Releases 0.9.369 - 0.9.378: Change Log

From May to September, we had quite the exciting set of releases! Most notably, we made a lot of improvements to the admin area of the Archive, enabled comment moderation on news posts, and added official labels to accounts held by AO3 committees. We also prepared for an upgrade to our search servers, and integrated a new server monitoring system after our old contract ended.

Special thanks and welcome to first-time contributors AliceLsr and Nisha! 🎉

Credits

• Coders: AliceLsr, Bilka, Brian Austin, Ceithir, Claire C, David Bilsky/Ironskink, de3sw2aq1, EchoEkhi, ellieyhcheng, james_, Nisha, Potpotkettle, Sarken, ticking instant, tlee911, weeklies
• Code reviewers: Bilka, Brian Austin, Ceithir, james_, Sarken, ticking instant, weeklies
• Testers: Anh P, Bilka, Brian Austin, calamario, Dre, Jenni D., lydia-theda, Maine, Runt, Sam Johnsson, Prisca, Sarken, Taylor Clossin, therealmorticia, Teyris, wichard

Details

0.9.369

On May 31, we gave admins the ability to moderate news post comments and took away their ability to leave comments or kudos.

• [AO3-5860] - Now that official comments from OTW or AO3 personnel are made using shared committee accounts that carry an "(Official)" label, we've removed the ability for site admin accounts to leave comments or kudos.
• [AO3-6713] - It's now possible for admins to moderate comments on news posts.
• [AO3-6723] - We updated the i18n and i18n-tasks gems.

0.9.370

On June 12, we deployed a grab bag of fixes and behind-the-scenes improvements. Notably, gender variants of emoji used in works and comments will no longer be split up into multiple characters.

• [AO3-5351] - We've made the confirmation email for support requests translatable.
• [AO3-5371] - We added some class names to the statistics displayed in bookmark blurbs for series and external works (e.g., where it says "Works: 5" to tell you how many works are in a bookmarked series). This makes it easier to style those statistics the same way you style the statistics displayed in bookmark blurbs for works.
• [AO3-5506] - Under certain circumstances, it was possible for drafts or works that were hidden by an admin to appear on your History or Marked for Later page. That should not have been possible, and now it will indeed be impossible.
• [AO3-6017] - We changed the comment notification emails to add the "(Official)" label to comments left by official accounts of OTW committees.
• [AO3-6087] - Some old code for cleaning up crufty HTML from versions of Microsoft Word was causing Sinhala characters with extensions – and some emoji – to get separated into multiple characters when posting works without using the Rich Text Editor. We've removed that code, which is no longer necessary for tidying up Word's HTML.
• [AO3-6570] - In the error message you get when a work import didn't go through (for example, because a work from the same URL had already been imported), very long URLs would spill out of the error message box. Now everything is nicely contained and folds over to a new line if necessary.
• [AO3-6704] - The preview page we use for testing the abuse report confirmation emails was giving an error on our staging environment. We've fixed the invalid test data that caused the error.
• [AO3-6706] - We use Redis to queue many automated tasks such as assembling the daily kudos email or updating users' history pages. We've now made sure we can update our Redis initializers to allow for automatic failovers (meaning when one Redis instance dies, others can pick up the slack). Once we get new Redis servers, this will make the transition go much more smoothly, and improve matters going forward.
• [AO3-6708] - We added an index to the owned_set_taggings table to make it a little faster, particularly when creating or editing challenge sign-ups.
• [AO3-6720] - The Serbian Translation team is switching from Cyrillic to Latin script, so we changed the locale file and configuration accordingly.
• [AO3-6725] - Because it was very slow, we removed the "Show Most Recent Bookmarks" option that appeared on bookmark blurbs in some places.
• [AO3-6727] - Bumped nokogiri from 1.16.3 to 1.16.5.
• [AO3-6736] - Bumped reviewdog/action-rubocop from 2.11.1 to 2.12.0.

0.9.371

The June 24 deploy contained several search engine fixes (e.g. for the OTP search option), in preparation for a big Elasticsearch upgrade.

• [AO3-6522] - We adjusted the bookmark indexing so you can now search for numbers in bookmark creator and bookmarker names, e.g. bookmarks made by AO3user42 versus bookmarks made by AO3user69.
• [AO3-6537] - Similarly, we adjusted the work indexing so you can now search for numbers in work titles.
• [AO3-6729] - Searches for otp: true weren't returning single-relationship works posted (or edited) after May 12. This was happening for absolutely baffling reasons, but the important thing is: it's fixed now!
• [AO3-6739] - When accessing a work in chapter-by-chapter mode, the notice telling you comment moderation is on was replaced with the word "Chapter" due to a mix-up with internationalization. We've made the actual notice appear.
• [AO3-6734] - We bumped our Rails version from 7.0.8.1 to 7.0.8.4.
• [AO3-6741] - We updated our automated code style checker to the latest version.
• [AO3-6707] - We added a config file that will let our devs use Gitpod for their development environments.

0.9.372

On June 30, we deployed a small change to keep our search servers happy. It has no user-facing impact.

• [AO3-6744] - We decreased the shard size for indexes in our search database to make sure it stays happy.

0.9.373

Due to issues with our error tracking and performance monitoring service, we did a small release with the theme "Things That Won't Cause Errors or Change Performance." We deployed these miscellaneous fixes on July 24.

• [AO3-6612] - We updated the test previews for emails sent when adding co-creators to cover the different types of creations (work, series, chapter). This will make testing and translating these emails much easier.
• [AO3-6616] - Last August, the browser engine WebKit made some changes that caused a variety of display issues for anyone using Safari 17 on macOS or any browser at all on iOS 17. WebKit mostly fixed the issue themselves, but there were a few areas we still needed to tweak, so we did that.
• [AO3-6700] - When you orphan a work, the confirmation screen has some information about the orphaning process, and we thought, hey, maybe this information should be clearer. So we updated it to be really, really clear about the fact that orphaning removes your name from the work byline, but it doesn't remove any identifying information from anywhere else, so you need to remove that information yourself, before you orphan the work. (You won't be able to make any edits after orphaning!)
• [AO3-6710] - There was some translated text for emails that was never actually used, so we removed it to clean things up.
• [AO3-6724] - We updated the About Us and Donate or Volunteer pages to include a link to our GitHub, where we accept pull requests for issues in our bug tracker. (Please check out our Contributing Guidelines for more information!)
• [AO3-6730] - We updated a dependency of some of our automated check tools to address a potential security vulnerability.
• [AO3-6753] - We updated our automated code style checker to the latest version (again).
• [AO3-6756] - To make sure translation updates are properly formatted (without redundant or unused keys), we added some automated checks to the review process.
• [AO3-6763] - Our automated code style checker released another new version, so we updated it again. This time, it fixed a bug that was flagging issues in files our contributors hadn’t even changed, so this was a welcome update!
• [AO3-6770] - There was another version, so we updated the same automated check dependency again. Woohoo.

0.9.374

Due to the aforementioned issues with our monitoring service, we switched to a new one called Sentry on August 13th. We also deployed some fixes for a particularly annoying tag nomination bug while we were at it.

• [AO3-6742] - This is the one where we updated our code to use Sentry to monitor for errors and performance issues.
• [AO3-6778] - We updated the version of one of our automated code checks. Nothing important for us, but it’s good to stay up-to-date!
• [AO3-6783] - When there was a blank tag somewhere in the database, editing a tag set nomination to remove tags actually nominated the blank tag instead. That did some really weird things (like cause the bug below) and isn’t the right behavior, but now it has been fixed!
• [AO3-6784] - Related to the above bug, the “My Nominations” and “Review Nominations” pages would give a 500 error if a nomination contained a blank tag that was a synonym or canonical. Also fixed!
• [AO3-6785] - We updated a dependency of some of our automated check tools to address a potential security vulnerability. Yes, this is the third time in two releases. 😭

0.9.375

On September 6, we deployed a lot of improvements to the site's admin area, along with some smaller fixes to our automated testing setup.

• [AO3-5441] - We technically supported the CSS filter property in work and site skins, but allowed none of the relevant properties through, so as a result we did not actually support it at all. That's fixed, so you can now use CSS filters in your skins!
• [AO3-6010] - Many of our committees have specific roles for their members who have admin accounts, e.g. for handling AO3 News posts or tag wrangling admin tasks. Our Legal team did not, so we remedied that to avoid leaving them out.
• [AO3-6493] - Tag wrangling supervisors would like to know when a tag wrangler changes their AO3 account name, so we added an email notification for that.
• [AO3-6539] - We've made it easier for Policy and Abuse admins to get an overview of a user's works and comments and improved the navigation in the relevant admin area.
• [AO3-6563] - When you contact the Policy and Abuse committee about a specific work (or chapter of a work), an HTML copy of said work will now be attached to the Zoho ticket PAC receives after you submit the report.
• [AO3-6728] - Policy and Abuse personnel have the option of deleting an account and all the works and comments they created in cases where the account solely exists to post spam. However, this would also delete replies to their comments, leading to errors when trying to access those replies. This has now been fixed and only the spammer's comments will be deleted.
• [AO3-6732] - We added a custom module to our automated code style checker to warn us when we use an outdated way of including HTML in translatable text.
• [AO3-6754] - We've made it so that only admins with the superadmin role can access the area reserved for managing the API token used by the Open Doors committee for imports.
• [AO3-6759] - We've also restricted access to certain tag wrangling admin tasks, so only tag wrangling admins (and superadmins) can, for example, manage wrangling assignments.
• [AO3-6764] - We created a test preview for the kudos notification email. This will make testing translations of this email much quicker.
• [AO3-6798] - Bumped fugit from 1.10.1 to 1.11.1.
• [AO3-6800] - Bumped rexml from 3.3.3 to 3.3.6, which makes it the fourth update in this set of releases.
• [AO3-6803] - In the same vein, bumped the script that automatically runs our style checker from 2.18.0 to 2.18.1. When will this end.
• [AO3-6804] - We fixed a flaky test for tag wrangling features.

0.9.378

We tried deploying a handful of bug fixes and things to finish up the Rails 7 upgrade on September 19th (in release 0.9.376). Alas, the Rails-related changes had some pretty negative impacts on users’ ability to stay logged in, so we reverted the same day (in release 0.9.377). The remaining bug fixes went out on September 26th, once we made sure the dangerous stuff was fully reverted.

• [AO3-4728] - Sometimes, when a creator deleted a work someone was subscribed to, that didn’t clean everything up, causing a 500 error when the subscriber accessed their subscriptions page. We’ve added some code to properly clean up in that case.
• [AO3-6392] - The buttons that show up when commenting inline were showing up, but not useable, when commenting on a specific thread’s page. Since those are specific to commenting inline, we’ve hidden them on the full page view.
• [AO3-6405] - Due to a bug, it was once possible to give a work multiple ratings (Schrödinger’s rating, if you will). This mostly happened with works imported from other archives, which we cleaned up this release.
• [AO3-6749] - We updated the Low Vision Default skin to make the experience with menus better for folks using smaller screens.
• [AO3-6772] - As part of our effort to make things easier for the folks translating our email templates (for when we roll out language options on the Archive), we added a preview for the reset password instructions email.
• [AO3-6796] - If you tried to list a creator’s works using a fandom that didn’t exist, you would previously be greeted by a confusing 500 error. Now, you’ll get a 404 error indicating that what you’re looking for does not exist.
• [AO3-6809] - Updated our automated code style checker again, because of course we did.