Support the OTW - Oct Membership Drive

[samvara]

The AO3's parent org, the Organization for Transformative Works, is running its biannual membership drive!

Once again we've reached that point in the year where we ask for your help! We appreciate the ways in which you help us day after day, year after year, since the Organization for Transformative Works would be nothing without its volunteers, staff, and members. Our projects exist because you've dreamed them, asked for them, and built them. And now we're hoping you can help us build the OTW's membership.

The Archive of Our Own is 3 years and 8 days old today if you count from launching the Closed Beta site (3rd Oct 2008). We had 93 users which was probably every OTW volunteer in existence and the ability to create accounts and post works... just.

Wow.

It took us another year and a bit to nudge the Archive into good enough shape to go to Open Beta (15th Nov 2009) and then of course Yuletide happened, anon kinkmemes happened (build more features!), LJ DDOS attacks happened (massive influx of people), Delicious got sunsetted sold (and again!) and I'm sure something newly interesting is just around the corner.

We bought servers back in 2009 - they arrived around the 10th Nov 2009 and we gloated over them a lot and I recall during the initial planning the OTW Finance Committee said that was our hardware budget for the next 3 years.

*grins*

The fannish support for the AO3 was amazing and we outgrew them in just over a year - the second round of hardware arrived around the 23rd Jan 2011 (1 year, 2 months later) and while we constantly work to improve the performance of our code we also need those machines to continue to do what we do.

Since I get ridiculously excited in the presence of graphs here's one showing how much code we've written so far - it goes up and down because if we find a tidier / faster / more elegant way of doing something we squee and replace our old code - and we do that all the time \o/

I am in the fortunate position of being able to donate money, and if you are as well it would be very welcome; you'll be supporting a fantastic project. Make sure we can continue to own our own servers! Donate to the OTW now!