Admin Post: Goodbye for Now

[yourlibrarian]

It's a new month and the MMM Challenge is now closed. We have added a total of 246 meta works to the community on AO3!

What happens now? While the challenge set some goals for the month of March, there's no reason not to continue transferring meta over throughout the year when you have time. Hopefully this community has provided encouragement and incentive that will keep everyone thinking about duplicating their meta elsewhere, both older meta and new content you write.

One thing we want everyone to know is that the March Meta Matters Challenge Community on AO3 can be added to throughout the year if you wish. And the Challenge will be back next year!

Whether one has transferred many, all one's works, or just a few, any additional works copied over during the challenge are works which are less likely to be lost in future moves or site collapses. So let's hear from everyone who took part this month with any of the following:

1) What did and didn't work for you as you took part in the MMM Challenge?

2) What you feel most pleased with as a result of your efforts this month.

This account accepts anonymous comments, so if you don't have a Dreamwidth account we'd still like to count you among our participants.

Also, a few suggestions for the year to come:

1) I'd like to encourage everyone who has read some interesting meta, either this past month or in the months to come, to rec it. A lot of rec posts that circulate end up being fic only. But wherever you rec works, whether it's in your account, at a recs community, or on AO3 (bookmarks function as rec lists, just ticky the Rec box), let people know! Making people more aware that meta is being written and can be found at AO3 will likely lead to more of that there and everywhere :)

2) For those of us new to AO3 or who write only meta, consider adding a permission statement to your profile. You can see an example on my profile. And lest you think no one would ever bother, check out the Out Of The Auditary fest!

Lastly, a reminder to anyone who hasn't seen the notice, AO3 is suffering some issues from the rise in activity this month. So keep in mind that your hit counts, if you're tracking those, are not going to be accurate for a while.

Thank you to everyone for taking part and following along this month!

Comments

[leahandillyana]

Thank you! It was fun :)

[yourlibrarian]

Thanks so much for following along!

[thenewbuzwuzz]

Yay for us! *blows party horn*

The frequency of mod posts worked really well for me.

I'm pleased with my "nonfic" pseud. It feels tidy.

And I've bookmarked a couple of meta works on AO3. Good point, might as well rec them elsewhere.

[yourlibrarian]

And thank you ever so much for your help :)

[eidolonlathi]

I liked the low-pressure atmosphere of this challenge. It gave me the feeling it was alright to transfer works at my own pace and didn’t make me feel too stressed once things started moving a bit slower for me than I had planned. And now it’s a good feeling to look at the works I was able to move.

It was fun participating, thank you for organizing :D

[yourlibrarian]

That's good to hear that it worked out just as planned then :) My major goal was to get people thinking about the issue and making plans, even if it was just to get started.

I'm glad you enjoyed it, thanks for coming along!

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

I made a collection to corral my own fic, since one can be in multiple collections with the same work.

[yourlibrarian]

Another good idea :) Yes, that's one of the well thought out ideas at AO3, to allow a fic to be collected in various different ways.

[wheatear]

Thank you for running this challenge, it was lots of fun! I look forward to it becoming a regular thing. :D

[yourlibrarian]

Yay! Hope to see you back next year.

[(Anonymous)]

I'd intended to do this when I found out about it in March, but real life (and an ongoing pandemic) got in the way of starting. That, and trying to figure out how I would go about transferring images. Some of my meta are really image-heavy as well as full of links (both to other meta posts I've made and sources), so trying to find a steady host that wouldn't delete everything when they went under or randomly delete my images was an issue.

[yourlibrarian]

Yes, that's the unfortunate thing about AO3 is that there still isn't any option for multimedia. Embedding yes, but hosting no. However it's still good that it got you thinking about what could be archived and what you might need to get started!

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, I'm wondering if it might be a good idea to just transfer them to Dreamwidth temporarily, but I'm wondering if 500MB is sufficient.

[yourlibrarian]

That's the drawback with DW too, the limited space.

Before DW made visual upload possible, and since a lot of image hosts started restricting content, I've been using Google Photos as a host. I have to caveat this by saying that it is not designed for embeds, which means I have to use a secondary tool in order to create embed links. However I have been using it since 2013, it offers a lot of space, and it's unlikely Google will discontinue it as a service, which gives the links a lot of stability. Also free.

[(Anonymous)]

Sorry for the late reply, but thank you for the recommendation! I'll look into that.