In my experience, there are a few things working against this site. First of all, it's very niche, and if people know about things like worldbuilding and RPG's, they seldom ever have enough interest to get them to visit the site. Second, a lot of us worldbuilders are a private lot who clutch our secrets close to our chests so as to not ruin the surprise, should whatever we're working on be published or if we simply want to surprise our players.
But we would still like to show it to some people, right? And why should they have to create an account just to read private content? Sure, it could be said that if they really wanted to see what we're working on, then they'd go through that little extra effort, but why limit our potential audience?
If our potential viewers could somehow create a guest account (or maybe even a sign in mechanism?) to view private content, it would go a long way towards helping us gain a fan base while keeping our content private.
I'm not sure if there are any. Mostly I'm just thinking out loud about something I've noticed that could use some attention. Hopefully I'm making sense and there's not a feature like this that exists already that I simply haven't noticed, yet.
What I envision is an account that each individual creator can setup themselves with a username and password that allows the guest to access certain articles that would otherwise be private and/or members-only access. Kind of like a membership tier for an account that doesn't necessarily belong to any specific person.
Bear in mind, that I don't know about all this 'Sage' stuff, which is why I put the disclaimer out there that this could already exist in one form or another and I simply don't know about it yet. Hopefully that clears some stuff up.
Good to know! It's a shame, though...
I think shareable links, similar to Google Docs or One Drive, only visible to those who have them would be so useful to be able to send articles to my players about something relevant to their character or about something they only know!
love the idea of a sign in thing, kinda like private tumblr blogs. alternately there’s the idea of doing something like “key” links like what Toyhou.se does :0 it’s just a link that you generate so you can share a private [world, in this case] so that anyone you send the link to can see the private content.
I like the idea of something like a shareable link like you'd get in Google Drive. Maybe even a temporary link where anybody who has the link has access to the article for an hour or something and then it expires.
I get the idea behind limiting access to private worlds, but when you have people that are already paying to use a service, making them jump through hoops just because you don't think they're paying you ENOUGH to be allowed to enjoy your product in a reasonable way, is just a little on the petty side. I used to run into problems with the amount of "followers" I could have all the time, because people would come and go from my D&D group, but it wasn't like I had 200+ followers out in the big wide world, but it seems like the devs at least fixed some of this. Anything to make this easier, I will throw support behind.
I'm an advocate of guest logins/temporary access, by virtue of the fact that it's a bit obnoxious to expect my family and friends to have to create an account when the lion's share of them have NO use for WA outside of popping in to see my progress and maybe leaving a remark or two. However, I think what's proposed here goes a little too far beyond that. If one expects a private lounge in a posh restaurant, one should expect to pay a premium. That said, $300 a year isn't exactly pocket change (for most), especially just for access to a single feature. Perhaps somewhere down the line, some of these higher tier features could be offered a'la cart at a reasonable rate for people who cannot necessarily afford to pay for Sage or higher, and still have access to the features they feel they need. It's just a thought; ya'll be good to each other.
It could be something like google drive shareable links, links to private articles that are a bit different so people can't just stumble upon them. And then no account creation is needed. Maybe the link would expire after x time (larger by subscription level) so there's a monetary cause too. Just like how intellij monetised collaborations, it's kinda annoying restarting them every 30 minutes, but you're not gated off of them
So you want to private content not to be private but visible by guests without an account? World Anvil has a subscribers features that you have to pay for in order for Dimi to be able to pay you know ... for the people seeing your content. Thinking of it, you can simply get a Sage account and give out password secured articles - this exists already. :)
I'm curious who this differs from them just making an account and getting subscription role, or even a clickable link to get said subscription role. They still need to create an account. How would this be different, except that the "guest account" would be vastly limited. It would *still* require a creation of an account and a login, which is the huge step people don't want to do.
This sounds like it would be difficult to implement, but I think it would be worth the effort because it could hook some people into World Anvil who initially don't want to register for a third party site.
This has been suggested before multiple times (especially for 18+ articles), but I don't remember Dimi's response. Voting on this anyways. Hopefully it can be implemented this time! Thanks for bringing it back up. God bless!