AO3 News

Releases 0.9.457 - 0.9.461: Change Log

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Published:
2026-04-11 19:01:15 UTC
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Our February releases included new admin tools for our Support and Policy & Abuse teams, as well as a bunch of challenge and collection fixes and a host of small updates and improvements. We also upgraded to Rails 8 and Elasticsearch 9!

Many thanks to first-time contributor Shel!

Credits

  • Coders: Bilka, Brian Austin, Danaël/Rever, FlyingFalcon, Hunter Ada Smith, james_, Jennifer He (DisappearEagle 无鸢), marcus8448, Richard Hajek, Scott, slavalamp, varram
  • Code reviewers: Bilka, Brian Austin, james_, sarken
  • Testers: ana, Bilka, choux, hvalrann, Lute, mumble, ömer faruk, pk2317, therealmorticia, Yuca

Details

0.9.457

On February 2, we deployed a major Rails update.

  • [AO3-7231] - Updated the framework the Archive runs on to Rails 8.0.

0.9.458

On February 9, we introduced a way for our Support team to add information to the support form without disabling the form, and deployed a bunch of miscellaneous fixes and improvements.

  • [AO3-6983] - It was already possible for our Support team to temporarily close the support form and replace it with a message to users, e.g. about a known site-wide issue the development team was already working to solve. Additionally, they can now add a temporary message to the form without disabling the form entirely.
  • [AO3-3245] - Trying to open the posting form to add a work to a closed collection (only possible by manually typing in the appropriate URL) would lead to an error message that looked like the form had already been submitted. The URL now redirects to the collection with a more helpful error message.
  • [AO3-7246] - We added a "Parent" link to comments, so you can quickly jump to the specific comment that is being replied to.
  • [AO3-7260] - Passwords must now be between 8 and 72 characters long. (The previous minimum was 6 characters.)
  • [AO3-7274] - Comment previews for Policy & Abuse admins were previously truncated after the first 100 characters, and admins had to click on the preview to access the full comment. Now the preview includes the first 1,000 characters, which is much more useful.
  • [AO3-7279] - When a collection is set to "revealed" or "non-anonymous", the collection is placed in a queue that runs when resources are available to change the status of potentially thousands of works. This means the moderator often has enough time to quickly change the setting back if a checkbox was ticked in error. We now make sure the process really only runs if the revealed or non-anonymous option is still wanted when the servers are ready to work through the queue.
  • [AO3-7240] - In our ongoing internationalization efforts, we prepared the text in the help pop-ups for Rating, Warning, and Fandom tags for translation.
  • [AO3-7047], [AO3-7281], [AO3-7287], [AO3-7288] - Code clean-up, database performance improvements, and system updates.

0.9.459

Our February 17 deploy included various small fixes and updates.

  • [AO3-4031] - Draft works include a message at the top, warning the creator that unposted drafts will be automatically deleted after a certain time. If you had a draft with multiple chapters, this message would not be displayed! Now it appears everywhere it should.
  • [AO3-5367] - If someone bookmarked a mystery work, i.e. a work in an unrevealed collection, the bookmark would show up in bookmark searches that matched elements of the mystery work. Since we don't want information about a mystery work to be guessable in this manner, we now make sure searching bookmarks doesn't give away information about unrevealed works.
  • [AO3-5870] - A blockquote in a comment would awkwardly overlap with the commenter's user icon, so we've taken steps to make sure it stays within its own boundaries.
  • [AO3-5963] - You can't request an invite with an email address that is already used by an existing account. If an existing account updates their email address to one that's waiting in the request queue, we now make sure that request is deleted.
  • [AO3-7206] - Downloads of a work in progress with only one chapter posted were missing that chapter's title, summary, and notes, displaying only the information entered for the work as a whole. Now all data is present and accounted for!
  • [AO3-7254] - We've added a limit to how many times a specific comment can be reported to the Policy & Abuse team for review.
  • [AO3-7263] - Under certain circumstances, an admin would get a 500 error trying to access a user's preferences page. Now they can access it even under those circumstances.
  • [AO3-7289] - When a user tried to create a skin with faulty CSS, the parser would just throw an error 500 instead of telling the user which part was stressing it out. It now helpfully points to the problem in the CSS code.
  • [AO3-7210] - The help pop-up that provides information about creating skins is now prepared for translation.
  • [AO3-6853], [AO3-7048] - Code clean-up and database performance improvements.

0.9.460

A bunch of gem updates went out on February 21.

  • [AO3-7036] - When reviewing comments held in moderation, to either approve or reject, there was no "Thread" link to get the URL for a specific comment, e.g. to report it to the Policy & Abuse team. Now there is!
  • [AO3-7278] - AO3 admins from the Open Doors team can now track invitations in the admin area.
  • [AO3-7236] - Prepared the text in a couple of skins-related help pop-ups for translation.
  • [AO3-7265], [AO3-7297], [AO3-7298], [AO3-7299], [AO3-7300] - Code clean-up and database performance improvements.

0.9.461

On February 28, we upgraded to Elasticsearch 9.

  • [AO3-7282] - Upgraded the search engine that powers, among other things, work searches and filtering from version 8 to 9.