AO3 Officially Launches After 17 Years in Beta

Archive of Our Own (AO3) has officially moved out of beta. The Organization for Transformative Works, the nonprofit that operates the fanfiction platform, shared this news on Thursday, marking 17 years since AO3 first launched in 2009.

“Since 2009, AO3 has grown and changed a lot,” the announcement states. “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 update highlights several features that have been added since AO3’s inception, such as a tagging system, the ability to download fanworks, and privacy settings that let creators control access to their content. Exiting beta doesn’t mean the site will stop evolving:

> 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 notable change is the removal of the small “beta” label from the AO3 logo at the top of the site. (AO3 even playfully switched the label to “omega” for April Fools’ Day this year).

You can keep track of the updates coming to AO3 by checking its projects on Jira.