How OTW Volunteers Keep AO3 Running

In an earlier article, How Much Does It Cost to Run AO3?, we looked at the costs that appear in a budget: servers, hosting, monitoring, payment fees, and shortfalls. That article left one major cost mostly outside the ledger: volunteer time.

That can sound like polite nonprofit language. For AO3, it is not rhetoric. AO3 is not a machine that runs by itself as long as the servers are powered on. Tags need wrangling. Users need help. Reports need review. Code needs maintenance. Documentation needs updates. News has to be written. Translation has to happen. Old archives have to be imported. From the user’s side, the page opens, search works, tags filter, and someone replies. Behind that is a volunteer system built by OTW.

OTW’s 2024 Annual Report gives a sense of the scale. In 2024, AO3 gained 2,139,910 works and 1,298,541 accounts, and saw about 34 billion page views. That same year, 5.4 million tags were wrangled, Support received 27,000 tickets, Policy & Abuse received 27,700 tickets, and AO3 deployed 34 releases. By the end of 2024, OTW had 889 volunteers. Volunteers & Recruiting received 1,398 volunteer applications and onboarded 385 volunteers that year¹.

If AO3 is imagined only as a “website,” those numbers stay abstract. From a volunteer’s perspective, they become actions: someone reviews new tags, answers a user ticket, reproduces a bug, translates Chinese tags, checks report evidence, posts downtime updates, recruits volunteers, trains them, records them, and hands work over when people leave.

This article looks at how that volunteer system keeps AO3 running.

AO3 does not run itself

Many users have a simple relationship with AO3: search a fandom, open a work, bookmark it, leave. The more stable the site is, the easier it is to forget that stability takes work.

AO3’s maintenance is not one department’s job. Public information suggests a long-term collaborative project. Tag Wrangling makes works findable. Support catches user problems. Policy & Abuse handles difficult reports. AD&T and Systems maintain code and infrastructure. Documentation writes FAQs and help text. Translation and User Response Translation help non-English users. Communications explains what is happening when the site changes or breaks. Volunteers & Recruiting makes sure people can join, train, take leave, and hand work over.

Server costs matter. Servers keep AO3 online. Volunteers keep AO3 functioning.

OTW’s annual report describes it as an organization run by fans for fans, with board members and committee volunteers who are also fandom participants. That can sound romantic, but it points to something practical: many of AO3’s essential jobs are done by ordinary people with jobs, classes, families, and their own fandom lives, in their own time¹.

These volunteers are not a mysterious customer-service layer behind the site. They are readers, writers, translators, archivists, tag lovers, and long-term residents of small fandoms. Because they come from fandom, much of AO3’s maintenance feels less like an outside platform managing users and more like a community continually organizing, explaining, and repairing itself.

Tag Wrangling: making works findable

If AO3 has one feature that feels least like an ordinary website, it is the tag system.

New users often find AO3 tags both powerful and strange. Why does one character have several spellings? Why can one trope tag connect many freeform tags? Why is a full relationship tag more stable than a short ship name? Much of the answer is Tag Wrangling.

OTW’s 2024 Annual Report says Tag Wrangling processed 5.4 million tags and canonized 6,050 fandoms in 2024. That does not mean 5.4 million tags were simply scanned by a machine. It means ongoing human judgment: which tags are synonyms, which should become canonical tags, which are freeform author expression, which belong to a fandom, and which should go under No Fandom¹.

The OTW interview with Tag Wrangler Novic gives a good picture of this work. Novic describes AO3 as a growing library and tag wranglers as librarians who use tags to classify and manage works so users can find them more easily. As a bilingual Chinese-English volunteer, Novic also translates Chinese tags into English so volunteers who do not read Chinese can understand them².

This detail matters. AO3 is a multilingual, multifandom, multicultural archive. A Chinese tag may need to be understood, translated, connected to an English canonical tag, or preserved in its original context. A wrangler needs to know AO3 rules and also understand how the fandom actually uses language.

Novic also notes that tag wranglers do not and cannot directly change the tags authors write. Wrangling is not about forcing everyone into one format. It connects free expression to searchability behind the scenes. Authors can still write idiosyncratic tags, while readers can still find related works through canonical tags².

Zixin’s interview makes the Chinese-language context even clearer. She joined OTW as a Tag Wrangling volunteer and was among the early Chinese-language volunteers recruited for this work. She helped other volunteers translate Chinese tags into English, wrangled fandom tags for Chinese works, and discussed difficult tag translations with other Chinese volunteers³.

That is a layer of maintenance many users never see. When you search Chinese works, Chinese fandoms, or Chinese ship names on AO3, someone may have spent time on those “just a tag” details. Chinese titles, pinyin, aliases, translated character names, and fandom abbreviations do not automatically become a usable search system. People make that happen slowly in the background.

Support: not a message into a void

Support is one of the volunteer teams users are most likely to meet and easiest to misunderstand.

From the user’s side, Support may look like a form: login problem, page error, tag question, feature suggestion, bug report. Fill it in, send it, wait. From the volunteer side, it is a ticket system, a routing process, and a lot of judgment work.

OTW’s 2024 Annual Report says Support received 27,000 tickets in 2024, 2,200 more than in 2023. September alone reached 4,150 tickets, more than twice the normal monthly average of about 2,000. The tickets included technical help, tag change questions, and feature requests for AO3 coding volunteers⁴.

The interview with Nary explains Support’s place in the system. Nary is both a Support staffer and a Tag Wrangler. Support handles site-use questions, feature requests, bug reports, and feedback, while also working with many other committees: Tag Wrangling for tag issues, AD&T for performance and bugs, Abuse for Terms of Service questions, Documentation for FAQ text, Testing for reproduction, and Translation for non-English requests⁵.

Support is therefore not an all-powerful help desk. It is a routing and coordination center. Many problems cannot be solved by Support alone, but Support has to understand the question before sending it to the right people.

Nary also describes the typical workflow: a volunteer claims a request in the ticket system, drafts a reply, and another Support volunteer beta-reads it before it is sent. Common questions have templates, but volunteers still try to adapt replies to the user’s specific situation. If someone asks how to filter tags, the reply may use the user’s own tags as examples⁵.

That makes Support different from generic customer service. It requires knowledge of AO3’s features and of the situation the user is actually facing. A question about excluding a tag may involve search syntax, canonical tags, filter logic, and the user’s own content boundaries.

The 2025 Support Q&A for International Volunteer Day is blunt about the human side. Some Support volunteers spend around 10 hours a week; others spend more than 15. Volunteers also want users to know they are not paid employees online 24/7. There are real people behind the form, and real people can be worn down by ticket volume and hostile wording⁶.

That reminder is worth keeping. AO3 does not have a commercial customer-service team on standby. Every ticket has to be read, judged, and handled by a volunteer. A slow reply does not always mean nobody cares. More often, it means limited capacity, a complicated issue, or a need to check with another committee.

Policy & Abuse: the hardest boundaries to see

If Support often handles “how do I use this?” or “how do I fix this?”, Policy & Abuse handles harder boundaries.

In 2024, Policy & Abuse received 27,700 tickets, up from 23,600 in 2023. The annual report lists a wide range of ticket types: non-fanworks, rejected complaints about offensive content, plagiarism and copyright infringement, commercial promotion, harassment, spam comments, incorrect fandom tags, policy questions, and insufficient ratings or warnings⁷.

Most users do not see this work. Ideally, they only see that AO3 has Terms of Service, content policies, and a report form. But when a dispute happens, someone has to decide whether a rule was violated, whether the evidence is enough, how to contact users, how to keep enforcement consistent, how to protect privacy, and how not to mistake personal discomfort for policy.

Zixin’s experience makes this more concrete. After joining Policy & Abuse, she handled user complaints, assisted with investigations involving Chinese works, and translated user communication emails into Chinese so Chinese users could understand them³.

That is not simple translation. Policy work is already sensitive. Across language, culture, and platform context, misunderstanding becomes easier. A “complaint” in one Chinese-speaking user’s terms may need to be mapped into specific Terms of Service categories. If an English reply is not translated clearly, the user may not understand what AO3 is actually saying.

Zixin also described the extra work Chinese volunteers took on after AO3 became inaccessible in mainland China in 2020: reading and replying to large numbers of Weibo direct messages, helping technical teams test connectivity, explaining the local network environment to non-Chinese colleagues, discussing work arrangements for mainland Chinese volunteers, and even learning psychological intervention skills for messages involving suicidal ideation³.

That detail matters because it shows that the volunteer system is not just an org chart. In a crisis, it becomes specific people standing between specific languages and communities. Whether Chinese users can be understood often depends on whether someone can carry their anxiety, anger, confusion, and practical difficulties into OTW’s internal conversations.

AD&T and Systems: keeping the site standing

AO3’s code and infrastructure also depend on volunteers. Users often notice this work only when something breaks.

In 2024, AO3 deployed 34 releases. The annual report timeline mentions changes around language filtering, skins, blocking, Rails upgrades, and Terms of Service updates. Systems handled version control migration, post-DDoS reporting, downtime, and site slowdowns¹.

The interview with coding volunteer Cosette gives this work a human shape. As an AD&T volunteer, she works with AO3’s open-source code: fixing bugs, writing tests, developing features, and working with testing volunteers to make sure code changes do not break the site. Her typical work is to look through issues in a project-management tool, choose one she can handle, try to solve it, and submit a fix⁸.

That sounds like ordinary software development, but AO3 is not an ordinary product. There is no commercial product manager chasing growth metrics, and no paid-user SLA. A group of volunteer developers maintains a public project used by millions. A small change can affect posting, comments, bookmarks, search, subscriptions, historical data, and long-held user habits.

Communications’ IVD Q&A explains another side of the collaboration. When AO3 has downtime or needs to explain status to the public, Comms works with AD&T and Systems to publish accurate, concise information, letting technical volunteers focus on the technical problem⁹.

When the site breaks, users see a notice or a status update. Behind it, Systems may be checking infrastructure, AD&T may be reading code, Support may be receiving tickets, Comms may be shaping public information, and Translation may be carrying that message to other language communities.

Translation and User Response Translation

AO3 is global, but OTW’s organizational communication, news, FAQs, and support work do not automatically cross languages.

The Translation Committee’s IVD Q&A says its main responsibility is to make OTW and its projects accessible to fans who do not understand English. That includes the OTW site, AO3 FAQs, Open Doors import announcements, AO3 news, and cooperation with other committees that need to communicate with non-English users¹⁰.

In 2024, OTW also created User Response Translation, specifically for translation needs from AO3 user-facing committees: Support and Policy & Abuse. Its high-demand languages currently include Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, Russian, and Spanish⁷.

That new committee is worth noticing. It shows that OTW recognizes the difference between translating news and translating user communication. News can be public and slower. Support and Policy & Abuse messages involve specific users, specific problems, accounts, and reports. The stakes and privacy needs are higher.

Zixin’s experience fits here too. As a Chinese volunteer, she did not only translate English news into Chinese. She moved between tag work, policy work, and Weibo operation, bringing Chinese users’ problems into OTW and bringing OTW’s explanations back into Chinese-language spaces³.

This work is hard to reduce to a clean statistic. But for non-English users, it can decide whether AO3 is merely visible or actually usable.

Communications: explaining what happened

Many users notice Communications only when AO3 has a problem.

The site is down. Comments are misbehaving. Spam comments explode. Terms of Service change. A fundraiser starts. Open Doors imports an old archive. A legal issue affects fan spaces. Users need clear, trustworthy, timely explanations. Those explanations do not write themselves. Someone writes, checks, posts, and follows up across platforms.

In 2024, Communications published 118 new posts, handled about 350 inquiries from fans, site visitors, and media, and either replied directly or routed questions to the right teams. They also worked with Translation on multilingual content and with Legal on posts about legal issues affecting fan spaces¹.

The Communications IVD Q&A explains their role during downtime: they often publish and spread downtime information and coordinate with AD&T and Systems so the public gets accurate, concise, timely updates while technical volunteers work on the problem⁹.

This can look like “posting announcements,” but it is also trust work. AO3’s user base is large, multilingual, multiplatform, and spread across time zones. Without timely explanation, panic, misunderstanding, and rumors travel quickly. Communications turns internal technical and organizational action into information users can understand.

VolCom: volunteer systems need maintenance too

An organization that depends on volunteers cannot only recruit them. It also has to handle training, records, support, role changes, leave, departures, permissions, documentation, and conflict.

That is the work of Volunteers & Recruiting, often called VolCom. In 2024, VolCom helped 13 committees recruit volunteers, opened 38 different roles, received 1,398 applications, onboarded 385 volunteers, and processed 382 volunteer departures. By the end of the year, OTW had 889 volunteers¹.

The 2025 VolCom Q&A notes that different roles have different weekly time expectations. Recruitment posts list those expectations. Some roles start around 2 hours per week; others may require 5 hours or more. VolCom also handles onboarding, departures, hiatuses, personnel records, tool access, and support for new committees, subcommittees, and workgroups¹¹.

This work does not show up directly in AO3’s interface, but it is one reason the site can keep going.

Volunteers are not an infinite resource. People graduate, change jobs, get sick, leave fandom, burn out, need breaks, or need to hand off work. Without a system behind the people, AO3 would become fragile over time: knowledge would be lost, permissions would be messy, new volunteers would struggle to join, long-term volunteers would be worn down, and committees would have a harder time working together.

OTW’s volunteer system keeps AO3 running not only because people want to help, but because someone maintains the act of helping.

The cost of this model

The volunteer model helps AO3 remain unusual: noncommercial, light on algorithmic interference, respectful of user control, and serious about preservation and search. It also has costs.

First, it will not move as fast as a commercial product. Feature development, bug fixes, tag canonization, and policy updates require volunteer discussion, testing, coordination, and scheduling. A problem that looks “obviously simple” from outside may touch old data, old assumptions, and long-standing user habits.

Second, replies will not always be immediate. Support and Policy & Abuse handle tens of thousands of tickets a year, but volunteers are not a 24-hour paid support team. Complex issues require cross-committee consultation. Sensitive issues need careful wording. Multilingual issues need translation.

Third, community labor wears people down. The 2024 Annual Report mentions an organizational culture audit and an Organizational Culture Roadmap, with goals around accountability, safer spaces, global accessibility and cross-cultural sensitivity, transparent collaboration, management standards, and volunteer safety¹. That shows OTW is also dealing with the governance problems that large volunteer organizations face. Good intentions do not automatically solve organizational strain.

Fourth, users easily miss the work happening behind the scenes. If tags can be searched, people assume they should be searchable. If tickets receive replies, people assume support should reply. If the site recovers after an outage, people assume the site is simply fixed. People usually notice the labor only when it slows down or breaks.

What the volunteer system maintains

OTW’s volunteer system maintains several core AO3 abilities:

• Works can be preserved long term.
• Tags can be continually wrangled.
• Users can seek help through Support.
• Reports can enter Policy & Abuse processes.
• Code can be patched and released.
• Documentation can explain complex features.
• News and crisis information can be made public.
• Non-English users can be included through translation.
• Volunteers themselves can be recruited, trained, supported, and handed off.

Together, these abilities are part of AO3’s real foundation as an archive. If servers are the skeleton, the volunteer system is what lets the archive act, understand, respond, and repair itself.

Returning to the operating-cost article: AO3’s budget contains servers, colocation, monitoring, and tool subscriptions. Those costs matter. Without them, the site cannot run.

But money is only half the picture. AO3 remains usable, searchable, reportable, repairable, explainable, and translatable because volunteers keep putting time into it.

That labor is not a line item. It is one of AO3’s core costs.