New: A huge update is now out. Here's a brief overview of all the new stuff.

Hey all!

I'm super excited to finally get this huge release live. It has some of the really-big features that people have been asking for for years now, that I've been putting off because they were such large features and I wanted to do them right.

Since this update has so much new stuff I'll probably do some more in-depth blog posts on each new feature soon, but I wanted to post a quick something before bed outlining what all is new for people who feel a little adventurous and want to explore on their own first. :)

So…

• You can now switch between light and dark mode across the entire site from the "Quick actions" dropdown on the top-right of any page.

• Premium users can now create Timelines. The editor is still in beta, so please leave any feedback you have in the form linked at the top of the page! Check out timelines by clicking "Timelines" under "Writing" in the sidebar.

• You can now follow other users and post directly to your followers while sharing your pages with them. Each share also has a comments section for you to hold a discussion about the shared page. Check out the "Stream" under "Community" in the sidebar. You can also browse a stream of posts from worldbuilders around the world!

• You can now submit your pages to public collections called, uh, Collections. These collections are themed around specific themes and page types and should be fun to build collaborative collections of our pages together. Once you get accepted to a collection, it'll show up on your profile.

• You can now block other users. You won't see content on their profiles or any of their comments on the forums.

• You now have a showcase on your profile for your universes, with big blocks to entice your followers to dig in and get lost in your worlds. The rest of profiles have also been mostly redesigned.

• You can now choose to disable social features completely. You can also choose to make your profile private. Check these settings out in your account settings.

• Worldbuilding pages got a souped-up references boost. Whenever you link any page to a timeline, a collection, or a share in the stream, you'll see automatic links created to help you track all the activity about your page in one place.

• There's now a Help Center in the Data Vault. This page has links to submit bug reports, get help, give overall site feedback, and submit more specialized feedback about certain features. I plan on filling this out with an FAQ and tutorials on how to use the site.

There's a lot of other small tweaks and polish around the site, as well as over a dozen bugfixes for super niche cases that have cropped up from several years of running the site now (and what a journey it's been!).

I hope everyone enjoys these features. I think they're all super exciting ways to augment your worldbuilding process and should have something for everyone.

Happy worldbuilding!

@Carrots That's the number of people currently following the thread – in other words, the number of people that'll see the bell notification for that thread when browsing the forums. In this specific case, it's mostly from people with the forums setting to automatically follow new threads in the Announcements board, but other reasons someone might be following a thread are:

1. You posted in the thread, automatically following it
2. You manually followed the thread
3. Someone mentioned you in the thread

I thought it was a nice little indicator to show how many people were following a thread even if they weren't commenting. Who is doing the following isn't visible, but it might show some thread authors they've got a bigger audience than they thought. :)

@ninja_violinist Thanks! I tweaked that editor design for weeks straight before I was finally happy enough to release it, haha. It still has a few rough edges, but it'll only get better from here; I figured it'd be better to get an initial version out so people can be using it while I improve it further instead of just waiting forever until it was perfect!

OMG WE FINALLY HAVE DARK MODE THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hmm, I don't have an iPad to test dark mode out on but I'll figure something out.

Working on the Error 500s right now. Good news is they aren't caused by any bugs, so if you refresh they should immediately go away. We just have a lot of people coming back to the site right now and I need to scale servers and the database back up to handle them all. A good problem to have. :)

Also, it's always so nice to stay up late putting out a big release and then wake up to tons of comments about it in the morning. Thanks, everyone. :)