I—-I followed them back in the day on LJ. Wow.

Everybody did. I guarantee if you were active on LJ and into m/m for live action Western fandoms, you followed at least somebody in those comments too.

It was a smaller world than now (or than all of fandom everywhere), and AO3 really was a community project.

I remember when I had to wait patiently for an AO3 invite from a friend of a friend…and that friend of a friend was a fic author who followed those named above.

I’m so proud to be an AO3 member since 2010.

The account number thing on everyone’s profile page is presumably for the future block feature, but it also gives you obnoxious bragging rights:

I waited a year - mostly watching to see how it was going first. ^^

{rummages through stats}

Oh good lord. I didn’t need to see that.

😅

Ahaha. I forgot about that feature.

oh wow

#ao3#haha three–rings is right#you can tell EXACTLY when ao3 opened to non beta testers#the floodgates opened in november 2009

Hah. Truth.

astolat is 8. elz is 10. I assume 1-7 are deleted test accounts. The really low numbers are the primary coders, unsurprisingly. The rest of the 2-digit numbers are committee members of the first round of committees (writing the ToS and so on). Then come whatever testers joined during closed beta.

Closed beta started on October 3, 2008. That’s when a bunch of staff’s imported old fic was visible to the public and people could start commenting and hammering on the archive.

Open beta, when anyone could request an invite, started on November 14, 2009.

#16 reporting in. :D  Also, btw, the Archive of Our Own phrase comes right out of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” I take blame/responsibility/credit for this, though overall I still think it was the best name on the table and I like the history baked into it (arguably A Room of One’s Own kicked off the discipline of Women’s and Gender Studies and led to a search for women writers to include in the canon.) What I remember more though was people being like, “The Organization for Transformative Works is a terrible name for an archive!!” which–(one of my jobs was to explain this over and over and over)–yes, yes, it is, it’s NOT the name of the archive, it’s the name of the nonprofit company we have to set up to run the archive if we’re serious about this” (spoiler: we were serious about this) “and also it’s the name of the legal defense - transformativity - that the whole project is based on!” And the truth is, seriously, every time I see someone–someone I don’t know, in a fannish community I’m not in, or randomly on YouTube or wherever–announce “this is a transformative work” I sit back with a happy little warm feeling  (and I also bow a couple of times in the direction of the OTW Legal’s team without whom etc.)

2759 here. One particular flood of new members in Dec. 2009 was Yuletide participants - that year we did signups and matching through the old Yuletide site, but we had to post our gifts on the new site (AO3). I became a tag wrangler about two weeks later and I’m still working.

It’s so interesting to track the various little explosions of users.

I was a late joiner, 3 months after I got an account I was a member of the systems committe.

I joined on:      2010-09-13     

My user ID is:      9262

\o/

Are there posts showing how the number of accounts and/or users has grown over time? I recall a couple of news posts, but I don’t remember if they show the whole history. It would be interesting to see how 2012 affected things.

This is crazy to see I joined in 2012 and oh my gods it was like winning the lottery I stg felt so amazing.

I joined on: 2012-06-30

My user ID is: 55564

50K in three years and it’s insane to me to think that there’s another 10+ years of this. I always smile when I see the user / fandom counts pass a milestone but it’s crazy to see how fast this place has grown.

Anywho - donate if you can, it’s definitely something that helps keep the growth going!

So you’re telling me the website grew by 10,000 users within two months?

That is exactly what I’m telling you.

When I talk about AO3/OTW being hit with “curveballs” (and this is why some coding things didn’t happen or didn’t happen fast), this is the kind of thing I’m talking about.

AO3 was a shaky baby colt taking its first steps. Nobody was even interested in the invitations I had. A little growth was happening, but not much.

And then FFN decided to go be a gigantic choad and delete all the porn again.

SIGNUP-POCALYPSE!

Jan 14, 2012 - 632 people on the waitlist

May 3, 2012 - 5,834

May 14, 2012 - 18,707

Jul 10, 2012 - 28,415

–

It stayed around 30k for months, finally dropping to like 20k in December.

And from what I remember, this whole time, AO3 was increasing the invites-per day to try to accommodate new users!

–

Feb 8, 2013 - 26

–

By the end of 2013, they’d added the ‘per day’ count to the page.

–

Dec 23, 2013 -  528 people waiting, 750 per day

I don’t recall when the next massive wait times were, but around 2013-2014, things were back to the norm where you requested an invite and got it in a day or two.

2012 was fucking bonkers.

2012 was really hard work, with traffic doubling over 12 months.

AO3: Too God Damn Popular For Its Own Good

(And this, kids, is why we hope our projects get popular… but at a steady and moderate rate.)