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Ourchive Beta: Week Three

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Tomorrow is September! [Mayor from Buffy voice] That's a very big month for us, because at the end of it we intend to release MVP. Beta testers who have watched us (me) break the sanitizer are probably laughing in disbelief, but it's true: the backlog is drying up, the P1 bugs are slowing down, and we're reasonably confident we can button up our requirements before then.

Highlights

  • Homepage redesign is coming! The pilot instance will have a new look soon.
  • We have caching on precisely one page and a few template fragments, in dev, as of this evening. This will be in prod over the weekend. Extremely exciting given that basic cacheing is a must for go-live.
  • We threw open the gates to our remaining beta testers and they have been champs: identifying weirdness, requesting and discussing features, and rolling with it when the roadmap is still up for grabs or we know something needs improvement but we're not sure how to do it yet.
  • Our Discord, currently open to beta testers, has had a lot of thoughtful discussion around moderation & abuse. Our use cases are very different from a monolithic site like AO3, but the smallest site in the world has vectors for abuse, and ours is no different. Complicating this is our intention to add federation. Some of us are already Masto mods, so we're familiar with some of the common pitfalls and UI/UX for Fediverse moderation, but we're not experts and there's a lot to learn and consider.

Lowlights

  • The AO3 importer broke! Then we fixed it. But it did underscore how much we need better logging within the importer code itself.
  • We're still working out the nitty gritty of a lot of config details, which can result in weirdness for our users. Firewall config, sanitizer config, TinyMCE config...this is the stuff that having a bunch of people really helps with, because there are paths and use cases a small team wouldn't consider. But having a good confirmed "base" configuration will be a relief.
  • Site's still ugly. If you're UI/UX person we would still love for you to get in touch. (But the site is slowly getting less ugly, and for that I'd like to thank our beta testers and verity.)

What's Next

We're working on feature improvements and on buttoning up some weak areas. In real terms this means:

  • Updated bookmark & collection UI, allowing users to more smoothly add bookmarks to collections and navigate to bookmarked works.
  • More unit tests.
  • Improved comment code (recursive data structures = an absolute mess on the HTML/JS side of the house).
  • Improved admin messaging capabilities.
  • Documentation and install testing for admins.
  • Icon redesign: our current icons are mostly from UIKit and they're not great. We'll be identifying an external set to import and refining precisely which icons we're using on the site.

Calls for Feedback: Coming Soon to a Newsletter Near You

In the coming weeks we'll be issuing calls for feedback in the following areas:

  • Exchanges
  • Federation & data backup
  • Search & browsing

If you are a person with opinions about any of these, please do subscribe. We'll be using the mailing list and blog to recruit participants.

Feedback sessions will start after MVP, realistically well into October or even November; they'll be done in groups of 5-10 people, with a focus on understanding how people use current equivalent features in AO3 and what sorts of changes, improvements, or re-imaginings might be useful. We're not aiming for 100% feature parity with AO3, but for something like exchanges, we know there'll be a lot of crossover in both expected and required functionality.