The OTW is committed to protecting the privacy of fans, whether they are users of our services or not. We do not allow anyone to connect fan identities and real life identities on our services against the wishes of the individual in question. Our content policy committee and focus groups are working on policies and procedures to both prevent this and minimize the damage should someone break the rules.

We'll do our best. While spam prevention will evolve along with typical spam attacks, we currently plan to require email confirmation for new account creation, and to use a CAPTCHA-style spam prevention measure for comments from non-registered users. We feel this is a good compromise that keeps signing up for an account accessible, while also protecting users from anonymous spammers.

No, not at all. In fact, we hope that other fans will use our archive software (which will be open-source and free to use and modify) to build their own archives.

Building the kind of archive the OTW envisions is not a simple process. We're not just setting up an archive using existing software, but building new open-source archive software that can be easily maintained and easily reused, and which can handle potentially millions of stories from hundreds of thousands of simultaneous users.

We will not be policing the archive actively; someone must report a violation of the TOS to us before it is investigated. An OTW committee will be organized from volunteers to handle these reports of TOS violations. These volunteers will themselves be archive users and fans. Like all OTW committees, this group's membership will rotate on a regular basis.

Yes, absolutely.

No one (including the OTW as an organization) will be making money from the archive or its content; in fact, the opposite, because the OTW will be paying to host the archive. Advertising will not be shown. Instead, we will likely have public radio-style pledge drives to ask for support from our users. However, no donation will ever be required to use the archive or any of its tools.

Our first goal is to create a new open-source software package to allow fans to host their own robust, full-featured archives, which can support even an archive on a very large scale of hundreds of thousands of stories and has the social networking features to make it easier for fans to connect to one another through their work.

The Archive Of Our Own is in beta as of October 2008. For information about archive policies, please see the archive Terms of Service and FAQ.