Word-by-word text animation, and a story others wrote in stays readable
July 2026
A maintenance release, built from what turned up while using 0.10.0. Most of it is small. Two items are not: text animation went from advertised-but-unusable to working in one click, and a story other people have written into can no longer be pulled back out from under them.
Chapter text can fade in word by word. Set Chapter Text's variant to Span per word in the Designer, open the new Chapter Text Word element, and click the flask icon next to Css Extensions. It fills in a complete animation, keyframes and all. This was always possible in principle and effectively impossible in practice: the built-in examples did not add up to a working animation between them, and the button that loads one was not rendered. Both are fixed, and the element now says what it needs.
A story others have written into stays where they can reach it. Once someone else has written a chapter or added a choice, the story can no longer be switched back to Private. Unlisted is still available: it takes the story out of every listing while the link keeps working for the people who contributed. The Private option simply disappears from the dropdown and the info button explains why.
Two story settings stopped hiding behind publication. Exclude from crossovers and Exclude added choices used to freeze the moment a story went public. They now stay editable until somebody else joins, so a story you write alone keeps its settings adjustable after you publish it.
Chapter length and language are on the Config step. They were on the first step of the creation wizard, away from the other per-story settings. Short stories show language only, since chapter length does not apply to them.
Chapter length lands closer than 0.10.0 promised. Those notes said the economical model tops out near 1,200 words whatever you pick. Measuring again for this release, every step up delivered a longer chapter, including the 2000 and 3000 settings. The numbers are still targets rather than guarantees, and how close a chapter lands depends on the model and the story.
Fewer background requests while you read. The app checked for maintenance announcements once a minute, plus once on every page change, even in a tab you were not looking at. It now checks every five minutes, stops entirely while the tab is in the background, and checks immediately when you come back. An urgent notice still appears at once.
The Animate.css checkbox is gone. If you ever ticked it, it never did anything: the library was never actually loaded. Nothing you styled with it changes, because nothing was ever applied. The word-by-word animation above is the route that does work.
Display names are stricter. Names are now compared without regard to capitalisation, so two accounts cannot hold what readers see as the same name. Names matching the site's own brand need a verified address on the matching domain.
Fixed: setting a story's image anchor failed. Choosing a reference image for image consistency returned an error every time. It now saves.
Help pages match the app again. The story creation guide described a five-step wizard that has been four steps for a while, and several guides pointed at a Preferences tab that 0.10.0 split into four. Corrected throughout.