Signal Boost: FFA DW Post 1085 - AO3 and FanArt

[morgandawn]

fail_fandomanon posted: AO3 was supposed to host vids and fanart. Why has it not 10+ years later?

The spaghetti code got the better of them. There's a lot of other features they can't implement because of it, like making the archive multi-lingual or uploading vids or basically any new feature......

It seems like the obvious way to do it would be to make a new art.archiveofourown.org subdomain, and then simply have that be a completely separate system with a separate search. People who want fic go to the regular site, people specifically doing fanart go to the subdomain. Even embedding images hosted on the fanart side in fics would still work.

AO3 comes up with some bizarre requirements for how things need to be organized, though, so it wouldn't surprise me if separating art from fic that way is off the table for some weird ideological reason.