Timeline of the Archive of Our Own

Below is a timeline of events related to the origin and development of the fanwork-hosting site Archive of Our Own (AO3), including policy and software changes, plus other events impacting the platform as a whole. 
For timelines on individual fandoms with fanworks hosted on AO3, see :Category:Fandom Timelines. For a timeline of the AO3's parent organization, see Timeline of the Organization for Transformative Works.
==2007==
*May 17: Astolat proposes a new fic archive in a LiveJournal post, An Archive Of One's Own 
*May 20: The LiveJournal community fanarchive is created to coordinate discussion and planning for the creation of the archive.
*May 30: The archiveofourown.org domain name is registered by Rebecca Tushnet.whois look up 20 October 2008
*November 1: Call for Ruby on Rails tutorial writers.
==2008==
* January 8: Call for Ruby on Rails Coders.Volunteer Search: Volunteer Ruby Coder, accessed 20 October 2008
* October 3: Archive opened for closed beta, in which members of the public are welcome to view and comment, but account creation is limited to Organization for Transformative Works staff and testers.
==2009==
* November 14: Archive enters open beta. Users are able to get accounts either via a first-come, first-served invitation queue, or via invitation codes distributed to those who helped with closed beta testing. The speed of new account creation depends on the servers' ability to handle increased load.
*December 17: The archive's new collection and challenge functionality goes live, with Yuletide as the first test case, created the same day., accessed 28 April 2024., accessed 28 April 2024. Yuletide 2009 opens on the AO3, and all Yuletide participants are given an invitation. 
*December 24: The AO3 has 4648 fandoms, 33,810 works and 4127 users.
==2010==
*March: Metatags are added. Tags can now have parent/child relationships with other tags, with metatag pages displaying all works tagged with that tag or any of its subtags.
*April: Matching code is added to the collections feature, allowing exchange mods to automate matching challenge participants with each other.
*June 2: The first Archive Roadmap is posted. Requirements for version 1.0 are enumerated, and 1.0 is predicted to be ready by August 2011. 
*September: AO3 Skins are added.
*November 13: An AO3 News post acknowledges that Yuletide 2010 is putting a serious strain on the archive.
*November 14: A user creates the first permanent anonymous collection not associated with a challenge. 
*December: Kudos feature is added.
==2011==
* February: New servers added. OTW Server Naming Contest ends badly.
*March: Subscriptions to authors added.
* September: Database performance issues recur, with administrators blaming them on greatly increased use. As of 5 October 2011, the archive has 7385 fandoms, 228,489 works and 22,974 users.
*November: The code for site skins is updated. Much wank ensues, covering such topics as bugs in the new code, accessibility issues, project (mis)management, overworking of volunteers, the OTW throwing said volunteer under the bus.
*December 31: The archive has approximately 8100 fandoms, 275,000 works and 31,000 users.
==2012==
*February 26: OTW committee Open Doors announces that it will begin migrating at-risk fanfic archives using its new mass archive importer. The first archive to be imported is Smallville Slash Archive.
* June: Database performance issues recur when the site reaches 1.4 million unique visitors a month, coinciding with Fanfiction.net's 2012 M-rated Purge. The archive begins to cache works and stats pages as an immediate measure to decrease server load. The tag filter sidebar is also temporarily suspended for the same reason.
*July 15: The archive has 56,203 registered users. As of October 2012, there were 459,655 works and approximately 23,000 fandoms.
*September 3: Version 0.9.0 of the AO3's code is released.
*November: The filter sidebar is reinstated with improvements.
==2013==
*February 15: The OTW Board announces their decision to allow meta essays on the archive., AO3 News, 2013-02-15. A followup post is made detailing the history of this TOS change., AO3 News, 2013-02-25. In a March followup post, the term "fandom nonfiction" is used to describe the new category of content to be allowed., AO3 News, 2013-03-13.
*March 27: The second Archive Roadmap is posted. Requirements for Version 1.0 are enumerated, but no release date is mentioned.
*April: Users can turn off anonymous comments on their works.
*July?: The terms of service and FAQ are updated., AO3 News, 2013-06-28.
*July 16: The archive has 763,326 works in 12,448 "canonical" fandoms, and over 183,000 registered users.
*November: Some tag wrangling activities, including canonizing of new No Fandom Freeforms, are temporarily suspended due to server load issues. The canonization moratorium on no fandom freeforms lasts, with limited exceptions, until 2024.
==2014==
*February 15: The one millionth work is posted.
*May: The terms of service is updated with minor wording changes and a new DMCA policy similar to that of Wikipedia's., AO3 News, 2014-04-21.
==2015==
* November: Comment moderation is added.
* December: Users can reject a gift.
* December 20: The archive reaches two million fanworks., posted to AO3_News 20 December 2015.
==2016==
*February: Minor updates are made to the terms of service and TOS FAQ related to privacy, collections, orphaned works, and who to contact for TOS questions., AO3 News, 2016-01-26."The AO3 Terms of Service changes are live, with the out-dated section about users not being able to delete works in challenges removed" (Accessed 16 November 2024.)
*June: The terms of service is updated to disallow anonymous abuse reports. All abuse reports submitted must now include an email., AO3 News, 2016-05-16. 
*October: Challenge matching code is updated to work more efficiently. Yuletide matching completes in 7 minutes. There is much rejoicing.
*October: OTW's membership drive triggers multiple discussions about AO3's content rules, sexually explicit content, harassment, censorship, and racism. Some discussions are motivated by anti-shipping, while others are concerned about racism in fandom.
* October 31: AO3 has 1 million registered users, 2,615,000 works spread across 22,970 fandoms.
==2017==
* April 28: The archive reaches three million fanworks.
==2018==
*May: The terms of service is updated to comply with the European Union's GDPR. Minimum allowed age for site users is generally 13, but is raised for some EU citizens., AO3 News, 2018-05-09., AO3 News, 2018-05-24.
*June: A new Exclude function is added to the Search & Filter sidebar, along with other metadata AO3 users can use to filter their results: Crossovers, Date Updated, Word Count, and the ability to filter for works in progress., AO3 News, 2018-06-06.
*July 20: The archive reaches four million fanworks.
*November: News spreads on the Chinese internet that a danmei writer, Tianyi, was sentenced to ten years in prison, resulting in many Chinese fanwriters migrating to AO3.
==2019==
*July: The archive reaches five million fanworks. Newsletter 137 
*August 18: The archive wins a Hugo Award for "Best Related Work".
*September: Users can no longer be added as a co-creator on a work automatically and must approve each invitation. The AO3 News announcement notes that "adding co-creators who did not wish to be associated with a work was becoming an increasingly common abuse and spam tactic".
*November: To reduce the number of works incorrectly labeled as English, the language dropdown on the work posting form is updated to no longer default to English; users must select a language before posting., AO3 News, 2019-11-19. (A 2024 AO3 TOS update explainer mentions that the thousands of new Chinese language works were reported to the Policy & Abuse Committee for having an incorrect language tag. by AO3_Policy_and_Abuse, 2024-08-18. (Accessed 4 November 2024.))
==2020==
*February 15: Criticisms and warnings about several third-party apps for AO3 go viral. See AO3 App Wars.
*February 29: AO3 is blocked in China.
*March 31: The archive implements temporary measures related to page caching to handle major increases in site traffic caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
*June: A new discussion about OTW, AO3, and racism starts in response to an OTW newsletter item and the George Floyd protests. 
*June 12: The OTW responds with a statement committing to, among other things, several code improvements to the AO3 to help users avoid harassment and content they don't want to see.
*August: Option to turn off comments on fanworks is added.
*December: The archive reaches seven million fanworks., AO3 News, 2020-12-31.
==2021==
*February: Comment freezing is added.
*August 24: The archive announces new tag limits, restricting the number of tags that can be added to one work.
==2022==
*February: Users can opt out of receiving gifts.
*June 10: Comment blocking feature goes live. Users can now prevent specific users from comment on their works.
*October: The archive reaches ten million fanworks., AO3 News, 2022-10-15.
*December 1: Word spreads that generative AI tools are scraping AO3 works for use in their models. Fans start archive-locking their works en masse. Coders update AO3 to block the scraping tools.
*December 5: Following the passage of an amendment to Russia's LGBT propaganda law, Russian users of Ficbook, the most popular Russian-language fanfic site, become aware of a change in Ficbook's terms of service. Many fans start moving their fic to AO3.
==2023==
*February 8: Muting feature goes live. Users can now hide works by other users they don't want to see.
*April 14/15: Around midnight local time, AO3 is blocked in Russia.
*May 6: An OTW newsletter includes an item indicating that the chair of the Legal Committee approves of AI-generated fanfic, causing outrage among fans who want AO3 to ban AI content.
*May 17-31: End OTW Racism campaign runs on several platforms, including on AO3, where users are encouraged add the phrase "End Racism in the OTW" to the title of both new and old fics.
*May 20: In response to the End OTW Racism campaign, chestnut_pod posts Be more democratic, be more autocratic, OTW, which leads to extensive discussions in the comments section and elsewhere on the Internet about problems with OTW management. Some problems specific to AO3 are also discussed, including the terms of service being out of date and the abuse team's inability to address harassment and other user reports.
*July 10: AO3 goes offline due to a DDOS attack, allegedly perpetrated by a Russian hacking group who had previously targeted other websites.
==2024==
* March: The ten-year moratorium on making new canonical tags for No Fandom Freeforms is partially(?) lifted to test a new wrangling procedure.
* April 21: Guest comments are temporarily turned off due to an influx of spam comments, some of which include porn images. Bots also post comments accusing fanwriters of using generative AI to write their fic. 
* September: AO3 Fandom Metatag Removal Controversy
*November 19: The terms of service and TOS FAQ are updated. Content policy does not change, but the TOS is rewritten for clarity and to allow the abuse team to address harassment more easily. The Underage archive warning is also renamed to "Underage Sex" to avoid confusion., AO3 News, 2024-11-04. (Accessed 19 November 2024.), tweet by AO3_Status, 19 November 2024. Unlike previous TOS updates, where changes were noted in the AO3 News post or in a linked temporary file, the explanations for the changes are posted as a work series on AO3 itself. by AO3_Policy_and_Abuse, August/September 2024. (Accessed 19 November 2024.)
*November: The archive reaches fourteen million fanworks., AO3 News, 2024-11-24.
==References==
Category:Archive of Our Own
Archive of Our Own