AO3 is finally out of beta after 17 years

Archive of Our Own (AO3) is officially exiting beta. The Organization for Transformative Works — the nonprofit behind the fanfiction site — announced the update on Thursday, which comes 17 years after AO3’s launch in 2009.

“Since 2009, AO3 has grown and changed a lot,” the announcement says. “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 that AO3 has 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 updates will stop flowing:

As the AO3 software has been stable for a long time, the change is mostly cosmetic and does not indicate that everything is finalized or perfectly working. Exiting beta doesn’t mean we’ll stop continuing to improve AO3—our volunteer coders and community contributors will still be working to add to and improve AO3 every day.

One of the most significant changes to the site is the absence of the tiny “beta” label inside the AO3 logo displayed at the top of the platform. (AO3 briefly changed the beta to “omega” for April Fools’ Day this year).

You can keep tabs on the updates coming to AO3 by viewing its projects on Jira