Subscribers

Guild Exclusive

This is a guild-only feature. To get access, Join the Worldbuilder's Guild!

The Subscribers feature lets you make private content visible to specific people. There are several ways to use this feature, including self-assigned subscribers, password activation, and Patreon import.

What is a subscriber?

A subscriber is somebody who can read the secrets and other private content in your world. Take a look at the Guide to Secrets to learn what they are and how they work. You can also make your world private as a whole, and then make certain articles viewable by your subscribers.
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.

Setting up subscribers

1. Create a subscriber group

Subscribers are organised in subscriber groups. To create one, click the button with the padlock icon at the bottom of the sidebar:

In the Access Rights page, choose the option Subscriber 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.
There are three checkboxes that you can use to toggle additional group settings:

• Visibility: make the group name invisible from their subscribers.
• Self assigning: let your readers assign themselves to a subscriber group (see below for more information).
• Default: if you want all of you private articles to be available to this group by default, check this box. Any players you invite to a campaign of this world will be automatically added to the default group.

If the subscriber group you're creating is self-assignable, you can also set mutually exclusive tags. If three subscriber groups have the same tag and a user picks a second group from the three, they'll be automatically removed from the first one.
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.

There are two additional buttons next to their names, which you can use to copy two different BBCode tags:

• Self-assignable button: this will copy a BBCode tag that you can paste anywhere to generate a button. If any logged-in reader clicks the button, they'll be added to the group.
• Subscriber container: paste these tags anywhere. Anything you write between them will be visible to members of this subscriber group only.

2. Adding subscribers

After you have created a group, you can start adding subscribers to it. 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 button to remove it from a group, and the green sign to add it to another group:

Making content available to subscribers

Articles

To let your subscribers read private articles, go to the article you want to make available and find the top panel in the right sidebar. Make sure that it's set as Private. Then, click the green button and choose from the list of subscriber groups. To remove a group, click the red button next to the group you want to remove.
The article will then be visible to you and the selected group(s) only.

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.
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

Self-assignable groups

This feature is available to Grandmaster and Sage guild members.

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

This feature is available only to Sage guild members.

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/world/activate). It looks like this:

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

Adding subscribers through email

This feature is available only to Sage guild members.

You can also add several subscribers at once if you have their emails (useful if you have a Patreon page, for example). To do so, use the Add subscribers to group (multi emails) panel in the Subscribers tab.
Make sure there's a single email per line and that you choose the right subscriber group in the drop-down. If you want to make sure there are no duplicates with the subscribers you already have add to the world, type PURGE in the bottom text box before clicking the Add Subscribers to Group button.

FAQ

Do subscribers need to be Guild members?

No. Anyone with an account can become a subscriber.

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?

No. Private worlds overwrite the privacy state of anything within it. Subscriber groups are necessary to manage access.

How does Patreon importing work?

This is a Sage-only feature and it's not an automatic process due to technical limitations. To import your Patreon supporters, use the method described in the "Adding subscribers through email" section of this guide.

See also