Updates

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

Community, accessibility and premium

Version 0.8.0 · January 18, 2026

Follow authors, series and books

  • Follow an author, or just a series or a book, and get an email when new chapters, books or series appear. Each notification type can be switched off in your settings.

Chapter comments

  • Comment on chapters, reply in threads, see an author badge on the author's replies, and report a comment for review.

Share buttons

  • Copy a link, or share a chapter, book, series or profile to your device's share menu, Twitter/X, Facebook, Reddit, LinkedIn or email.

Text-to-speech

  • Listen to a chapter with your browser's voices: play and pause, skip by sentence, adjust the speed, follow the highlighted words, and auto-play the next chapter. Authors can switch this off for their work.

Trigger warnings and content filters

  • Authors add warnings from 26 predefined choices at the series, book or chapter level. Readers choose which warnings to hide, and can block AI-generated or mature content, with a View Anyway option.

Install as an app

  • Add Writer's Grove to your home screen or desktop, and read saved chapters offline.

Public author profiles

  • Every author has a page at /u/username with an avatar, bio, follower count, published works and links.

Premium

  • Premium subscriptions through Stripe with a 30-day free trial, and a personal subdomain at yourname.writersgrove.net that switches off if the subscription ends.

Home page

  • Seven carousels: Latest Releases, New Authors, Most Popular, Trending, Hidden Gems, Completed Series and Continue Reading. Empty ones stay hidden.

Mobile and accessibility

  • Smooth carousel scrolling, no sideways overflow, sign-in and sign-out in the phone menu, and full keyboard and screen reader support aiming at WCAG 2.1 AA.

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.