AO3 started with astolat’s post An Archive of One’s Own on Livejournal. Details at Fanlore here.
(And no, it wasn’t originally supposed to be the actual archive’s name. It’s just that no one liked any of the other proposed names. There was a poll and everything.)
Cesperanza and various other friends (or more like acquaintances in my case) of astolat are all over the comments and were involved in the initial building. It was a who’s-who of LJ era big Western slash fandoms, so if you’re into stuff like SGA, you’ll see many familiar names.
The comments are still up if you want to go see what fandom was thinking in 2007 about this pie-in-the-sky proposal that was definitely never going to work.
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. ^^
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.)
Back around the time you were born, the Internet was a toddler too, and very little illustrates this like a game called Elf Bowling. This game from NStorm hit the web in 1998. Like many of the whack-a-mole games of that time, it was very simple and involved physical abuse.
In this case, Santa was bored and decided to go bowling, using his elves as pins while a reindeer watched.
The elves scream in high-pitched synchronized fear every time Santa bowls, and their crushed bodies are swept away into darkness by a giant squeegee.
Also, the game is really boring, like all bowling games.
Because the internet was still in diapers, of course it went completely viral in 1999.
And it kind of destroyed the Internet.
See, back in those days, most email users were using a program like Outlook Express to download messages to their computer.
This was before webmail was a thing. A majority of users at this time were still on dial-up (some were lucky enough to get a steady 56k connection, but many would be stuck at 33.6, or even worse, 18.8) and email systems were built to quickly move tiny text messages back and forth. A huge essay-like email to your mom explaining why you need more money? That’s a kilobyte or two in plain text and an email system blasts that out with no issues.
Elf Bowling is 1.1mb.
With a strong 56k connection, 1.1mb takes at least two and half minutes to download.
Outlook Express 5, which came with Windows 98, had a default server timeout of 60 seconds.
In 1999, everybody emailed it to everyone they know.
I was working as an internet tech support rep at the time, and here’s what happened:
Elf Bowling would appear in your inbox on the server.
You would attempt to download new messages.
Everything before Elf Bowling would download fine.
The server would time out trying to download the Elf Bowling file.
The email would not be deleted from the server or marked as downloaded.
Later on you’d try to get new messages and it would start to download Elf Bowling again, preventing new emails from getting through.
Eventually, it might download, or when you called tech support they had you increase the timeout, but then you’d play the stupid game and try to send it to every person you’ve ever met with an email address.
For the entire holiday season that year, email servers were under assault by this stupid game.
And that was only one half of the story. The file that was being sent around was elfbowling.exe.
People were downloading and running an unknown executable file.
Eventually, a chain email started going around, warning that elf bowling was a virus and it was going to delete all the information on your computer on Dec 25th at midnight, but this was determined to be a hoax.
There are two points here:
First off, fuck you, Elf Bowling
Secondly, kaanekii, marvel at where we have come in just your lifetime. I can watch Doctor Who streaming in HD on my phone, and just 16 years ago, one megabyte of Santa being a jackass almost destroyed the Internet’s email infrastructure.
there was a chat function, which unlike the flie transfer function (derived from FTP) was derived from IRC
in social terms, who the fuck cares about the underlying code
there was a main channel for each given server and possible side channels, and private messaging and you were expected to have a bot, and a bot user, if you had a server
there were also file directories this was the FTP part it was all about file transfer and this was the era where user-end and server connections where 14.4 to 28.8 to 56k to T1 and T3 (mythical)
cable became a thing it was understood between 56k and T1
people would host servers on T1+ from businesses and colleges on the understanding that this was an unapproved but worthy thing, especially after business hours (5pm local on, this was back when there were “local hours” because the internet hadn’t yet made everything everything)
you would download user-end software mostly games and photo/video/music processing software and also pornography
It was an intermediate step between FTP servers (which were themselves kinda continuous with direct-dialup BBSes) and p2p p2penis
It was an intermediate step between FTP servers (and Archie and… Gopher? I hear Gopher was a thing, that existed) and p2p p2penis
It was initially for Mac which was a distinction becauses in the late 1990s mac and apple shit was always about to die because Gil Amelio was not a Great Man
It was followed by Carracho but that turned out not to matter
On Hotline you would first sign into a tracker. The program came preloaded with 4? trackers but they kinda sucked?
The tracker would populate a list of possible servers that you could see in a list this was novel`
When you finally found a good tracker (outlaw) ~outlaw~ outlaw you would find some servers you might actually want to sign into
(you would hear about better trackers on better servers)
You could sign in in particular, username/password or as a guest without
There was a provision to serve you a particular text screen when you signed in this was novel and in continuity with FTP and BBS and in continuity
a lot of times it would tell you the rules to sign in as the ~real~ guest to sign in as
a lot of times this was “go to this webpage, click on this banner ad, use the Xth word of the Nth paragraph as user, something like that for pass”
this was Web 1.0 when a single banner ad click promised to pay out as much as one US dollar, especially if it was for a porn subscription site which had a decent paythrough rate because they were part of an industry that was used to clients (older than me) that were used to paying money for looking at naked women
also often the textscreen would say that by clicking “agree” you admitted that you were not a government police agent and renounced all powers according
I do not believe the government police powers accepted this as binding
