Good morning, afternoon, and evening!
We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)
I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.
Ta for now!
The AO3 Fanzine Scan Hosting Project (FSHP) is a partnership between the Open Doors committee and fan-run preservation project Zinedom through which fanfiction and fanart originally published in print fanzines is imported to the Archive of Our Own. Fanworks can be imported to AO3 with the consent of either the creators of the works or the publisher of the fanzine in which the fanworks were published.
Today, Open Doors is pleased to announce a list of collections that it has created since September 2024 to house fanworks imported through the FSHP. A collection has been created for each fanzine from which one or more fanworks have been imported, but these collections do not contain every work from each of these zines, and many so far only include one work each in cases where Open Doors only has permission to import that particular work. For full transparency, Open Doors plans to continue to announce collections as they are created that may or may not grow with additional fanworks as additional permissions are obtained from more creators in the future.
As of August 2025, Open Doors has created the following collections to represent fanzines from which it has imported works:
- A Gathering of Blacque
- A Little Past, A Little Future
- A Question of Trust
- Act 5
- Another K/S Zine
- Betrayed
- Bondmates
- Charisma
- Cheap Thrills
- Choices
- Cold Fish and Stale Chips
- Companion
- Contact Christmas
- Counterpoint
- Cyberdreams
- Derelicts
- Despatch
- Duet
- Dyad
- Encounters
- Enigma
- Friends Will Be Friends
- Hierarchy of Needs
- Hysterical Historicals
- Impossible Things
- Leap in the Dark
- LoneStar Trek
- Mind Meld
- Mirrors of Mind and Flesh
- More Missions, More Myths
- No Greater Love
- Nocturne
- Old, Bold Spies
- One Way or Another
- Out of Bounds
- Outrider
- Portraits
- Scales of Justice
- Tantalus
- The Black Box
- The Cosmic Collected
- The Eightfold Fence
- The Fake’s Progress
- The First Duty
- The Long and Winding Road
- The Pits
- Thrust
- TREKisM at Length
- Uncharted Waters
- Undercover
- Vault of Tomorrow
- Voyages
- Wheels of Darkness and Other Stories
- Worlds Apart
For answers to frequently asked questions, please see the FSHP page on the Open Doors website. If you’d like to give Open Doors permission to import any of your fanworks that have been previously published in print fanzines, or if you have any other FSHP-related queries, please contact the Open Doors Committee.
We’d also love it if fans could help us preserve the story of any fanzines in which they may have been published on Fanlore. If you’re new to wiki editing, no worries! Check out the new visitor portal, or ask the Fanlore Gardeners for tips.
Thanks for your interest in preserving fannish history for future generations of readers!
– The Open Doors team
Commenting on this post will be disabled in 14 days. If you have any questions, concerns, or comments regarding this import after that date, please contact Open Doors.
Are you fluent in a language other than English? Do you have graphic design skills and enjoy creating social media content? Are you interested in the rescue and preservation of fanworks? Are you fluent in a language other than English, passionate about AO3, and want to help us better reply to users all around the world? The Organization for Transformative Works is recruiting!
We’re excited to announce the opening of applications for:
- Translation Translators – closing 29 October 2025 at 23:59 UTC
- Fanlore Graphics Designer Volunteer – closing 29 October 2025 at 23:59 UTC or after 40 applications
- Open Doors Import Assistant – closing 29 October 2025 at 23:59 UTC or after 50 applications
- User Response Translation Translators – closing 29 October 2025 at 23:59 UTC
We have included more information on each role below. Open roles and applications will always be available at the volunteering page. If you don’t see a role that fits with your skills and interests now, keep an eye on the listings. We plan to put up new applications every few weeks, and we will also publicize new roles as they become available.
All applications generate a confirmation page and an auto-reply to your e-mail address. We encourage you to read the confirmation page and to whitelist our email address in your e-mail client. If you do not receive the auto-reply within 24 hours, please check your spam filters and then contact us.
If you have questions regarding volunteering for the OTW, check out our Volunteering FAQ.
Translation Translators
If you enjoy working collaboratively, if you’re fluent in a language other than English, if you’re passionate about the OTW and its projects, and want to help us reach more fans all around the world, working with Translation might be for you!
Translation volunteers help make the OTW and its projects accessible to a wider global audience. We work on translating content by the OTW and its projects from English to other languages, such as site pages, news posts, AO3 FAQs and AO3 Support emails. (However, we do not translate fanworks.)
We really need volunteers who speak Afrikaans, Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Estonian, Filipino, Galician, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Irish, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Macedonian, Malay, Marathi, Norwegian, Persian, European Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese and Welsh—but help with other languages would be much appreciated. If you’re interested in starting a team for a language we don’t have yet, you’re very welcome to!
(Please note that our Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Ukrainian teams are not accepting new members at this time. If you are fluent in one of these languages and interested in volunteering, please consider volunteering for another team within the organization instead. The User Response Translation Committee is currently recruiting for the following languages: Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, and Chinese, as well as Russian. For more information, please refer to the Volunteering page.)
Applicants will be asked to translate and correct short text samples and will be invited to a chatroom interview as part of the selection process. More information about us can be found on the Translation committee page.
Applications are due 29 October 2025.
Apply to be a Translation Committee Translator at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.
Fanlore Graphics Designer
Would you like to help Fanlore reach more fans and get new editors? Do you have graphic design skills and enjoy creating social media content? If so, we need your help! The Fanlore team needs designers to create graphics and banners for social media posts, editing challenges and other outreach projects to help us reach more fans and potential editors. We have a lot of amazing fan history and fandom content, but we need you to help others find out about it. If you think you might enjoy that, come and join us!
If you’re interested, please prepare a portfolio of your work to submit with your application. As part of our design review process, applicants will also be asked to create a sample graphic for Fanlore. Further directions will be given upon applying.
Applications are due 29 October 2025 or after 40 applications.
Apply to be a Fanlore Graphics Designer at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.
Open Doors Import Assistant
Do you enjoy spreadsheets, self-paced projects, and helping protect fanworks from getting lost over time? Are you interested in the rescue and preservation of fanworks? Do you still guiltily–or not so guiltily–love the first fanwork that opened your eyes to fandom?
Open Doors is a committee dedicated to preserving fanworks in their many formats, and we’re looking for volunteers to support this goal. The work we do preserves fan history, love, and dedication to fandom: we keep fanworks from offline and at-risk archives from being lost, divert fanzines from the trash, and more.
Our import assistants contribute to our goal by:
- Importing works to AO3 from rescued digital archives and fanzines
- Searching AO3 for existing copies of works that creators have already uploaded themselves (to prevent us from importing duplicate versions when we import an archive)
- Compiling and correcting spreadsheets of works from an archive to be imported and/or tags to use on those works
- Copyediting/proofreading works from fanzines that have been scanned from PDFs (to ensure that the scanned works were transcribed properly by the software we used)
The training is self-directed, and so is the work for the most part, though we also have weekly working meetings/parties for people to all chip in and work on tasks together! Import assistants can generally alternate the types of tasks they work on. At any one time, we usually have several tasks of different types available.
To apply for this role, you must be at least 18 years old and legally of age to open explicit fanworks in your local jurisdiction.
If you’re interested, click on through for a longer description of what we’re looking for and the time commitment. For your application to be considered, you will be required to complete a short task within 3 days of submitting your application.
Applications are due 29 October 2025 or after 50 applications.
Apply to be an Open Doors Import Assistant at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.
User Response Translation Translators
Are you fluent in Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, or Spanish, and want to help us better communicate with AO3 users all over the world?
User Response Translation (URT) volunteers help AO3 committees to correspond with users in other languages. URT translators will assist the Policy & Abuse and Support committees by translating correspondence between these committees and AO3 users into specific languages. URT does not translate AO3 or OTW site pages, news posts, or fanworks.
We are looking for volunteers who are at least 18 years old and fluent in Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, or Spanish. Applicants will be asked to translate and beta (edit) short text samples as part of the selection process.
(If you are fluent in languages that are not listed above and interested in volunteering, please consider volunteering for another team within the organization instead. The Translation Committee is currently recruiting for the following languages: Afrikaans, Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Estonian, Filipino, Galician, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Irish, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Macedonian, Malay, Marathi, Norwegian, Persian, European Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese and Welsh. For more information, please refer to the Volunteering page.)
Applications are due 29 October 2025.
Apply to be a User Response Translation Translator at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.
Celebrations are in order, because the Archive of Our Own (AO3) has recently surpassed 16 million fanworks! Incredible timing, as very soon AO3 will also celebrate its 16th anniversary (keep an eye out for that)!
As always, we’d like to thank each and every one of you for contributing to this achievement. Whether you are out there creating fanworks celebrating them in the comments, sharing them online or hosting fandom-related events – or engaging in fandom in any other of the myriad possible ways – you are a cornerstone of the archive’s continued existence, growth and improvement!
Speaking of improvements: Did you know that you can learn about all the latest changes and updates to AO3 by reading our change logs? Our volunteer programmers, code reviewers and testers work tirelessly behind the scenes to maintain the site, combat bugs, and bring you new features. If you are interested in reading the latest releases, simply filter AO3 news using the release notes tag.
Or, if you want to delve deeper into some AO3 and OTW related technical topics, the Systems committee—who manages the OTW’s servers and technical infrastructure— occasionally posts about exciting insights into past tech-related issues with AO3 on their account: AO3_Systems.
If you are interested in coding yourself, you can even contribute to improving AO3’s code, all without becoming a volunteer! You can find more in our Contributing Guidelines on GitHub.
Whether you are a tech enthusiast or here to celebrate reaching 16 million works on AO3, we are once again more than grateful for your support, and excited to share more achievements with you in months and years to come!
And which underscores/enforces the fact that Matthew has a piece of crap for a father.
To that end, I've closed the GFM I opened for Matthew, to try to fulfill Doug's requirements for the vehicle. I closed it because those reasons no longer exist. Thank you to anyone who shared it. I appreciate it.
Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.
Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.
The Organization for Transformative Works’s (OTW) October membership drive is over and we are delighted to say that we are finishing with a total of US$288,692.28 raised. We are particularly pleased that 7,339 donors chose to either take up or renew OTW membership with their donation, exceeding our goal of 4,500 members.
These donations came from 8,753 people in 79 countries: thank you to every single one of them, as well as to all of you who posted and shared the news about the drive! The OTW would not exist without its users all around the world, and your continued support for us is our absolute pride and joy! We are so glad to know that our ongoing mission to support, protect, and provide access to the history of fanworks and fan culture continues to resonate with the people that matter most of all: the fans themselves.
If you were intending to donate or join and haven’t yet done so, don’t worry! The OTW accepts donations all year round and you can always choose to become a member with a donation of US$10 or more. Memberships run for one calendar year from the date of your donation, so if you donate now you’ll be able to vote in the 2026 OTW Board elections, which will take place in August. And our exclusive thank-you gifts are available whenever you donate!
Thanks again to our donors, our volunteers, and everyone who supports the OTW and its projects. We can’t wait to see what milestones we hit in the future.
The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.
AO3 continues to grow and pass new milestones. This year alone, we celebrated having nine million users, one million Mandarin Chinese fanworks, and 15 million fanworks—have you ever wondered how we keep up behind the scenes?
One of the places your generous donations go to is our Systems committee, who have been hard at work upgrading the servers that power AO3’s database and search systems, to keep up with the ever increasing amount of users and activity.
Systems maintains the infrastructure to support the OTW’s projects, as well as internal systems. This includes our three server racks, numerous servers, and networking equipment, which can be seen below. Our all volunteer team regularly monitors our servers and responds to outages as quickly as possible to restore service, in addition to performing routine upgrades and maintenance to ensure the OTW’s projects remain available. They also occasionally publish postmortems and presentations about AO3’s infrastructure on their AO3_Systems AO3 account.
We’ve prepared various donation gifts for this Drive as well! As usual, we have our US$45 sticker set. At the US$75 level, we have this year’s pin (the AO3 logo in disguise as a butterfly!) and a new spinning keychain with the AO3 and OTW logos. This month, we have also replaced our old duffel bag with a water bottle + pin combo.
If you want a gift but don’t want to donate all at once, you can also set up a recurring donation and save towards the gift of your choice. Simply select the gift you prefer on the donation form, and if you choose to not donate for the gift in one sitting, it will automatically get set up as a recurring donation. Those of you in the U.S. might also be able to double your contribution via employer matching: contact your HR department to find out if this is an option for you.
A donation of US$10 or more will also allow you to become a member of the OTW. OTW members have the right to vote for the Board of Directors—the OTW’s governing board. You have until June 30, 2026, to become a member if you would like to vote in next year’s election, which will be held in August of next year.
While we hope that many of you will take this opportunity to donate and join the OTW, we’re grateful for the support of all members of this community, in all its many forms! Whether you create, share, comment on or kudos fanworks on AO3; edit Fanlore; read Transformative Works and Cultures; or spread information from OTW Legal, you all help shape the OTW and its projects every day. We are grateful for your time, energy, and engagement!
Through the last year, the OTW Finance team has continued to ensure that the organization’s bills are paid, tax returns filed, and standard accounting procedures met. The 2024 audit is wrapping up so the focus will soon be on year-end reconciliations!
The team has also been diligently working to meet the OTW’s 2025 needs, and is proud to present to you this year’s budget update (access the 2025 budget update spreadsheet for more detailed information):
2025 Expenses
Archive of Our Own (AO3)
- US$560,321.01 spent so far out of US$669,120.53 total this year, as of September 30, 2025.
- 67.4% of the OTW’s expenses go towards maintaining the AO3. This includes the bulk of our server expenses—both new purchases and ongoing colocation and maintenance—website performance monitoring tools, and various systems-related licenses, as well as costs highlighted below (access all program expenses).
- This year’s projected AO3 expenses also include US$450,000 to purchase new servers, as well as US$44,000 in server related equipment to increase the capacity of existing servers to handle expected site traffic growth through the year.
Open Doors
- US$3,891.60 spent so far out of US$5,131.78 total this year, as of September 30, 2025.
- Open Doors’ expenses consist of hosting, backup, and domain costs for imported fanwork archives, as well as an allocated share of various OTW-wide productivity tools (access all program expenses).
Transformative Works and Cultures
- US$4,653.17 spent so far out of US$5,090.67 total this year, as of September 30, 2025.
- Transformative Works and Cultures‘ expenses are the journal’s website hosting, publishing, and storage fees, as well as an allocated share of various OTW-wide productivity tools (access all program expenses).
- Additionally, in 2024, the University of Amsterdam provided €1,000 (US$1,061) to Transformative Works and Cultures, which will be used to help fund the Fans of Color Research Prize. Three prizes have been awarded in 2025.
Fanlore
- US$31,602.78 spent so far out of US$37,565.43 total this year, as of September 30, 2025.
- Fanlore’s expenses are its share of allocated server hardware, maintenance and colocation costs, as well as its portion of various OTW-wide productivity tools (access all program expenses).
Legal Advocacy
- US$427.92 spent so far out of US$2,927.92 total this year, as of September 30, 2025.
- Legal’s expenses consist of registration fees for conferences and hearings and funds set aside for legal filings if necessary, as well as an allocated share of OTW-wide productivity tools (access all program expenses).
Fundraising and Development
- US$63,522.51 spent so far out of US$137,998.95 total this year, as of September 30, 2025.
- Our fundraising and development expenses consist of transaction fees charged by our third-party payment processors for each donation, thank-you gift purchases and shipping, outreach work by volunteers at various fan conventions, and the tools used to host the OTW’s membership database and track communications with donors and potential donors, as well as an allocated share of OTW-wide productivity tools (access fundraising expenses).
Administration
- US$116,916.42 spent so far out of US$134,924.67 total this year, as of September 30, 2025.
- The OTW’s administrative expenses include hosting for our website, trademarks, domains, insurance, tax filing, and annual financial statement audits, as well as productivity, management, and accounting tools (access all admin expenses).
2025 Revenue
- The OTW is entirely supported by your donations—thank you for your generosity!
- We receive a significant portion of our donations each year in the April and October fundraising drives, which together will account for about 41.1% of our income in 2025. We also receive donations via employer matching programs, royalties, and PayPal Giving Fund, which administers donations from programs like Humble Bundle and eBay for Charity. If you’d like to support us while making purchases on those websites, please select the Organization for Transformative Works as your charity of choice!
- Thanks to your generosity in previous years, we have a healthy amount of money in our reserves, which we can use to pay for larger than usual purchases and keep on hand for legal contingencies. As mentioned previously, we plan to continue to upgrade the capacity of AO3’s servers, which will significantly increase server equipment and server hosting expenses. The growth of AO3 and other projects of the OTW also requires more volunteers and administrative support, further increasing expenses. The budget spreadsheet projects a withdrawal of US$205,000 from reserves to cover the costs that exceed the amount of revenue projected to be received this year. This amount may be withdrawn as needed during the year.
- US$602,410.00 received so far (as of September 30, 2025) and US$790,202.01 projected to be received by the end of the year.
Got questions?
If you have any questions about the budget or the OTW’s finances, please contact the Finance committee. We’ll get back to you as soon as possible!
To download the OTW’s 2025 budget update in spreadsheet format, please follow this link.
The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.
https://gofund.me/448bae2b8
Hi!
I am going to provide you with all the details I can, because that is who I am as a person. Thank you so, so much for writing in one of these fandoms. See you on the 25th!
(And if you're not my writer, thank you for looking at my letter! I am entirely open to treats of any length.)
( Likes/DNWs and General Stuff )
( Between Silk and Cyanide -- Leo Marks, Leo Marks, Forest Yeo-Thomas )
( blink-182 )
( Blue Prince, Worldbuildling, Simon P. Jones )
( Nomads, Eileen Flax, Veronique Pommier )
Matthew, Madisyn and I think she realized she wasn't the golden child, favored one, in Carolyn's eyes any longer, so she was going to react like a child would. She has a couple of interviews set up with other companies, but she quit -- when she's supposed to be saving money to move out of here -- without having anything else actually lined up.
Megan's apparently making decent money, but she's now the sole source of income for them -- and she just went today and ordered a brand new Playstation 5 from Aaron's (a rent-to-own place, if anyone's unfamiliar). It's like $20/week... but again, they're supposed to be saving to move out. They haven't paid rent since August/September (I say they paid in August; Matthew and Madisyn say they didn't), and I told them that if they were planning to be out before the end of the year, and their aim was by the end of next month, that they didn't have to pay anything. Just put it all toward savings. Except they're eating out and NOT helping around the house, and I just don't know what to think any more. I gave them that grace, and now they're kind of throwing it back in my face, it feels like.
Meanwhile, we have Internet that's past due, a $170 dollar water bill coming up, and an electric bill that's past due. I did something so incredibly stupid I can't even look at myself for the shame, and we overdrafted my checking account -- to a point where my SSI check won't even cover it.
Madisyn and Matthew say Megan and Donnie need to be out by the end of this month. Which is only three weeks away. They haven't even said anything to them, and I keep telling them they can't just decide and only give them iike, a couple weeks' worth of notice. It takes longer than that, usually, to get approved for an apartment -- and now D/M are going to have hanging over their head that both are in new jobs (Megan's only had hers for a couple weeks; even if Donnie gets a job Monday or Tuesday, most places want you to have had your job at least a couple months), plus, are they going to be able to make the 3x/rent that most places now ask for? They don't even know if they'll be accepted because they haven't done the application.
Matthew says they're taking advantage of us, and if they're planning to stay they need to pay rent. Donnie had made a good point for not paying Sept - Dec, in that they'd be able to save up faster. But I don't think that M/M/me can handle them being here much longer.
Madisyn has to go in tomorrow and open -- it was supposed to be her day off -- because Donnie quit. She is very, VERY unhappy about this, though at least now she won't have to deal with Donnie bringing home shit to work, or creating drama there at work. But now Donnie will be here all the time, so I don't know how that's going to work for Madisyn.
Pray for us, people. Or keep us in your thoughts. Whatever. Anything. I think it's going to get a lot MORE stressful before it gets less stressful. O_O
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otw_news_feed : Open Doors Announces New Import of Fanzine Works [+0] - blackeyedgirl : Yuletide Letter 2025 [+0]
- james : Brains on Lack Of Good Drugs [+4]
- otw_news_feed : The OTW is Recruiting for Translation Translators, Fanlore Graphic Designers, Open Doors Import Assi [+0]
- otw_news_feed : AO3 Celebrates 16 Million Fanworks [+0]
- mickeym : Closing the GFM for Matthew [+0]
- james : Why [+0]
- dw_maintenance :: alierak : AWS outage [+24]
- otw_news_feed : October 2025 Membership Drive: Thanks for your Support [+0]
- james : Fictional diets [+10]
- james : What the Dickens [+16]
- otw_news_feed : October 2025 Membership Drive: The Systems You Support [+0]
- otw_news_feed : OTW Finance: 2025 Budget Update [+0]
- mickeym : A GoFundMe for Matthew... "Help a guy have some good luck". [+0]
- james : Fic [+0]
- james : Stretchy Jeans [+10]
- james : Today's affirmation [+10]
- james : If I could turn back time [+9]
- thefourthvine : Dear Yuletide 2025 Author [+2]
- mickeym : Holy Hannah, the drama [+1]
chasethestars