Archive of Our Own and AD&T

[samvara]

Second Accessibility, Design, and Technology (AD&T) meeting attended by me, hopefully I will do better now that various life pressures are easing.

These are not official communications, this is me keeping a diary and being open about what we do. People are welcome to ignore the fandom:archive and otw tag if it's not interesting to you, or to come chat about stuff if it is :)

• Celebrating the Smallville Slash Archive import, next up Yuletide!
• March Deploy on schedule!
• Emails and User Stats - we've a draft post about it so we can showcase the basic design (which should be up soonish) and a plan to have it in the April deploy - right now we're looking at batching Kudos daily and Subscriptions hourly.
• Navigation menu: We're looking at making this two levels deep now that there are so many places to go. Given this is a big change we'll be looking to do some usability testing / feedback requests plus multi-browser and multi-device testing. Once I've a sense of when we're likely to be ready I'll be looking to coordinate this so that we have an idea of how to tweak it before we release it to the AO3 proper.
• Browser Support: The conversation about testing triggered a discussion about which browsers to test for - although it's more about browser / device combinations and which browsers we continue to support - it should not be surprising to hear the coders beg to leave IE6 behind ;p In practical terms we're updating our list of browsers/combinations plus who has what and can be finangled into doing some testing in a pinch.
If you're curious, we originally based our browser plans around what the people visiting Yuletide were using plus we looked at various sites for information about 'browser penetration' (which is a terrible , terrible term). We were trying to strike a balance between supporting the most critical browsers and supporting as few as possible for our own well being.


Yuletide 2009AO3 January 2012

 

• Filtering / searching improvements are being referred to as 'Mordor' in the official minutes which is good for a giggle but also reflects how challenging this piece of work is..

There were other topics but those were the ones that stood out for me. I've been noodling around with a simple infographic to help explain the new User Stats page, playing with the github wiki and having quiet conversations with people about what we'd like to achieve plus I'm learning and trying to get back up to speed with AD&T.

Comments

[unjapanologist]

Wow, I'm surprised at the small share for IE in 2012.

Question: I often access the archive from Dolphin Browser on Android, which is presumably a verrry minor browser for you guys. Is there any point in me letting support know about Dolphin-related problems? I sent in a couple layout-related issues last year, but since they didn't get fixed, I assume Dolphin is too minor to support. Which is totally understandable, of course, but I'm wondering if it would be useful for AD&T to still have a list of reported issues on Dolphin on hand? If that's not really useful for you, I won't waste anyone's time writing up and sending in more Dolphin-related stuff. *efficiency first*

[samvara]

I think it reflects the kind of people who use the AO3 - not IE users! I know we have a certain number of IE6 users who are trapped because their workplace won't upgrade which is why we try to keep it at least usable if not pretty in IE6.

RE: Dolphin I do not know but I will ask and get back to you :)

[sarken]

Dolphin I do not know but I will ask and get back to you

Hi! I saw your link and thought I'd just leave my answer here.

Basically, the Dolphin issues didn't get fixed because we don't have a way to code and test them. I only have access to an iPhone, and there's no one else actively working on CSS right now. So, while it doesn't hurt to report the issues -- someone who does have an Android phone might join the team! -- we won't be able to do anything about them in the immediate future.

[samvara]

Thank you :)

[unjapanologist]

Ahh, thank you! I'll report, then, in case someone with an Android phone comes along ;)

[samvara]

Heh, so the situation is not that we don't care, and more that we don't have someone right now who can work on Dolphin issues - in which case report away! Because if we do find someone - we should have things for them to do :)

[unjapanologist]

Yeah, I thought it might be something like that. Will report, thank you for checking!

[samjohnsson]

From a Support point of view, I'm going to third Sarken and Samvara - please do report it! If for no other reason than so we know how it's being weird, because if it's being weird on Android, now that Dolphin's being ported to iThings, we might have more issues. I would ask when you submit the ticket, you either submit from your phone or navigate to http://useragentstring.com and copy the full user agent string into your email, so we know exactly where we should be looking (if Dolphin runs on a standard platform, be it moz, webkit, or presto, it might be an error that surfaces elsewhere).

Sam J.
AO3 Support

[unjapanologist]

Oh, I'll do that. Thanks!