New universe discovery page

We have made a major change to how universes are presented. Now if a universe doesn’t have active blog it will show a new landing page designed along the lines of a story preview page.

This is our first draft and we will iterate on this. Please let us know what you think.

Automatic topic creation from blog post

New feature for forums in blogs. Now after a new blog post is published you can set it up that it will create a forum topic in a specified category so that you can follow the discussion there.

This is the initial implementation, so there are still some rough edged, but we’ll keep on improving and adding features that work across features.

New encyclopedia categories

We are constantly thinking about improving the encyclopedia. Given the complexity of the system we are careful about any big changes as is (though a new design is on our roadmap). But we can very easily add new categories. Well, due to an error it was discovered that we had a backlog of new categories that were ready to be added, but we never hit the switch. Now that we were adding 2 new extra we found it and fixed it, so these are the new categories that you can enjoy in encyclopedia:

• Buildings

• Jobs

• Vehicles

• Diseases

• Traditions

• Food

• Sports

• Schools

• Continents

• Countries

• Landmarks

• Settlements

Consent form

This one was the least fun thing that we have done for this release and we didn’t really wanted it. But realities of business and legislation did force our hand. So you will now see the usual cookie banner when you visit the site which will allow you to turn of analytical trackers. We don’t really have cookies for those, but that doesn’t matter.

We currently use Ostr.io for basic tracking and analytics (we use their service for other things around SEO as well). We are also trying a bit of advertising on the Czech market where we have Sklik analytics that track if people sign-up and where they come from. We will probably move this into the marketing section so that you can better set things up as you want. But that will be after we add a few more services or something similar that would require us to update this component.

Bug fixes & small improvements

• Fixed an issue with non-English characters not displaying properly in various places in the workshop.

• Fixed an issue of story text not displaying when re-opening page (CTRL + SHIFT + R is your friend if something similar happens again).

• Improved early access information on chapters listing.

• Extended settings for email notifications. Right now it only saves your preference and we will be implementing this more in the next releases.