DragonWriter

Accounts and settings

Your DragonWriter account holds your stories, your preferences, and how the site reaches you. This page covers signing up, signing in, and everything in the Settings hub.

Creating an account

Open the registration page and choose a username (3 to 15 characters: letters, numbers, dots, dashes, and underscores, starting and ending with a letter or number), enter your email address, and pick a password of at least 12 characters. For your safety, passwords are checked against known data breaches, so a password that has leaked elsewhere will be refused. You confirm the password by typing it twice.

Whether anyone can sign up themselves, and whether new accounts need approval before they can log in, are both decided by the site administrator in the admin settings. The form says what will happen once you send it: a link to follow, a wait for approval, or both. If registration is closed you will see a short notice instead of the form, and you will need to ask the site owner for an account.

Some sites run invite-only. When that is the case, the registration form asks for a referral code as well — enter the code you were given to sign up. See Referrals below for generating codes to share with others.

Confirming your email address

If the site sends email, registering does not log you straight in. Instead we email a confirmation link to the address you gave. Open it within 24 hours and press Confirm my address on the page it opens. Depending on the site's settings, you are then either signed in there and then, or your account waits for an administrator to approve it, and you are emailed once it is approved.

If the link has expired or never arrived, use Resend a confirmation link on the login page. A new link replaces any you were sent before. A sign-up that is still unconfirmed seven days after it was made, or after its last new link, is removed, so the address is free to use again.

If the site does not send email, there is no link to follow. Your account is created straight away and waits for an administrator to approve it.

Logging in and out

Log in with either your username or your email address, plus your password. To protect your account, repeated failed login attempts from the same place are temporarily blocked: after too many wrong guesses you are asked to wait about 15 minutes before trying again.

Logging out ends your current session on that device. A session you have not used for 30 days signs itself out.

Forgotten password

On the login page, follow the Forgot your password? link and enter your email address. If an account exists for it, we send a reset link that stays valid for one hour. For privacy, you see the same confirmation whether or not the address is registered.

The reset link lets you choose a new password (again at least 12 characters, and again screened against known breaches). Setting a new password signs you out of every device, so you will log in fresh afterwards.

If the site does not send email, password resets by email are unavailable and you will need to contact the site owner.

The Settings hub

Everything about your account lives on the Settings page, organised into tabs:

  • General — your Usage (a read-only view of how many stories and how much image storage you are using against your limits), your Timezone (below), and — where the site has set them up — Discord linking (see Discord) and Matrix linking (see Matrix).
  • Account — your Username, your Email address, Change password, your Sessions, and Delete account. Changing your username, email address or password asks for your current password to confirm it is you (see Your account tab).
  • Appearance — your colour Theme, Editor font, Editor background (a personal Unsplash image behind your writing, where the site has Unsplash enabled — see Appearance), and the Save status indicator (how the autosave marker — Saved / Saving… / Unsaved changes — looks in the scene and note editors: coloured or subtle text, or coloured or subtle cloud icons). See Appearance.
  • Profile — your Profile picture and your Bio, a short introduction (up to 1,000 characters) shown on your public profile. See Appearance for the picture.
  • Notifications — choose how you hear about each kind of activity and set your email delivery schedule (see Engagement and notifications), manage your writing Reminders (below), the Install app button (below), and your push Devices.
  • Editor rule sets — build per-story auto-corrections for the editor: curly quotes, dashes, and your own word replacements. See Editor rule sets.
  • Referrals — on invite-only sites, generate invite codes to share (below).

Your account tab

Changing your email address. Enter the new address and your current password. When the site sends email, we send a link to the new address, and your account keeps its current address until you follow that link, so a typo costs you a retype rather than your account. The tab shows the address it is waiting on, and you can cancel the change there. Once the change goes through, your old address is told about it, in case it was not you. When the site does not send email, the address changes straight away.

Confirming your address. If your address has never been confirmed, for example because your account was made while the site was not sending email, the tab says so, and nothing is emailed to you until you confirm it. Use Send me a confirmation link to do that.

Sessions. The tab lists everywhere you are signed in: the device, when it signed in and when it was last used, with the one you are using now marked. You can sign out any other session on its own, or all of them at once with Sign out everywhere else. Changing your password also signs out every other device.

Changing your username. You can change your username twice in any twelve months, and the tab says how many changes you have left. Your old name is retired rather than freed: nobody else can take it, and a link to your profile under the old name takes people to your profile under the new one. You can take an old name back later, though that counts as a change too. Changing only the capitals, such as dragonlady to DragonLady, does not count.

Your data

Download your data, linked from the Account tab, gives you a copy of everything you have put into DragonWriter. Your account, settings, goals, statistics, badges, comments, forum posts, chat messages and notifications come as one JSON file. Each story downloads on its own, as a DragonWriter file holding the whole story with its notes, cast, places and images, which you can import again, or as Markdown.

Deleting your account

Delete my account on the Account tab opens a page that shows exactly what will happen before you confirm:

  • what is deleted: your stories, with their word count, and your stories in the library, with the comments, likes and bookmarks on them, as well as your goals, statistics, badges and settings
  • what stays: forum threads and posts you wrote, and your comments and replies on other people's stories, because they are part of conversations with other people; they stay, shown as written by A deleted account

To confirm, type your username and your current password. Deletion happens straight away and cannot be undone, so download your data first if you want a copy. Afterwards you are signed out and returned to the home page.

Keep my username reserved is ticked by default, so nobody else can take your name and links to your old profile never lead to a stranger. Untick it to let the name, and any names you retired by renaming, be taken by somebody else.

If you are the site's only administrator, your account cannot be deleted until another account has been made an administrator.

Timezone

On the General tab, set your timezone so that day-based features line up with your real day — daily word counts, for example, roll over at midnight in the timezone you choose. Use the Use my browser's timezone button to fill it in automatically from your device.

Referrals

When a site is invite-only, the Referrals tab appears in your settings. From there you can generate invite codes to share. Each code works once and expires 30 days after you create it, and you can add an optional private note (up to 60 characters) to remind yourself who a code is for.

How many codes you can create is set by the administrator: ordinary members get a monthly allowance that does not carry over, while administrators can generate as many as they like. Whether the site is invite-only at all, and the monthly limit, are both admin settings.

Writing reminders

Reminders are gentle nudges to come back and write. Add one from the Reminders section of the Notifications tab: choose Every day or Every week (weekly reminders also pick a day), a time of day (set to the nearest 15 minutes), and an optional message — leave the message empty and we will pick something for you. You can edit or delete each reminder in place, and you can have up to ten at once.

Reminders use your timezone, and always send straight away rather than being collected into a digest. Choose where a reminder reaches you — in-app, email, or push — under Notifications.

Web-push notifications

Push notifications let the site alert you even when DragonWriter is not open. They are enabled per device, not per account: turning them on affects only the browser or installed app you are using right now, and each device you want notified is added separately from its own Devices list under Notifications. You can remove any device later, including a lost phone, from any browser.

On iPhone and iPad, push works only after you have added DragonWriter to your Home Screen (see below).

Installing the app

You can install DragonWriter to your device for a full-screen, app-like experience with its own home-screen icon. The Install app button on the Notifications tab of your settings is enabled when your browser supports one-tap install. If it is disabled, the app may already be installed or one-tap install is not available. To install manually, follow the steps for your device:

  • Android — open DragonWriter in Chrome, tap the menu (three dots), then Install app (or Add to Home screen).
  • iPhone and iPad — open in Safari, tap the Share icon, then Add to Home Screen.
  • Windows — open in Chrome or Edge, click the install icon at the right of the address bar, or open the menu (three dots) and choose Install DragonWriter.
  • Mac — open in Safari, click the Share icon, then Add to Dock.

The installed app is a shortcut to the live site: it needs an internet connection to work and does not cache your stories for offline use.

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