AO3 is finally out of beta after 17 years

Apr 03, 2026 05:07 AM - 1 month ago 36532

Emma Roth

is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, user tech, crypto, societal media, and overmuch more. Previously, she was a writer and editor astatine MUO.

Archive of Our Own (AO3) is officially exiting beta. The Organization for Transformative Works — the nonprofit down the fanfiction tract — announced the update connected Thursday, which comes 17 years aft AO3’s motorboat successful 2009.

“Since 2009, AO3 has grown and changed a lot,” the announcement says. “We’ve introduced galore features complete the years done the efforts of our volunteers and coding contributors, arsenic good arsenic the contractors we’ve been capable to prosecute acknowledgment to generous donations from our users.”

The station highlights immoderate of the features that AO3 has had since its launch, including a tagging system, fanworks downloads, privateness settings that let creators to limit entree to their work, and more. Just because AO3 is exiting beta, doesn’t mean the updates will extremity flowing:

As the AO3 package has been unchangeable for a agelong time, the alteration is mostly cosmetic and does not bespeak that everything is finalized aliases perfectly working. Exiting beta doesn’t mean we’ll extremity continuing to amended AO3—our unpaid coders and organization contributors will still beryllium moving to adhd to and amended AO3 each day.

One of the astir important changes to the tract is the absence of the mini “beta” explanation wrong the AO3 logo displayed astatine the apical of the platform. (AO3 concisely changed the beta to “omega” for April Fools’ Day this year).

You tin support tabs connected the updates coming to AO3 by viewing its projects on Jira

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