Guide to Subscribers

Subscribers are a Guild Feature!
If you want to use it, please consider supporting World Anvil!

Sometimes you want to hide parts of your content to most people but make it visible to certain people. You can achieve this by using the Subscribers feature.

What is a subscriber?

A subscriber is somebody who can read the secrets and other private content that you can pepper throughout your world. You can read about secrets and how to make them by clicking here.
You can have several groups with subscribers, meaning that you can give different secrets to different groups of subscribers. The higher your Guild rank, the more subscribers you can have.
If you are a Guild member you can also make your world private, but you can make articles viewable by your subscribers.

Let's do it!

Creating a group

Before adding subscribers, you will need to create a subscriber group. To do so, first go the Access Rights page of your world from the left sidebar (link highlighted in red):

In the Access Rights page, choose the option Groups and use the right sidebar to create a group.

Only Title is mandatory; you can leave Description and Position empty. In Position, you can enter a number between 1 and 100. Groups with higher numbers appear first in the list of groups. After you have created the group, you will see it listed:

Each group in the list has three buttons, from left to right:

• Edit: it will take you to a page to edit the group's settings (title, description and position).
• Subscribers: it will show you who is part of this group.
• Group Assets: it contains a list of all pages that this group can view.

Adding subscribers

It's time to add people to the group! Select Subscribers and use the sidebar to add a subscriber to a group. Note that the subscriber needs a World Anvil account. You can add a subscriber to multiple groups, but all subscribers need to be in at least one group.

After adding it to the group, the subscriber will appear in the list of subscribers. Use the red — sign to remove it from a group, and the green + sign to add it to another group:

And we are done! But keep reading to know how to make content available to subscribers only!

Adding subscribers to your content

Articles

To let your subscribers read private articles you first go to the article you want to make available. The Article List can help you finding your private articles.
Go edit the desired article. At the top of the page, you will see these tabs. Click on Access:

If you choose Private in the first box and your subscriber group, the article will only be visible to you and the chosen group.

Secrets

Secrets are always private. When creating them, you can optionally choose subscribers groups so that they can see the secret. If you don't choose any, only you and your co-authors will be able to see it. When creating a secret, you can choose one or more groups from the list. Afterwards, you can also edit the secret and change the subscriber groups, of course.

Categories

You can also give your subscribers access to an entire category. To do so, go edit your category and, at the bottom of the page, set it as Private and choose the subscriber group.
See also: Guide to Creating and Using Categories

Maps

Maps have different parameters to set their level of privacy. You can make the whole map available to subscribers only from the Map Settings (Display & Privacy) tab you will find in the map edit page:

Set it as private and choose the subscriber groups. You can do the same with specific layers, marker groups or individual markers, from their respective tabs. If a marker is set to a marker group, it will automatically have the visibility level set for its group.
See also: Guide to Maps

Timelines

Timelines as a whole can also be hidden from everyone except subscribers. Edit your timeline and edit the visibility setting in the Edit Timeline box of the right sidebar. Note that you will have to click on Show advanced options to see the visibility settings (they will show up at the bottom of the section).
You can do the same for individual historical entries, from their respective edit pages.
See also: Guide to Timelines

Images

Finally, images can also be private. At the bottom of the image edit page (or when you are first uploading it), you can find the usual visibility settings. In both cases, you will have to click the Show advanced options link to edit visibility settings.
See also: Guide to Images

FAQ

Do subscribers need to be Guild members? No, they don't. Only the world creator needs a Guild account.

How many subscribers can I have? The higher your guild rank, the more subscribers you can have. Note that the subscriber slots count for all your worlds (i.e. If you have ten subscriber slots, you can have ten in a single world or five in two different worlds, but not ten in each world).

If the world is set as Private, can certain articles be Public? Yes, but since the main page will be private, public articles will have to be accessed from a direct link.

See also

Subcontainers

Subcontainers are tags that let you make a specific piece of article content available to a subscriber group only without having to create a ecrets. To get the tag, go to the list of subscriber groups and click this button:

Click to enlarge

A tag will be copied to your clipboard. Paste it anywhere and replace the Add_your_content_here part with whatever content you want to show your subscribers only. The result should look something like this:

[subcontainer:ID]
Lorem Ipsum this is the hidden content
(but visible to the selected subscriber group).
The "ID" part would be a string of letters
and numbers and you should not edit it.
[/subcontainer]

Self-assignable groups

Self-assignable are Grandmaster (and above) feature!
If you want to make use of this feature, consider supporting World Anvil or upgrading your subscription.

You can also let your readers to assign themselves into a specific subscriber group. To do so, go to the Subscriber groups section of the Access Rights page and click the copy button next to the name of the group you want to make self-assignable:

This will copy a BBCode tag into your clipboard that you can paste in any BBCode-enabled text field of your world (it will look something like [subgroup:GROUP-ID|WORLD-ID]). Use the following syntax to generate the result in the screenshot below: [subgroup:XX]Party[/subgroup] (replace the first tag by the proper one you have copied).

When a logged-in reader clicks on Party, they will be added to the subscriber group and the checkbox will be filled with a check mark.

Access codes

Subscriber Access Codes are Sage (and above) feature!
If you want to make use of this feature, consider supporting World Anvil or upgrading your subscription.

This feature allows you to send an access code to someone so that they can activate their subscription to your world without you adding them manually. In your world's Access Rights page, select "Subscriber Access Codes" and fill in the sidebar. You will need to have created at least one subscriber group. The empty form looks like this:

After clicking the "Create Code" button, it will appear in the list, like that:

Your subscribers will be able to activate their subscription from a special page of your world, located at your world's URL followed by /activate (e.g. https://www.worldanvil.com/w/Melior/activate). It looks like this:

When the subscription is activated, your new subscriber will see a confirmation message at the top of the page: