“Perhaps, after all, romance did not come into one’s life with pomp and blare, like a gay knight riding down; perhaps it crept to one’s side like an old friend through quiet ways; perhaps it revealed itself in seeming prose, until some sudden shaft of illumination flung athwart its pages betrayed the rhythm and the music, perhaps … perhaps … love unfolded naturally out of a beautiful friendship, as a golden-hearted rose slipping from its green sheath.” ― L.M. Montgomery
Look at the sky. It’s not dark and black and without character. The black is in fact deep blue. And over there, lighter blue. And blowing through the blueness and the blackness, the wind swirling through the air and then, shining, burning, bursting through, the stars. Can you see how they roar their light? Everywhere we look, the complex magic of nature blazes before our eyes.
Every year, multiple times a year, they convince ppl to fork out thousands of dollars and….literally nothing changes. There’s no doubt in my mind they’re pocketing most of this money lol
Yep
That’s what’s so wild to me. They’ve made exactly 0 changes other than adding the ‘Exclude’ tags and that def doesn’t take 130k.
You know if any of you actually bothered to click the link it’ll take you to their budget update and break down exactly what the spend the money on, over 70% of which is spent on server expenses, monitoring tools and system licences.
They also spent a good amount of the rest of the 30% budget on significant server overhaul costs.
AO3 is literally a service you get for free and the audacity you’d have to not bother reading the very open budget plan they have, but to then bitch and whine about people donating to keep the site running is wild.
hosts millions and millions of fanfiction at no cost to site users
hosts millions and millions user accounts at no cost to site users
is an extremely high traffic site that rarely, if ever, experiences crashes
is an extremely high traffic site that could profit immensely off ads, but keeps the entire site free of ads
maintains a consistent and elaborate tagging system that allows users easy navigation through fanworks
maintains a simple layout structure so the entire site is easy to read, easy to navigate, and easy to understand making it highly accessible to users – especially disabled users
maintains and updates the budget for users to know exactly where their donations are going to be used in the future and have been used in the past
works with the legal aspects of fanworks in order to keep their site and their users completely legal, and therefore not at risk of being shut down, or sued, or manipulated by large media/companies
works with users when it comes to decision making, includes members in voting processes, etc.
literally hosts millions of fanfiction at no cost whatsoever and doesn’t subject you to ads, honestly those are the only two points you need but the other ones are there to show how much they’re doing
y’all need to appreciate that – donations are completely optional and if you don’t want to donate then don’t, but spreading posts about how Archive doesn’t do anything for anyone and doesn’t do anything with all this money they’re getting is completely unnecessary and outright false.
Also… do you realise $130k is NOTHING? Really nothing? It’s not a small fansite on a free hosting service, they created a whole new platform, ad free, free for all the users with millions of visits every month. And they only ask for 130k.
You clearly know nothing about having a professional website and how much it costs.
And I repeat: it’s ad free. They could make SO MUCH money with the millions of pages visited, so much money with the targeted adversiting.
And yet it’s FREE.
In this house, we respect Archive of Our Own and the Organization for Transformative Works.
abbys_little_whippersnapper 