war death and destruction
Feb. 28th, 2026 06:55 pmThis world is breaking down and it's my country's fault and I hate it. I'm sorry

Every month in OTW Signal, we take a look at stories that connect to the OTW’s mission and projects, including issues related to legal matters, technology, academia, fannish history and preservation issues of fandom, fan culture, and transformative works.
A recent article in The Varsity, University of Toronto’s (UoT) campus paper, profiles a growing student community centered around a shared love of fanfiction.
Fanfiction Club president Zain Butt says that while interest was initially low, they now have 40–50 students at weekly events that include activities such as fandom potlucks, karaoke featuring fandom songs, and a collaborative murder mystery with the school’s Literacy club.
Both club president and social media manager acknowledged that there is still some stigma around fanfiction, with fans often being relegated to anonymous corners of the internet. The club and its interactions with other campus groups places fanfiction alongside other recognized student activities as an established creative practice. The club itself provides a space for students to grow a community outside of online spaces.
The community is really what made this club,” Butt said. “It wouldn’t be possible without people. The community really is something special. And there’s the fact that it’s so diverse: we have so many different people. Oftentimes, [they’re] completely different, personality-wise, but they bond over their shared fandom, or their shared trope. That’s what I really love.
A 2025 research paper by Victoria Lunden looks at the preservation of fandom and pop culture within archival institutions. In “Preserving the People’s Stories: The Preservation of Fandom and Pop Culture”, Lunden notes that archives have historically focused on “official” records while overlooking creative works produced by everyday people.
Citing the work of Abigail De Kosnik, Lunden positions fandom as both a cultural production and community record that captures the voices of marginalised groups and lacks the elitism often found in other archival institutions.
Fan archives must be regarded as having consequence and relevance for both fans and for larger society…they are ‘safe spaces’ for non-hetero-normative practices that are not documented anywhere else.
In the essay, Lunden highlights OTW projects Archive of Our Own (AO3), Fanlore and Open Doors as being models for community-driven, ethical digital archiving that, as a non-commercial space, offers a counter point to corporate-controlled narratives.
Do you have questions for us, but don’t know who to ask? In November 2025, we updated our FAQ on how to contact OTW staff! The page features a comprehensive list of which committee to reach out to for many of the most common questions we receive.
We want your suggestions for the next OTW Signal post! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or news story you think we should know about, send us a link. We are looking for content in all languages! Submitting a link doesn’t guarantee that it will be included in an OTW post, and inclusion of a link doesn’t mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.
We released several batches of bug fixes and code updates in December, focusing on error handling, improvements to the posting and browsing of works, and largely invisible code optimization. Many thanks to our coders, code reviewers, and testers!
On December 3, we made some improvements to how we index information for admin user search.
On December 11, we deployed a batch of miscellaneous bug fixes and improvements. (We skipped version 0.9.448.)
<img> HTML into a plain link. We have now updated our help text to reflect this practice where it applies.http protocol instead of https. We now make sure that all links start with https.We deployed another batch of improvements on December 15, including some small fixes to the work form in particular.
December 18 saw another release of a few fixes and updates. The Open Challenges page will now show all challenges that currently accept sign-ups, even if they aren’t allowing new works to be added yet.
On December 29, another small batch of fixes went out to ring in the new year!