At long last, we have upgraded our search engine, Elasticsearch, from version 0.90 aaaaaaall the way to 6.2, which had obviously been long overdue. A lot of other emergencies kept cropping up over the years, and there were never enough volunteers around to handle such a massive code rewrite while also managing the day-to-day upkeep of the Archive. With the help of our contractors (thanks to your generous donations!), we are now getting ready to deploy these changes to the Archive.

For a short period of time, the new search will only be available to a few volunteers for some final testing; everyone else will still see the current search and filtering interface. You might experience some issues in the days before we switch everyone over, as we had to tweak our old code a bit to get both versions of Elasticsearch running. Please bear with us, this will be temporary.

Once we are ready, we will move all accounts to the new system in batches, while monitoring how it holds up under increasing pressure. We currently expect this process to take at least a week, and longer if we run into any problems we have to stop and fix.

As always, we will keep you updated on progress here and through our @AO3_Status account on Twitter. (We'll have a bigger post with more details coming, but you can find a tiny preview below.) Many, many thanks to all the coders and testers who helped carry this over the finish line!