Updates

What has changed on Writer's Grove, newest first.

The author dashboard

Version 0.4.0 · December 19, 2025

Writers can now write. Patch releases 0.4.1 to 0.4.8 followed through January 5.

Dashboard

  • Stats at a glance: ranking, series, book and chapter counts, total words, reviews and average rating, follows and comments.
  • Create series and books with covers, descriptions and keywords; mark them mature or AI-generated; switch between Draft and Published; delete what you no longer want.

Chapter editor

  • A rich text editor with bold, italic, headings, lists and quotes. Write, add a description and keywords, then publish or save as a draft.

Agreements

  • New authors accept the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy before publishing.

Behind the scenes

  • The site moved to a single server for simpler deploys, with security hardening and accessibility work for screen readers and keyboard navigation.

Accounts and magic link sign-in

Version 0.3.0 · December 16, 2025

Sign in without a password

  • Enter your email and click the link we send. Links expire after five minutes.
  • One sign-in works across all of Writer's Grove, including author subdomains.

Claim your username

  • New users pick a username after signing in: 3 to 20 characters, starting with a letter, with letters, numbers and underscores only. Common terms and names that could be used to impersonate someone are reserved.

Reader and Author modes

  • A toggle in the navigation switches between reading and a preview of the author dashboard that was on its way.

Protecting your work from scrapers

  • Requests are limited to human reading speeds, and repeated rapid requests trigger longer and longer timeouts with a countdown showing when you can continue. Normal readers never notice; bulk scrapers wait a very long time.

The first reading experience on beta

Version 0.2.0 · December 14, 2025

Writer's Grove moved from a landing page to a working reading site on beta.writersgrove.net.

Reading

  • A home page grid of series with cover images, and tabs for Latest Releases, New Authors and Most Popular.
  • Series pages that list the books, and book pages with Start Reading and Latest Chapter buttons and the full chapter list.
  • Chapter pages with clean typography, breadcrumbs, Previous and Next buttons, and the left and right arrow keys to move between chapters.
  • Page changes without full reloads.

Behind the scenes

  • The database moved to PostgreSQL, with clean indexed addresses such as /u/classics/frankenstein/volume-1/letter-1.
  • Beta was seeded with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Writer's Grove opens its doors

Version 0.1.0 · September 18, 2025

Not much to see yet, but the foundations are in place.

  • A newsletter signup at writersgrove.net so you can hear when the site is ready.
  • A blog for release notes and news.
  • The WritersGrove organization on GitHub, where our policies were first published.
  • A Discord server for early readers and writers.