Updates

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

The fix round before launch

Version 0.13.16 · September 5, 2026

Releases 0.13.7 to 0.13.16.

Reading and following

  • A Following page lists the authors, series and books you follow.
  • Reply to a comment, one level deep.
  • Every page has a descriptive title in the browser tab, and error pages look like the rest of the site.

Accounts

  • The username picker says as you type whether a name is free.
  • Notification preferences moved onto the Edit Profile page, and the newsletter signup fills in your address when you are signed in.
  • Your username shows in the phone menu with a link to Following.

Premium

  • Premium is on for everyone, with no feature switch, and beta offers the same 30-day trial as the live site.
  • Stripe Connect onboarding is live, and a rejection from Stripe comes back with a readable reason.
  • Payments made during a maintenance window are applied straight away, and cancelling through Stripe's billing portal shows on your dashboard.
  • Author subdomains work on beta, and the dashboard shows the exact address.

Layout and accessibility

  • Dashboard buttons and the search box fit a phone screen, the Save Changes button and the chapter editor's branch buttons stay on screen, the text-to-speech panel opens fully, form fields have labels, heading order is right for screen readers, and links use the site colour.
  • Cover and avatar uploads: 2 MB on free accounts, 5 MB on premium.
  • Open redirects were closed.

Fixes from the first days on AWS

Version 0.13.6 · August 15, 2026

Releases 0.13.1 to 0.13.6.

  • Content preference overrides, follower counts and chapter navigation fixed.
  • New styles and scripts are picked up right after a deploy, and the footer year updates itself.
  • Signing out clears every sign-in cookie.
  • Following a series no longer fails, and the Trending query was repaired.
  • The Stripe integration was upgraded to the current API version.
  • The classics author biography no longer carries a Project Gutenberg credit.

A new home on AWS

Version 0.13.0 · August 12, 2026

  • Writer's Grove now runs on AWS behind a content delivery network, so pages and images are served from locations near you.
  • Every release is a tagged deploy, with database changes applied automatically as part of it.
  • Requests that bypass the content delivery network are rejected.
  • A book or series can only be published once it has at least one published chapter.

Sign-in limits and a reCAPTCHA fallback

Version 0.12.1 · July 29, 2026

Releases 0.12.0 and 0.12.1.

  • Limits on how often a magic link can be requested, with a reCAPTCHA checkbox as a fallback when the invisible check is not sure you are a person.

Full-text search

Version 0.11.0 · July 23, 2026

  • Search across series, books and chapters from the search box in the navigation.
  • Fixes to premium from an audit of the subscription code.
  • A security upgrade of a text-handling library.