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A field agent armed with privacy-violating technology searches for Nazi loot--stolen diamonds--on behalf of a South African diamond cartel.
Probe (Search, # 1) by Leslie Stevens & Russ Mayberry
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Posted by Caitlynne https://www.transformativeworks.org/ao3-releases-0-9-427-0-9-432-change-log/ https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=269038 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.
https://www.transformativeworks.org/ao3-releases-0-9-427-0-9-432-change-log/ https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=269038
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I dreamed I discovered a weapon in Half Life 2 that would generate and hurl at considerable speed empty shipping containers.
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Guardian: Nearly 100 years after her death, Oxford’s first female Indigenous scholar honoured
Reading the lost diary of the first indigenous woman to study at Oxford (by her descendant June Northcroft Grant, who accepted Papakura's MPhil certificate at the ceremony)
What a cool person and fascinating life; really interesting and impressive to see someone succeeding in doing academic scholarship on an Indigenous group from within that group, in that time period.
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Someone's finally cast Francesca Mills as Ophelia:
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/gallery/2025/oct/01/hamlet-national-theatre-hiran-abeysekera-shakespeare-in-pictures
Which I have been saying should happen for six years, since seeing her in Barrie Rutter's Two Noble Kinsmen as the Jailer's Daughter (a role which I described as "semi-comic shitty-first-draft Ophelia"). Also Juliet now please, casting directors.
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The complete tabletop RPG about the heroic rats of Fortitude
Bundle of Holding: The Far Roofs
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You too can support James Nicoll Reviews.
October 2025 Patreon Boost
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Akiko's plan to become Japan's foremost manga artist is manifestly reasonable, so why will reality not cooperate?
Blank Canvas: My So-Called Artist's Journey„ volume 1 by Akiko Higashimura
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I made landfall chez ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) selkie around three o'clock in the afternoon and my godchild almost instantly wanted to show me the reorganization of his bedroom and take me for a walk as he biked with his familiar in his backpack and for the first time reciprocate in our time-honored ritual of my weightlifting him which I have been doing since he was a lankily small child and it took no effort at all.
( Well, no one except you and me. )
My early birthday present from Selkie is a rare copy of Leib Spizman's Women in the Ghettos (פרויען אין די געטאס ,1946) in timeworn but otherwise astonishingly sound condition plus a Gol/Them sticker which I am using as a bookmark. I have been fed chopped liver and lime-yuzu soda and a variety of proteinaceous snacks. I even managed to doze a little on the train once my seatmate disembarked at New York and left me room to stretch my legs out in. I could have done without lightly hitting my head on a chair likely out of sheer exhaustion, but I plan to get as much sleep out of the windowless pit as I can. As a last grace note of the night, I did not expect to find my flash fiction "Teinds" (2007) listed among Maria Haskins' "A Short Fiction Treasures Special: 2 x 25 Gems from Strange Horizons' Archives." May all of it be some kind of template for the year to come.Current Music: My Morning Jacket, "Time Waited"
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21 works reviewed. 11 by women (52%), 9 by men (43%), 1 by non-binary authors (5%), 0 by authors whose gender is unknown (0%), and 8 by POC (38%).
The chart is breaking formatting. Need to fix or remove it. I do like charts, though.
September 2025 in Review
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For so very few people will I haul myself out of bed before the mourning doves have even woken up, but since some of them live in the D.C. metro area, I am once again watching the world in dawn-flashed geometries of catenaries and crossties slide past me from a rear-facing seat of the Northeast Corridor. There were some excellent mussel-streaks over the Mystic and the brick-boxed windows are gilt-glinting even now. A milk of mist is actually hovering over the green spaces. I still feel a teleporter would be healthier on my sleep schedule.Current Music: Mal Blum, "Gabriel"
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Posted by an https://www.transformativeworks.org/otw-signal-september-2025/ https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=269013 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
On September 23, SenLinYu’s Alchemised joined Rose in Chains by Julie Soto and The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy by Brigitte Knightley as the third “Dramione” fan fiction-inspired novel to be traditionally published in 2025. In their article “‘The Year of Dramione’: Fan fiction’s leap to bookstore shelves”, United Press International (UPI) spoke with OTW’s Rebecca Tushnet about the growing appeal of fanworks outside of fandom spaces. Many publishers are fans themselves, Tushnet noted, commenting on the—often fraught—relationship between fandom and traditional media publishing. She also highlighted the deeper, intrinsic worth of fanworks:
… the value in fan fiction writing extends well beyond the potential for publication, Tushnet said.
“To me, it’s never about making the jump to getting paid for it,” she said. “People develop all sorts of skills and passions and connections through fan fiction and I would never want to flatten that.”
UPI posited that it’s perhaps, in part, this passion at the heart of fandom that serves as a beacon for fans and publishers alike. Ali Hazelwood, whose “Reylo” fan fiction inspired her novel The Love Hypothesis, reflected on what binds her to fandom:
“… it’s also just great to feel a sense of community and to get to know people, to find someone who’s like-minded and interested in similar things. It’s very hard to make friends as an adult. And I feel like I truly found my adult friends through fanfiction and through the fandom community.”
Hazelwood’s experience embodies a core purpose of sites like the Archive of Our Own (AO3). “As long as there are humans, they will ask what happens next [beyond canon],” Tushnet said. “The fight we have is their ability to find each other.”
Rae Johnston, presenter of the Download This Show podcast, asks, “What does it take to keep a website alive when every other platform is chasing advertising dollars or subscription fees?” The podcast’s new episode, “How fanfiction took over the world (and stayed free)”, explores how AO3 has risen to the challenge. Johnston spoke with OTW Board Director Rachel Linton to learn more:
The vision was to have a space for fans, created by fans, to make sure that it was a noncommercial space and to make sure that it didn’t restrict content. And those were driven by concerns that were raised by FanLib and by Strikethrough, and trying to make sure that there was a space that people could post what they wanted to write without having that controlled by what corporations wanted to support or promote—and to keep ownership over that work.
… There was definitely a desire to have a very clear vision of why we think that [creating fanworks] is allowed and why this is legal, and as part of that, we’ve had a Legal Committee from the beginning who … exists to support AO3 and to support fans—and make sure that their work is protected and that they know what they are allowed to do and can’t be intimidated.
… On the technical side, [AO3’s] code base was created for the Archive … we own all of our own servers, which is great for having control over the work that we host and the work that we do. … we’re entirely volunteer-run, so any work that we’re doing in terms of coding or in terms of upgrades or anything like that is all done by volunteers. … All of our funding is through donations. … we are essentially completely run by fan volunteers, but also run by the money that fans donate.
An incredible testament to community, Johnston concludes that “Archive of Our Own has managed the near impossible: staying free, staying independent, and keeping the culture alive.”
OTW Tips
Looking for more OTW news coverage? Visit our Press Room! Here, you’ll find a catalogue of notable media mentions of the OTW and its projects—dating back to its founding in 2007. Browse articles, podcasts, and more to learn about how the OTW and its work and volunteers have been recognized across the media landscape.
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-september-2025/ https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=269013
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I forgot to bring my camera when I left the house to walk around the block this evening, but I saw a white hibiscus growing through a hedge and bees clustered around some brilliantly Halloweenish orange flowers. I have not had my head in the sand despite being under quite a lot of rocks this month, but I am still demoralized that an international friend's postcard could not reach me because of the intimidation theater of the tariffs. Nor am I thrilled that last week I had an unexpectedly bizarre interaction with a medical professional about Tylenol. I am much more cheered by the existence of ghost ponds and the renascent fern, not to mention the eleven-million-year-old asteroid no one knows yet where it hit. The Draconids peak on the eve of my birthday this year. Last week was still too many doctors, but I have hopes of fewer in the week to come. At least I managed for the first time on this new regimen to write about a film.Current Music: Mal Blum, "Truth Is Out There"
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A magical hoard for Fifth Edition roleplaying
Bundle of Holding: 5E Treasures
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2016: The Chilcot Inquiry illustrates the meticulous process by which the UK went to war in Iraq, Lord Lucan is declared dead, and the UK’s narrow vote to leave the EU is at worst the second stupidest collective decision made by a Western democracy in 2016.
Pretend I caught that the poll autofilled the wrong question and that it reads "which 2016 Clarke Award finalists did you read?"
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 52 Which of these look interesting?
View AnswersChildren of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
22 (42.3%) Arcadia by Iain Pears
2 (3.8%) Europe at Midnight by Dave Hutchinson
7 (13.5%) The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor
12 (23.1%) The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
44 (84.6%) Way Down Dark by James Smythe
0 (0.0%)
Bold for have read, italic for intend to read, underline for never heard of it.
Which 2016 Clarke Award finalists did you read??
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Arcadia by Iain Pears
Europe at Midnight by Dave Hutchinson
The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
Way Down Dark by James Smythe
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