or fanart, or a filk, or whatever else you'd like to post!).

Vividcon vidders, you may wish to add this year's vids to the Vividcon 2011 collection, or archive your older vids in Vividcon 2010 and Vividcon 2009.

Farewell to Eylul and Ira

We bid a sad farewell to two committee members, Eylul and Ira, who are stepping down to devote more time to other things. We're really grateful for all the hard work and energy they've devoted to the project.

Next deploy

The next deploy is scheduled for the end of August. It will include a bunch of performance enhancements, improvements to our prompt meme feature, many JavaScript enhancements, and a fix for the very annoying issue causing downloads to fail on the first try!

News from our sub-committees

• Coders launched Code Issue Bingo! Courtesy of coder Rebecca, coders can generate a custom bingo card linking to our Google code issues - the cards help us blitz some older issues, and also bring a strange sense of personal satisfaction. :D
• Testers waved goodbye to former test lead Eylul - we're really grateful to her for all her work. They're gearing up to test our forthcoming deploy.

News from our sister committees

• Support recently welcomed a couple of new members: mumble and Sam Johnsson have both dived in and are proving a great addition to the team. Support requests remain high, but the extra staff are making a big difference!
• Tag wranglers have been reviewing the wrangling rosters to confirm how many wranglers are still active, and gathering wrangler feedback on the new tag autocomplete so coders can improve it. They also have plans for a wrangling open house - more news coming soon!

If there are things you'd like to do or say, please share them in comments, via the AO3 support and feedback form, by volunteering, or in whatever medium you feel comfortable with. Everyone is welcome to this party!

This meeting round-up by Zooey.

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