fanarchive

So I took a hiatus from this because I had to move out of state suddenly. I've time to work on this again now, and I'm just going to bite the bullet and stop treating this as a Special Fandom Community Project that needs to be taken mega seriously. Realistically, what I want out of this is a multi-author story archive that works for me (easy to host myself, tags and categories that make more sense than AO3, good ui for posting works), so that's what I'm currently aiming for.

Obviously this is still an open source project, so if you want to make suggestions, poke at the source and contribute, or fork the repo and grimly change all the fonts, knock yourself out.

Current to do list:

• pick a goddamn license, seriously.
• accept that I will be coding an admin interface (long story short, I looked into the abyss that is Django admin plugins and customization and decided I wasn't going down that hole). Cry. Cut out Django's okay interface and replace it with my shitty one
• accessibility tweaks galore. I don't think I'll be doing special ~fancy CSS/JS shit focused on this yet, but at the very least the HTML structure of the barebones site should function sensibly for keyboard users, screen readers etc
• consider stripping out even more of the barebones CSS library I started with, or exchanging it for something I like better
• get SSL working with letsencrypt on heroku
• slap together pythonanywhere install instructions & make sure they work. Because having not one but TWO easy serverless options for anyone who wants to screw around with this is aces.

This is probably too much to do, but who cares! It's going to be fun!!

Edit: I'm now moving the tasks in this post to this Trello board for better organization/assignment.

Here's the deal. Absent the sudden and miraculous addition of Sally Jobs, Coder Extraordinnaire, to our contributor team, what we are is a bunch of enthusiastic mostly-amateurs and busy pros with moderate to no coding experience, and varying amounts of free time we're willing to devote to this.

Which, considering the example of the AO3, is worrying at best ("we don't know what we're doing either! How do we avoid falling down the same hole??") and terrifying at worst ("these people I've signed up to work with could all turn out to be insane fandom wankers!!! D:. Also everyone will see my/our terrible code and laugh").

( So I figure we can all promise ourselves a few things, to keep this from going south: )

To sum up, the overarching rule: let us all try to treat each other with kindness and respect. If we get as far as doing regular releases on github, I'll want to adopt something similar to this code of conduct as a baseline for governing how project contributors interact.

Roadmap

Since it's just going to be a handful of us working on this initially, I don't think it'd be helpful to commit to anything more strenuous than a roughly quarterly public release. 'Sometime in June' sounds good enough to me for a point where we absolutely want to have something functional up on github, though it'll most likely be a rough development release (0.x.x). Release versioning will use semantic versioning; to familiarize yourself with that or refresh your memory of what that entails, check this out.

We don't have any data on how long it'll take us to complete tasks, so any dates or timelines for when we'd like to have work completed will be estimates for the time being. That said, here's how I think we should spend the next few weeks:

( Task assignment list, followed by administrivia )

Most important thing to begin with, at least imo, is to decide on a bare-bones feature set that we can all feel mostly happy with. I’m going to leave the brainstorm post running as a grab bag for ideas for at least the next day or so, while also mining through my pinboard and dememe for past thread discussions to pull from.

Otherwise, though, this is what I’ve got planned as tentative first steps for the next few days:

• Features:
  • start a shared document so we can collate the most-requested stuff
  • boil down that document into a list of features
  • put feature list to a quick-and-dirty poll on meme so we can figure out what we can shelve for future releases vs what absolutely needs to be in the first one
• Important community stuff:
  • piece together quick code of conduct so we don’t all go down in flames. At least not right away, right :D?
  • maybe assign a couple more mods for this comm
  • say hi to each other in an awkward post??
  • list what we can all bring to the table
• Archive looks / front end:
  • let’s go look at a bunch of other archives we’ve used in the past, and see what we can steal and what we absolutely shouldn’t
  • figure out what should be in our mockup reel
    • put together two or three different sets
    • decide on most loved set
• Archive name:
  • collect a list of great and obnoxious names. winnow down over time
• Archive stack / back end:
  • list framework options that would best serve our purpose. Think stuff that is easily installed on your bargain-bin VPS
    • laravel, rails, django, node.js maybe, etc etc
    • friendly cage match until one framework is ruled the victor
  • figure out a data structure for fanworks & fanwork metadata that won’t send the db mad when it’s trying to handle a million works
  • figure out what extras will be useful
    • memcached, elasticsearch for fulltext search, S3 for image/file hosting, etc

(Basics for an archive stolen from here.)

A way to upload text works
A warning system
A tagging system (minimally reliant on wranglers, able to handle things like primary/secondary pairings)
A search system
A translation framework
The ability to handle non-English characters gracefully even in an English-language archive (western anime and k-pop fandom use cases)
Independent screennames manageable from a single account
Comments, removable kudos, bookmarks
Gifting
Co-authoring, opt-in per fic (no adding a co author without the co author first approving it)
Basic social features such as messaging, blocking, and favoriting/friending users
Ability to lock fics so only archive users can view
Ability to flag material as adults-only (the AO3 system for this is fine)
A place to put rules, TOS, FAQs, walkthroughs, misc documentation
A way to report problems (for most use cases, this’ll just be routing a report to the archive owner’s email)

Administrative features are probably a separate brainstorm. They would include ability to invite/restrict/ban users, some way to deal with spam, etc

And the archive should be deployable by one or two administrators with basic technical competence, but should be scalable to at least the size of the current AO3.

What else?