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 30 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. If self-registration is turned off 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.

Verifying your email

If the site sends email, registering does not log you straight in. Instead we email a verification link to the address you gave. Open it within 24 hours to confirm the address. Depending on the site's settings, your account is then either ready to use or held for an administrator to approve — you will be emailed once it is approved.

If the site does not send email, there is no verification step; your account is created immediately, though it may still wait for approval.

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.

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 it up — Discord linking (see Discord).
  • Account — your account Details (change your username or email address, which asks for your current password to confirm it is you), Change password, and Delete account.
  • Appearance — your colour Theme, Editor font, 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).

Deleting your account asks for your current password and for you to type DELETE to confirm. It is permanent: your account, every story, and all of your uploaded images and covers are removed, and you cannot undo it.

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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