Archive of Our Own - AD&T weekly meeting

Sunday 7:05am, which is the time it takes for my alarm to go off and my PC to boot up.

We should probably have declared this week an International Torchwood Holiday and written it off but we had a fun meeting with lots of energy.

1. Code update: the deploy went well, we’re now working on the next round of code changes and verifying all the freshly deployed stuff works on the Archive of Our Own (I find I’m using ‘AO3’ more and more as my abbreviation of choice – it makes me happy)
2. Test Archive: Systems have upgraded the version of Ruby we’re using on Test Archive and we’re hanging to deploy that to the Beta Archive – as soon as we confirm it didn’t break anything else! I’m told our dedicated Systems team are logging in up to five times a day to kill hanging processes on Beta right now
3. Co-location: We think we’re at the point of being able to settle on a co-location facility again (older and wiser now) plus we’re reviewing the hardware and working out how much we can afford to boost the boxes we want to buy (RAM + CPU Cores). We’ve tentatively set a date at the end of August for set-up + install and after that we’ll test for two weeks before getting excited. If we find out the stuff we want to order will arrive earlier we’ll accelerate this.
4. Open Beta: The co-location process gets us that much closer to Open Beta; obviously we have to have servers! We still have to write the code for features we require to launch Open Beta but we think we can get there for early October.
5. Warnings: OMG we’re paying attention right now and we think it’s very important. Our Content Policy people put a huge amount of thought into the warnings we choose to display/enforce and we’re fine-tuning the interface based on user feedback.
6. Bookmarks: A massive amount of changes are being made to Bookmarks – they are about to be a lot more information rich and hopefully prettier as well. Keep your eyes tuned for a poll on bookmark types.
7. Tag Wranglers: We need more for specific fandoms; the list will be published shortly and we’ll be looking for volunteers who care about details.
8. Testers: We need more testers! You don’t have to be technical to do this although it helps if you are patient and good at expressing yourself clearly in writing. This is a job that calls for a willingness to prod something until it breaks, then break it again, and again until you’re confident you can tell someone else exactly how to break it as well.