https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/32811

Forging Ghost, a Spike/Angel fanfiction archive, is being imported to the Archive of Our Own (AO3).

In this post:

• A bit of background explanation
• What this means for creators who had work(s) on Forging Ghost
• And what to do if you still have questions

Background explanation

Forging Ghost was a Yahoo! Group dedicated to fanfiction for Spike/Angel from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel: the Series. Ghostsforge, the moderator, preserved Forging Ghost when Yahoo! Groups was shut down in 2019 and asked Open Doors for assistance in importing its works to AO3.

The purpose of the Open Doors Committee’s Online Archive Rescue Project is to assist moderators of archives to incorporate the fanworks from those archives into the Archive of Our Own. Open Doors works with moderators to import their archives when the moderators lack the funds, time, or other resources to continue to maintain their archives independently. It is extremely important to Open Doors that we work in collaboration with moderators who want to import their archives and that we fully credit creators, giving them as much control as possible over their fanworks. Open Doors will be working with Ghostsforge to import Forging Ghost into a separate, searchable collection on the Archive of Our Own. As part of preserving the archive in its entirety, all fanart currently in Forging Ghost will be hosted on the OTW's servers, and embedded in their own AO3 work pages.

We will begin importing works from Forging Ghost to the AO3 after September. However, the import may not take place for several months or even years, depending on the size and complexity of the archive. Creators are always welcome to import their own works and add them to the collection in the meantime.

What does this mean for creators who had work(s) on Forging Ghost?

We will send an import notification to the email address we have for each creator. We'll do our best to check for an existing copy of any works before importing. If we find a copy already on the AO3, we will add it to the collection instead of importing it. All works archived on behalf of a creator will include their name in the byline or the summary of the work.

All imported works will be set to be viewable only by logged-in AO3 users. Once you claim your works, you can make them publicly-viewable if you choose. After 30 days, all unclaimed imported works will be made visible to all visitors.

Please contact Open Doors with your Forging Ghost pseud and email address(es), if:

1. You'd like us to import your works, but you need the notification sent to a different email address than you used on the original archive.
2. You already have an AO3 account and have imported your works already yourself.
3. You’d like to import your works yourself (including if you don’t have an AO3 account yet).
4. You would NOT like your works moved to the AO3, or would NOT like your works added to the archive collection.
5. You are happy for us to preserve your works on the AO3, but would like us to remove your name.
6. You have any other questions we can help you with.

Please include the name of the archive in the subject heading of your email. If you no longer have access to the email account associated with your Forging Ghost account, please contact Open Doors and we'll help you out. (If you've posted the works elsewhere, or have an easy way to verify that they're yours, that's great; if not, we will work with the Forging Ghost mod to confirm your claims.)

Please see the Open Doors Website for instructions on

• importing your works to the AO3
• adding your works to the new collection Forging Ghost

If you still have questions...

If you have further questions, visit the Open Doors FAQ, or contact the Open Doors committee.

We'd also love it if fans could help us preserve the story of Forging Ghost on Fanlore. If you're new to wiki editing, no worries! Check out the new visitor portal, or ask the Fanlore Gardeners for tips.

We're excited to be able to help preserve Forging Ghost!

- The Open Doors team and Ghostsforge

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.

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://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/32811

https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/32806

Over the past month, we rolled out behind-the-scenes upgrades and quality-of-life improvements across the site, including the addition of username links and chapter numbers to kudos and comment emails, respectively. We also made some major privacy and security enhancements, such as removing the email, birthday, and location fields from profiles and checking new passwords against known data breaches.

Special thanks and welcome to first-time contributors anna, Liz Watkins, Riya K, and theamandawang!

Credits

• Coders: Abhinav Gupta, anna, Amy Lee, Bilka, Brian Austin, Ceithir, Connie Feng, Domenic Denicola, EchoEkhi, Hamham6, kitbur, Liz Watkins, marcus8448, Riya K, sarken, Scott, slavalamp, talvalin, theamandawang, weeklies
• Code reviewers: Bilka, Brian Austin, Ceithir, HamHam6, james_, lydia-theda, marcus8448, redsummernight, sarken, Scott, weeklies
• Testers: Allonautilus, ana, Anh P, Aster, Bilka, Brian Austin, calamario, choux, Dre, Keladry, Lute, lydia-theda, Pent, redsummernight, Runt, Sanity, sarken, Teyris, therealmorticia, weeklies, wichard

Details

0.9.420

On July 15, we massively improved the user search used by admins.

• [AO3-6565] - We've improved the user search feature available to admins by moving it to Elasticsearch and adding the ability to search by past email addresses and usernames.
• [AO3-7042] - Instead of redirecting to the main Collections page, we now give a 404 error if you try to access the collections page for a nonexistent user, work, or collection.
• [AO3-7004] - We've added a database index to make it faster for database admins to search for comments using a specific guest name.

0.9.421

Following some email-related changes in our July 24 deploy, embedded images are now always stripped from comment emails, and usernames in kudos emails now link to the users' dashboards.

• [AO3-3154] - When you receive a kudos notification email, the names of users who have left kudos now link to the users' dashboards.
• [AO3-6060] - Even though they no longer had access to tag comment pages, former tag wranglers would still receive email and inbox notifications of replies to their old tag comments. This was both annoying and confusing, so we've stopped it from happening.
• [AO3-6746] - If you changed your username or pseud name and you had some chapters that you co-created with another user, the chapter bylines would not always get updated with your new name. We've changed this so the cache is refreshed more reliably.
• [AO3-6929] - The list of gift exchange sign-ups visible to collection maintainers now includes the pseud and username of signed-up users, instead of just their pseud.
• [AO3-7011] - Using the Tab key to navigate in desktop Safari used to select hidden inputs, causing the focus indicator to temporarily disappear. We've fixed it so only visible links and inputs receive focus.
• [AO3-7032] - If you tried to add your email to the invitation queue when it was already part of the queue, you would see two copies of the same error message. Now it only shows the error once.
• [AO3-7065] - We fixed some intermittent failures in the automated tests for the bookmark importing tool used by Open Doors.
• [AO3-7052] - We did a schema dump to capture what the current data structure looks like before we upgrade to Rails 7.2.
• [AO3-7053], [AO3-7054], [AO3-7067], [AO3-7068] - We updated a whole bunch of gems and GitHub actions: reviewdog/action-rubocop, awalsh128/cache-apt-pkgs-action, nokogiri, and thor.
• [AO3-5352] - We prepared the preface of work downloads that are attached to work deletion emails for translation.
• [AO3-7001] - As an anti-abuse measure, we now strip embedded images from comment notification emails even when image embeds are enabled on the site itself.

0.9.422 & 0.9.423

On July 28, we made a number of small improvements all around the site. There were some issues while deploying these changes, so we did another release to fix it all up on the same day.

• [AO3-5609] - We stopped sending subscription notifications for works hidden by admins, since hidden works are inaccessible to other users.
• [AO3-7006] - When a comment contains an HTML list, the list numbers or bullet points no longer overlap with the commenter's icon.
• [AO3-7024] - You'll no longer get an incorrect success message if you mark items in your inbox as read without selecting any comments.
• [AO3-5476] - We cleaned up some unused code in the works controller.
• [AO3-7064] - We updated the gems we use for automated testing.
• [AO3-7072] - We updated the unicode gem to solve some issues with developing the AO3 software on Macs with Apple Silicon chips.
• [AO3-5346] - Collection maintainers get an email notification when matches in a gift exchange have finished generating. We've improved the text of this email and prepared it for translation.
• [AO3-6484] - We made a small change to the code that generates the HTML class names we use for hiding work blurbs by muted users. We were hoping this tweak would improve performance, but unfortunately it had no effect, so we'll have to try again.
• [AO3-6997] - If an Open Doors archivist tries to leave kudos while logged in to an archivist account, they'll get an error message telling them to log in with their personal account instead.
• [AO3-7015] - Work blurbs now contain an invisible code comment with the work's update date, to make it easier for developers of third-party tools to automate downloads from index pages like tags, bookmarks, and search result listings.
• [AO3-7021] - To make it easier to filter or search using work languages, we've added the language codes on the Languages page.
• [AO3-7057] - We now provide any applicable error messages when an admin attempts to send an invitation directly to an email and something goes wrong.

0.9.424

On August 5, we deployed another batch of miscellaneous fixes.

• [AO3-5025] - The Tag Wrangling committee can now use the Rich Text editor to edit the Wrangling Guidelines pages.
• [AO3-7076] - We fixed some unwanted shadows that Chrome was adding to radio buttons and checkboxes.
• [AO3-7088] - We fixed some flaky automated tests related to importing works from LiveJournal.
• [AO3-7074] - We removed some unused CSS from our default site skin.
• [AO3-6580] - We updated the account creation confirmation page's title from "Create Registration" to "Account Created" so that it's clearer you've successfully made an account.
• [AO3-6818] - When an admin bans an email from being used for guest comments, that email is now also banned from requesting invitations.
• [AO3-7026] - When we run a spam check on edited comments by new users, we now tell the spam checker that it's an edit.
• [AO3-7046] - We migrated the subscriptions table so it can hold more rows and we won't run out of room in the future.

0.9.425

On August 19, we deployed an important change to account security that checks new AO3 passwords to see if they've been part of a known data breach. We also began allowing CSS variables in site skins.

• [AO3-7073] - To better protect users' privacy, we've removed the preferences and fields to display emails, birthdays, and locations on user profiles.
• [AO3-7091] - We stopped using fixtures in our integration tests.
• [AO3-7098] - We updated cache-apt-pkgs-action again.
• [AO3-7099] - We bumped the version of actions/checkout – a utility that helps run automated tests on our code – from version 4 to version 5.
• [AO3-3071] - Comment emails now include the chapter number, so you don't have to follow the comment link to know where exactly it was left.
• [AO3-7087] - To improve account security, we updated our password change process to prevent users from choosing passwords that are known to be compromised on other sites. (If you missed our post back on World Password Day, we also have some tips for keeping your AO3 account secure!)
• [AO3-7090] - We changed links in emails to be HTTPS instead of HTTP.
• [AO3-7093] - We added an automated test to make sure the fixtures used for seeding development databases result in valid records.
• [AO3-7094] - We now allow limited use of CSS custom properties in site skins! You can find more information in the skins help text.

0.9.426

We upgraded to Rails 7.2 on August 26.

• [AO3-7058] - We updated our version of Rails from 7.1 to 7.2.
• [AO3-7095] - We added more example admin and user accounts with a greater variety of roles to our basic development dataset, which will make it easier for coders to work on things that require specific access levels.

https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/32806