{"id":280489,"date":"2018-10-18T01:50:05","date_gmt":"2018-10-18T01:50:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2018\/10\/18\/ao3-through-the-years-6\/"},"modified":"2018-10-18T01:50:05","modified_gmt":"2018-10-18T01:50:05","slug":"ao3-through-the-years-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2018\/10\/18\/ao3-through-the-years-6\/","title":{"rendered":"AO3 through the years"},"content":{"rendered":"

naryrising<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

One odd complaint I\u2019ve seen is that\u00a0\u201cAO3 hasn\u2019t changed\u201d.\u00a0 First, if something is well designed and working, it shouldn\u2019t need to change constantly (does anyone actually like it when Tumblr makes random changes to things? no.)<\/p>\n

Second, even at a cosmetic level, it\u2019s just\u2026 not true? Not unless you haven\u2019t been around very long.<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/figure>\n

AO3 in 2008 – the first decent cap from the Wayback Machine.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/figure>\n

AO3 in 2009.\u00a0 Still in closed beta.\u00a0 About 5500 works.<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/figure>\n

AO3 opens for general signups! 2010.\u00a0 Also, our logo makes its appearance :3<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/figure>\n

2011 – the tabs appear at the top of the page.\u00a0 Things looking generally more tidy and less squished.<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/figure>\n

2012 – a more chipper intro page.\u00a0 Things shifted around a bit as well.<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/figure>\n

2013 – looking a little more classy now.\u00a0 Tweets available on the main page.<\/p>\n

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2014 – some more subtle changes, including adding the number of works and fandoms in a prominent place.\u00a0 1.2 million works at that point\u2026<\/p>\n

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2015 – look how much it\u2019s changed! The categories move to the front page for ease of access.\u00a0 Recent news updates also on display.\u00a0 Nearing 2 million works\u2026<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/figure>\n

2016 – I admit I picked this one because of the news update about buying a new server\u00a0\u201cafter holding together mail with sticks and strings\u201d.\u00a0 Nearing 2.7 million works.<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/figure>\n

2017 – cosmetically few changes but look at the works number – 3.3 million works.\u00a0 This was just about a year ago (October 2017) and the current number today is about 4.2 million.\u00a0 You can also see from the news post that this was when we were in the middle of upgrading to HTTPS, which was a difficult but important process.<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/figure>\n

And here we are at more or less the present – 2018 (September to be precise).\u00a0 I agree fully that if you joined the site in the last 3 years, you might not have seen a lot of cosmetic\/interface changes, but that\u2019s because people – volunteers – spent the previous 5-6 years hashing those out to get them into their present state.<\/p>\n

More importantly, you might not have noticed the under the hood changes that necessarily come with going up by roughly a million works a year.\u00a0 You might not have noticed the updates to site security that came with HTTPS, and maybe you didn\u2019t even notice the huge changes to searching and filtering over the past few months.\u00a0 I get that it\u2019s easy to say\u00a0\u201cnothing has changed\u201d.\u00a0 That\u2019s because there\u2019s a team of volunteers who are working hard to make sure pages keep loading quickly, downloads keep working as expected, searches find you what you\u2019re looking for, and downtime is kept to a minimum.\u00a0 Without them, I guarantee you would notice a lot more changes at this rate of growth, and not for the better.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

naryrising: One odd complaint I\u2019ve seen is that\u00a0\u201cAO3 hasn\u2019t changed\u201d.\u00a0 First, if something is well designed and working, it shouldn\u2019t need to change constantly (does anyone actually like it when Tumblr makes random changes to things? no.) Second, even at a cosmetic level, it\u2019s just\u2026 not true? Not unless you haven\u2019t been around very long. … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “AO3 through the years”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[1070,4],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280489"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280489\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}