{"id":579497,"date":"2026-04-03T11:45:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-03T11:45:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/579497\/"},"modified":"2026-04-03T11:45:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-03T11:45:09","slug":"ao3-is-finally-out-of-beta-after-17-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/579497\/","title":{"rendered":"AO3 is finally out of beta after 17 years"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">Archive of Our Own (AO3) is officially exiting beta. The Organization for Transformative Works \u2014 the nonprofit behind the fanfiction site \u2014 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.transformativeworks.org\/ao3-is-exiting-open-beta\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">announced the update on Thursday<\/a>, which comes 17 years after AO3\u2019s launch in 2009.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">\u201cSince 2009, AO3 has grown and changed a lot,\u201d the announcement says. \u201cWe\u2019ve introduced many features over the years through the efforts of our volunteers and coding contributors, as well as the contractors we\u2019ve been able to hire thanks to generous donations from our users.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">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\u2019t mean the updates will stop flowing:<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup ewrhy38 _1xwtict1\">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\u2019t mean we\u2019ll stop continuing to improve AO3\u2014our volunteer coders and community contributors will still be working to add to and improve AO3 every day.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">One of the most significant changes to the site is the absence of the tiny \u201cbeta\u201d label inside the AO3 logo displayed at the top of the platform. (AO3 briefly changed the beta to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/FanFiction\/comments\/1s97ith\/archive_of_our_own_says_omega_instead_of_beta_now\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">\u201comega\u201d for April Fools\u2019 Day<\/a> this year).<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">You can keep tabs on the updates coming to AO3 by viewing its projects <a href=\"https:\/\/otwarchive.atlassian.net\/jira\/software\/c\/projects\/AO3\/issues\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">on Jira<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Archive of Our Own (AO3) is officially exiting beta. The Organization for Transformative Works \u2014 the nonprofit behind&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":579498,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[49,48,44,64,61,343],"class_list":{"0":"post-579497","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-news","11":"tag-tech","12":"tag-technology","13":"tag-web"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=579497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579497\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/579498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=579497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=579497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=579497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}