Self-assigned subscribers: interact with your readers!

If you are a Guild member, you probably know about subscribers —a feature that allows you to choose who can see certain pieces of content. But what if I told you that your readers can assign themselves to subscriber groups? Self-assigned subscribers might not seem very useful at first, but it’s actually a very powerful feature! Keep reading to know more.

The information on this blog post might be outdated! Check the documentation for the most up-to-date information about this feature.

What are self-assigned subscribers?

Before talking about the flexibility that this feature gives you, let’s get the technical explanations out of the way. Assuming you have created a subscriber group, click this button in the access rights page:

Paste the result anywhere in your world, keeping in mind that it should be visible to the people who you want to offer the option to. The result will look like this:

If someone clicks the Party link, they will automatically be added to the Party subscriber group. Then, you can use the [subcontainer] tag to set which group can see a specific piece of content. —learn the details in the Codex guide. Anyway, time to see how you can use this in your world!

Using self-assigned subscribers to adapt your content

Needless to say, using this to hide game-breaking secrets can be dangerous, as anyone would be able to see them. But there are several ways to play with content to make it more immersive using this feature. And remember that you can use this feature with others! For example, adding them in the global world announcement will make them appear in every single article.

Factions, species, and teams

Different groups of people have different views of the world. Using this feature, you can let your reader experience the world from the perspective of a specific faction. Someone reading from the perspective of the evil demonic cult will have a very different experience than someone who has joined the church of light! This is not limited to factions, though: an article about elves will likely have a very different tone if read from a stereotypical dwarf’s point of view.

Pekkola has a selector for cultures so that you can interact with the world and see what each culture thinks about a certain topic.

Language picker

Check out Andrawyn to see this in action!

You can use this feature to let your readers choose in which language they want to read your world. This is useful for worldbuilders that are bilingual and have an audience in their language but still want to participate in the wider worldbuilding internet community. For example, Davina, the creator of Andrawyn, has a language picker in the world global announcement box.

RPG systems

Self-assigned subscriber groups will also come in handy if your setting is system-agnostic. Let your readers choose their favourite system to hide content that is relevant to other systems! This can include stat blocks for creatures, class or racial features, and so on.

On the flip side, if your setting is not just for role-playing, you can let your readers completely opt-out of RPG content to get the most immersive experience! Alternatively, you can let them opt-in to prose content, for example.

Sensitive content filters

Look how fancy this looks in Melior!

If your world contains some content that needs filtering, such as spoilers or graphic content, you can also use this feature. Instead of the spoiler tags, let your readers choose if they want to see this content at all. It’s much cleaner and looks very fancy!

This use case is especially useful in the global announcement, as you can see in Melior, TJ’s world —it’s looking amazing!

This post is packed with ideas, but I probably missed some —how are you using this feature in your world? Let me know in the comments!