Week Eleven Site Updates

Posted by Eric · October 12, 2026

This was a big week! There have been about 230 changes since the last update.

We finished two feature themes, Reading and Navigation and Play and Session Tools. We also fixed 25 bugs, and 22 additional character sheet layouts are live. We also closed a few gaps around blocking and joining games, and your Private Notes from the old site are back.

Feature Theme: Reading and Navigation

Last week we said this theme had just started and its scope was still in flux. It’s now finished, and all of these are live:

Bookmarks: Open a post’s menu and choose Bookmark post. Your bookmarks live under your username menu, and Go to post takes you straight to the post. Add or remove bookmarks as you need to. If you lose access to a post, it drops off your list.
Compact layout: If you want to see more on one screen, go to Account Settings → Content → Density and choose Compact. Topic lists get tighter and the gaps between posts shrink, but the post cards themselves don’t change. Comfy is still the default.
Optional back-to-top button: Turn on “Always show a back-to-top button” in Account Settings. Then you can get back to the top of a thread with one click on any device, including desktop and iPhone, and you can do the same in a DM conversation. Android phones still get the button by default since they don’t have a native touch interface.
Profiles have tabs: User profiles have been completely reorganized into tabs. Topics lists the topics the user started, and Posts has a Go to post link on every entry, so you don’t have to hunt through the thread for it. You’ll only see topics and posts you’re allowed to read. Members can also show a Friends tab. It’s hidden unless the member turns it on in their Social settings.
Hide signatures: Turn off your signature on a single post from the post composer. GMs can also hide signatures for everyone in a whole forum or a single thread.
Order topics: GMs can sort a forum’s pinned topics A–Z, oldest first, or newest first in one go. Open up Manage Forum → Order Topics and pick what you want; every reader sees that order. You can still organize individual topics afterwards.
Deeper forums: GMs can nest forums up to four levels deep, move an existing forum under another one, and see every level on the game’s forum index.
Resources folders you can link to: A Resources folder now has its own address, so you can copy the link and send someone straight to it. GMs can pin a folder to the game’s tab bar, and you can sort Resources by name, date added, or type. Your choice is remembered.
Pin your own tabs: Players can now pin forums and topics to their own tab bar under My tabs, the same way GMs could already customize the game’s tabs.

That’s eleven of your feature requests. While reviewing the epic we found a couple of bigger requests related to the post composer that were too big to squeeze in, so they’ve been moved into their own Writing Workspace epic for later.

Bonus Feature Theme: Play and Session Tools

We picked this theme because, having finished up the prior theme mid-week, we needed something small enough to finish in the remaining couple days before the weekly update.

Posting deadlines: A thread’s deadline now lists who has posted and who it’s Waiting on. Once the deadline passes, that becomes Did not post. A topic row in the forum list shows a small posted/total count next to the clock, so you can see progress without opening the thread. GMs also get a Posting deadlines card on their game’s forum page that lists every active deadline in the game.
Clone a poll: Running the same vote again and again? Use Clone poll on the post’s Clone button, or the new Clone button on the poll banner at the top of the topic, then choose Use cloned poll in any composer’s Poll tab.
Ongoing effects: Now you can keep track of ongoing effects (bless, curse, shaken, etc.) by using + Effect under a character’s postbit in In-Character topics. You can give it a note and say how long it lasts. It defaults to the character associated with the post, but you can tick checkboxes to affect any/all characters at once. Both GMs and players can do this. Applying and clearing an effect each shows up in the thread’s timeline. Every post shows the effects that were active when it was written, so editing an old post later doesn’t rewrite its history. The composer’s preview reminds you which effects are active right now.

Polls didn’t have a section in the help guide before. They do now, and ongoing effects have one too: Forums and Posting → Polls and → Ongoing effects.

One item tied to the theme, loot accounting, needs a design of its own. We’re grouping it into a future “GM status board”.

The next feature epic is Maps and Calendar. A few pieces of it that were effectively bug fixes are already done:

Multi-day calendar events now show on every day they cover, including ones that cross into a new month or year. The calendar’s weekday header also lines up properly on phones now.
Maps update live for everyone looking at them, so you don’t have to reload to see a token move.
Tokens a GM places can only be moved by whoever placed them, so players can no longer drag the GM’s monsters around unless the GM permits it. Tokens linked to a character can still be moved by that character’s player. Existing tokens haven’t changed.

As always, there’s no date attached to the rest, though we are having good success so far with keeping to a weekly schedule. Upvotes on the theme epics in the Issue Tracker still shape what comes next. That includes epics themselves, which you can now vote on (see below).

Character Sheets: 22 More New Layouts Are Live

Last week we published the updated Pathfinder layout and said 45 new layouts were coming. The next 22 are now published. If you own a sheet on one of these systems, a banner at the top of the sheet offers to “Try the new layout”, just like it did for Pathfinder:

3:16, 13th Age, 7th Sea, Anime d20, Dominion, Dresden Files, Dungeon World, Eclipse Phase, Exalted, Iron Heroes, Legend of the Five Rings (3rd and 4th editions), Mutants & Masterminds (classic), Paranoia, Serenity, Shadowrun 3rd edition, Stargate SG-1, Starship Troopers, Star Wars (d20), Stars Without Number (starships), The Window, and Warrior Rogue & Mage.

We started with these because they’re the less-used sheets, which lets us catch any problems before the busiest systems go live. Nothing changes until you choose it, and Switch back to the classic layout in the sheet’s Actions menu works any time.

We’ll watch these for feedback for about a week, watching switch-back trends, error logs, and your issue reports. If those look clean, the next 19 layouts go out together. They include Stars Without Number, Starfinder, both World of Darkness editions, Call of Cthulhu, Savage Worlds, GURPS, FATE, Mutants & Masterminds 3e, D&D 2e and Basic, d20 Modern and Naruto. After that come the four biggest, one at a time and smallest first: Pathfinder 2e, D&D 4e, D&D 3.5, and D&D 5e last.

As of this announcement, more than 200 Pathfinder sheet owners have tried that new layout since it launched, and about four in five have stayed on it. If you switched back because something was wrong with the new layout, please report it in the Issue Tracker so we can fix it before the bigger systems follow.

One bug fix came along with this layout batch. On six of the new layouts, picking a hair, eye or skin color swatch erased what you’d typed in the box next to it. The swatch now has its own spot, and your typed description stays.

Bugs, Fixed

Posting and the editor

GM Only dice rolls could disappear from a post. The post saved, but its rolls didn’t attach to it, and we had to go database-diving to reconnect them. Rolls now attach as part of saving the post, so either both save or neither does. If something goes wrong, you get an error you can read and your draft is kept.
Inline restricted rolls didn’t say so. Inline dice in the text of a post now carry a GM only, Blind or Whisper tag, the same as the roll panel.
Post avatars weren’t sticky. If you changed a character’s avatar, every old post by that character changed with it, which was different from postbits and statblocks. Now a post keeps the avatar the character had when you posted it. That includes every post made since the July move to the new site; all of them were set to the current value, since we didn’t keep the older values.
Table widths didn’t stick. Setting one column to a percentage, then resizing the next one, sent it back to pixels. And a table you’d set to a fixed width, such as 400px, could come out more than twice that wide. Percentage, pixel and em widths now all hold, and a table that’s too wide for the page scrolls, both in the composer and in the posted thread.
“Wrap text” stopped working for tables. A wrapped table lost its width in the composer, so text wouldn’t flow around it. Fixed.
Animated images in game overviews stopped animating. Some animated images were being swapped for a still copy. Animated WebP and PNG images no longer get a still copy, and we cleared the still copies of the 173 that already had one, so they’re animating again.
Dice and card-draw panels hugged the edge of the post. Since August, these panels had been sitting flush against the left side of every post. They’re back inside the post’s margins, and on phones they now span the full width of the post.
The Quick Reply header couldn’t be selected with a keyboard. You can now tab to it and open or close it with Enter or Space.

Games and polls

Joining a recruiting game left no way to apply. If you joined an open game while it was recruiting, you couldn’t post an application afterwards. Now, when you press Join on a recruiting game, you’re asked whether to Join and post an application or Just join.
@mentions didn’t work in an application. Typing @ in your application’s introduction didn’t bring up the member list. It does now, and the people you mention are notified, as long as they can read the application.
GMs couldn’t close or delete a player’s poll. The site already allowed it, but the buttons never showed up for GMs. They do now.
Application posts could be moved, or split, into places nobody could find them. Moving an application topic into the game’s forums, or splitting posts out of an application into a new topic, could leave those posts hidden once recruitment closed, and only an admin could recover them. Both are now blocked, with an explanation. Moving posts from an application into an existing topic still works, but we’re working up a living-character feature so you won’t have to.
The access picker didn’t show who’s in the game. When you grant someone access to a thread or resource, the user search now lists game members first and labels them.

On your phone, and in your browser

The phone menu items were all different widths. In the phone menu, the items and their dropdowns now span the full column, and the profile menu no longer jumps sideways when it opens. Tapping the bell now closes the menu, so notifications aren’t hidden behind it.
The footer took up three tall rows on phones. Now it takes two, and the contents are purposefully laid out.
Long tags didn’t break at phone width. Tags now wrap rather than spilling across the right edge.
Some ad blockers broke every thread page. One member’s script filter blocked a single small stylesheet because of its file name, and that took down every thread page for them. Now a blocked stylesheet only costs that one bit of styling, and our file names no longer match common filter rules.

Your account

The account recovery page was confusing. “Email me a reset link instead” was a small text link that didn’t look like something you could click. If you hadn’t set up recovery questions, the page showed a red error with nowhere to go next. Now you enter your email first. Then you either get your recovery question, with a proper Email me a reset link instead button, or the page offers to email you a reset link straight away.

The Issue Tracker

You couldn’t upvote epics. Even though we asked you to upvote epics last week, it wasn’t possible—whoops! Now you can. That matters, because epics are how we choose the next feature theme.
Issue search now covers comments, and not just titles and descriptions. So if a problem was only ever described in a reply, “search before filing” will find it. You can also tick Issues in the site-wide search, and matching issues now appear on the first page of results instead of five pages in.

Safety: Blocking Users and Joining Games

Joining a game now requires a verified email, the same as applying already did. Accepting a GM’s invitation doesn’t, because that’s a reply to someone who contacted you first. Spam accounts were using self-join to reach game rosters, and this closes that route.
Someone a GM has blocked can no longer apply to or join their games. Before, a blocked user could still apply to a GM’s advertised game, or join an open game outright. Now, if any of the game’s GMs has blocked them, they’re told plainly that they can’t join. We considered hiding the reason, but an advertisement invites contact, and a vague message only leads to confused bug reports.
Staff can’t block or be blocked. Moderators need to be able to see what members post, and members need to be able to hear from moderators. Blocks that were placed on someone before they became staff are paused. They take effect again if that person steps down.

We also closed two holes that we found while working on other things:

Posting as someone else’s character was possible. A maliciously crafted request could post as, or edit a post to show, a character belonging to another member, or from another game. Now the site checks that the character is yours and belongs to the topic’s game, both when you post and when you edit.
Map token libraries were visible to players. When players added a token to a map, the picker could show the GM’s prepared tokens, including monsters for encounters the players hadn’t reached yet. Now only a game’s GMs can see its token library. Players see their own uploads, public tokens, and tokens already on the map they’re editing.

Your Old Private Notes Are Back

On the OGWM site, you could keep Private Notes, a notebook only you could read. Many of you kept character details in it, but these notes were never brought over to the new site. They are now. If you had any, you’ll find each one as a topic in your own private notes forum, with its original date. As before, only you can read them.

Under The Floorboards

Hover cards load faster. The card that pops up when you hover over a username used to count every post that person had ever made. That count was the slowest part of the card, and it included posts in private games you couldn’t read. We’ve removed it. The card still links to their posts.
A malformed link now gets a “bad request” instead of a “server error”, which keeps our error logs focused on real problems.

Every Site Update So Far

What’s Next

If you own a sheet on one of the 22 systems, try the new layout: Your feedback decides when the next 19 go out. If you switch back, a quick note telling us why is the most useful thing you can send us.
Try bookmarks and Compact density: They’re both off the beaten path, in a post’s menu and in Account Settings.
GMs: look at your game’s forum page for the Posting deadlines card, and try Order Topics on a forum that needs specific organization.
Upvote the epics you want next, now that voting on them works.
If you reported one of these twenty-five bugs, please check it. If it’s still happening, reopen your ticket.

Keep on weaving those myths!

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