Archive of Our Own (AO3) is officially exiting beta. The Organization for Transformative Works — the nonprofit behind the fanfiction site — announced the update Thursday, which comes 17 years after AO3’s launch in 2009.
“Since 2009, AO3 has evolved and changed a lot,” the announcement said. “We’ve introduced many features over the years through the efforts of our volunteers and coding contributors, as well as the contractors we’ve been able to hire thanks to generous donations from our users.”
The post highlights some of the features AO3 has had in place since its launch, including a tagging system, fanworks downloads, privacy settings that allow creators to limit access to their work, and more. Just because AO3 is exiting beta doesn’t mean the update flow will stop:
Since the AO3 software has been stable for a long time, the changes are mostly cosmetic and do not indicate that everything has been finalized or is fully functional. Exiting beta doesn’t mean we’ll stop improving AO3 – our volunteer coders and community contributors will still be working to add and improve AO3 every day.
One of the most significant changes to the site is the absence of the small “Beta” label inside the AO3 logo displayed at the top of the platform. (AO3 briefly changed beta to “Omega” for April Fool’s Day this year).
You can keep track of upcoming updates to AO3 by viewing its projects on Jira
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