owl | Signal boost (Reply)

Gakked from various places:

Thank you.

Thank you to everyone who's ever written a line of code, fixed a bug, wrangled a tag, answered a support ticket.

Thank you to the back-end coders and thank you to the front-end coders.

Thank you to everyone who's ever brainstormed about what the archive might do, and thank you to everyone who's poured their hearts, souls, and spare time into trying to make the archive do all of those things and more.

I use the AO3 every day. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for building it for me and for everyone who uses it -- and for everyone who doesn't use it yet but might use it someday.

This archive isn't something to which fandom is entitled. It's a labor of love. You make the archive as your gift to fandom, and I appreciate that gift so, so much.

Even though it isn't finished yet. Even though it isn't perfect yet. It's still awesome, and your hard work is tremendous and admirable, and I just want to say thanks.

(Dear everyone else: if anything in this post resonates with you, feel free to signal-boost or repost.)

I'm a developer myself. I generally sympathize with the devs; my reaction to Facebook changes are generally, "Someone probably worked very hard to code that, and grinned at their monitor when they saw it work for the first time" rather than "Oh, no, more changes!" That goes treble where the devs are volunteers.

lim's post explaining her resignation from AO3 is heartbreaking; code was her happy place, and now she's lost it.