We maintain a Jira issue tracker for developers, and a list of Known Issues for Archive of Our Own users, neither of which are publicly editable.
If you need help using the site, or want to report an issue you have found, please contact the AO3 Support team. Our Support team is staffed by volunteers, so please wait for a response before submitting another ticket. Duplicate submissions will not make things happen faster.
Please refer to SECURITY.md.
Our development wiki is publicly editable. Unless a page says at the top that it should only be edited by official OTW volunteers, please feel free to make changes!
Please contact the AO3 Support team. Our Support team is staffed by volunteers, so please wait for a response before submitting another ticket. Duplicate submissions will not make things happen faster.
We only accept pull requests for issues we have already added to Jira, with the exception of spelling corrections and documentation improvements (e.g. any Markdown files). We also do not accept code generated by AI tools; for more information, please refer to our commit policy.
Please check out our development wiki for more information on:
- If this is your first contribution, we recommend starting with an issue reserved for first timers. After your first pull request, or if you're up for a challenge, choose any open and unassigned issue available. (If you're a new contributor, don't worry about claiming the issue for now. If you make a Jira account, you'll get permissions for claiming issues in step 5.)
- Write code to address the issue. If you already have Jira permissions, be sure to set the issue status to "In Progress".
- Optional: Create a Jira account if you'd like the ability to comment on, assign, and transition issues. Please make sure the Full Name on your Jira account either closely matches the name you'd like us to credit in the release notes or includes it in parentheses, e.g. "Nickname (CREDIT NAME)."
- Submit the code with a pull request following the checklist on our template.
- Once you've submitted a pull request, we'll review your code and give you permissions on Jira. (Please be patient with us! Due to our workload, it may take some time before we can review and eventually merge your pull request.)
- Once your pull request is merged, we will deploy it to our internal testing site and our QA team will check that everything is working as intended.
- If something is not working as intended, we may set the issue to "Broken on Test" and ask you to make further changes in new pull requests.
- If all is well, your contribution will be deployed to the Archive of Our Own and you will be credited in the release notes!
If you'd like to contribute more pull requests, please do not pick up any more issues with the difficulty "First Timers Only"; these are reserved for new contributors' very first pull requests. Instead, choose an issue of any other difficulty from the open and unassigned issues.
Once you have Jira permissions, make sure to assign any issue you pick up to yourself and set its status to "In Progress" and "In Review" as appropiate. If you set the Jira issue status to "In Progress" before submitting your pull request, Jira will automatically transition the issue to "In Review" for you. Thank you for contributing!
If you would like to donate more of your time and expertise in a multi-national,
inclusive, fandom-oriented team, you might enjoy becoming an official OTW volunteer.
We regularly recruit AD&T Software Developers as official volunteers. To become an official AD&T volunteer you must have submitted a minimum of two pull requests – at least one for an issue with medium or higher difficulty - and apply when recruitment for the role is open.
Drop us an email if you have any questions.