Sunset ^beta

While browsing WayBack Machine's AO3 archives from 2008, I noticed they used to have a button that said "Try a new author!" and it linked to a random site user. I thought that was cute so I upgraded the code to the current Rails otwarchive uses and now we have it on the homepage!

For other otwarchive admins, you can implement this using this link, it's pretty easy.

EDIT, 12/29/25: I didn't think this needed its own news post so I added it on to this one. I've done some much needed updates on Sunset, such as:

-Linked to the content policy in the about menu
-Changed the content policy because why was it entirely in bold text until now
-Added a site button to footer and about page so you can link to us if you want
-Changed the embed description so link embeds for Sunset no longer say it's a project of the OTW

Hope you're all doing well. :)

Sunset will be going down on November 14th at 7:00PM EST to add its first new feature! I’ve been playing around with Ruby on Rails and have developed a very basic status update + timeline view for Sunset. Your status will show up on the timeline page, as well as your user page, if it is set. New status button will be available from the users page, the "post" dropdown, and the timeline will be available from the "browse" dropdown. You can optionally add current mood, music, and an icon, which will be resized to 50px, so I suggest using something relatively square!

You can’t comment on status updates at the moment, and this is intentional; I’m trying to keep Sunset an archive for now, not social media. It’s just a fun little place to promote your works, show off the fic you’re currently most proud of, promo your friends fics, etc.

Please do not misuse this feature i.e. use it to spread hate. I developed it out of love!!

If you'd like a live preview, you can go here for the profile view, and here for the timeline view.

If you run an otw-archive site and would like to implement this feature, I documented how I did it here: at this link.

Thanks! I'm so, so excited for this :)