A guided tour, a friendlier German — and ninety days before a story disappears

The last edition was almost entirely about things that had been broken more quietly than we would have liked. This week has a different shape. Two of the things in it simply did not exist before and you will notice both straight away — and in between sits a week spent mostly re-reading what we claim about ourselves. On the pages about us, in the copy that sells Premium, in the legal texts, in six store listings, in the help library. Some of it was not true, and that is the uncomfortable half of this report.

The three sentences it comes down to:

• There is now a guided tour of OutaStory. Six short tours that show you where things are — plus help exactly where the question arises, without leaving the page you are on.
• When an account is deleted, everyone knows before anything disappears. Thirty days' notice, ninety if something has been published — with a visible date on the stories themselves, and reversible at any point.
• And in German, we now say "du". Everywhere. Including the legal texts.

A guided tour of OutaStory

OutaStory has grown quickly over the last months, and so has the number of places where something useful is quietly hiding. Someone arriving today sees a home page, an editor and a profile, and is left to find the rest alone. That has been our sorest point for a while, and it is now addressed.

Six short tours walk you through the places where the most is at stake the first time you reach them: the home page, your stories, the writing editor, the reader, the cover designer and your settings. At most five steps each, skippable in one click, in both languages, and you can start them again later if you want to. Each step highlights the exact element it is talking about and explains it in a sentence.

Then there is the second half, which will probably matter more day to day: small question marks at the places where questions actually come up. One click opens the matching help article over the page you are standing on — no detour into a help centre and no finding your way back afterwards. On desktop there is also a help menu in the top bar; on a phone you will find it in your profile area.

The help library behind it grew considerably in the same pass and, more importantly, got corrected: 215 FAQ entries and 91 help articles, all of them in English and German. Two of them had told you something untrue about your own voice — they claimed a voice sample is "never shared with third parties". It is sent to our narration provider, which is precisely what the consent notice you confirm before recording says. So our help library contradicted our own consent copy. That is the worst shape a mistake in support content can take: a confident, specific reassurance that is false. It is gone.

After the first feedback on the tour we also made it a great deal easier to see — the page dims further behind it, the highlighted area gets a real glowing ring, and the explanation card no longer sits on top of the very element it is describing. That used to happen reliably whenever the button being explained was in the bottom tenth of the screen.

One warning, because it is fairer than a surprise: because so much about the tour changed, we are offering it once more to people who have already seen it or clicked it away. There are six pages, so potentially six offers, each dismissed with a single click — and after that it stays gone.

In German, we say "du"

This change is trivial to describe and was anything but trivial to make.

German has a formal and an informal way of addressing a reader, and ours was inconsistent. Part of the interface was informal, part of it formal, and the legal texts were formal almost throughout. That was never a decision — it was the result of different people writing in different corners over months, each taking their cue from whatever text happened to sit next door. It is decided now: OutaStory speaks informally. In the interface, in the hints, in the administrative screens, in the emails, in the terms of use, in the privacy policy, in the site notice, in the community rules, in the speaker and writer terms.

The reason this is work rather than a search-and-replace: in German the verb changes with the pronoun, in the middle of the sentence. "Soweit Sie Zahlungen erhalten, bleiben Sie in Ihrem Wohnsitzstaat steuerpflichtig" becomes "Soweit du Zahlungen erhältst, bleibst du in deinem Wohnsitzstaat steuerpflichtig" — three forms in one sentence. 159 places across twelve of fifteen legal documents, plus ten areas of the interface. And roughly half of all the matches had to stay exactly as they were, because a capitalised "Sie" at the start of a German sentence is usually not a form of address at all but the ordinary pronoun pointing back at the previous noun: "Your narration voice is ready! It will be used …" Every single occurrence was therefore read rather than replaced.

The same pass turned up something else we would rather say out loud than bury: our privacy policy described controls in several places that do not exist in that form. Among them, it said we ask for your date of birth in order to check that you are old enough to use the service. We do not — the field is optional and decides one thing only, which is whether age-rated stories are shown to you. A privacy text that promises more than the product does is not a safer text, it is a false one. It now says what happens.

When someone leaves: thirty days, ninety days, and a visible date

This is the second genuinely new thing this week, and it has two sides: one for the person leaving, and one for everyone who had been following their work.

Until now, deleting an account ran on a single fixed period and gave readers no warning whatsoever. A story someone was attached to could be there one day and gone the next. That is now settled differently, agreed with our legal counsel and our data protection officer:

• Thirty days when nothing was ever published. An account with no audience goes quickly.
• Ninety days as soon as there is at least one published, readable story. Anyone with an audience leaves with notice.

The period covers the whole account — author name, every pen name, every story: one departure, one date. Publishing something after the request does not extend it; withdrawing something does not shorten it. The date is fixed the moment the request is made.

And this is the part that concerns readers: nothing is hidden during that window. The stories stay fully readable, listenable and discoverable. They simply carry a quiet notice with the date from which they will no longer be available, and a countdown. Both appear for signed-out visitors too, because those are precisely the people who would otherwise walk into a hole. If the request is withdrawn the notices disappear as though nothing had happened — and it can be withdrawn right up to the last day.

At the end of the period the stories and the profile become unreachable, leave our own search, drop out of the sitemap and are submitted for removal to Google and Bing. In the same week we added the piece that was still missing: Bing is now actively told about the removed addresses rather than being left to come by and notice.

One decision stays with the account holder: what should happen to your comments? Either they stay where they are with your name anonymised — so that discussions other people took part in do not fall apart — or they go with you. Both are fine, and it is your call. The stories go offline either way.

Alongside this we went through the deletion page itself. It made a number of statements that were not accurate about what gets deleted, what gets anonymised and what remains. What it says now matches what actually happens.

A pen name is a name of its own

A pen name on OutaStory is meant to be a public identity in its own right. Not "an account with a different label on it", but an author who looks to readers exactly like any other. Who is behind it is something we know — and nobody else.

That was the intent. It was not fully honoured: in several places, what a public page served made it possible to tell that a byline was a pen name. Not as a label, but as a pattern — a field that is only filled in one of the two cases gives away just as much as a badge would. Those places are closed.

The neatest illustration of it is the deletion notice above. There is exactly one notice, and it is word for word the same whether a whole account is closing or a single pen name is being retired. It gives no reason — because the reason is precisely the sentence that would tell the two cases apart. Before, there were two notices, and which one appeared told any reader immediately what kind of identity they were looking at.

Premium: what it includes now reads the same everywhere

The important thing first, because it surprises people: Premium has nothing to do with what you are allowed to read. It never did. Every story on OutaStory is free to read and free to listen to. There is no paywall, no chapter costs money, and there are no stories reserved for subscribers.

What a subscription actually changes is short, and good:

• Reading and listening without ads.
• Offline downloads in the apps — text and audio.
• Read-along: the text is highlighted as it is narrated.
• Publishing covers without the OutaStory mark.

That is the list. And from now on that is also what it says everywhere Premium is offered. Several of those places used to say something else: "full access to every story" in the confirmation email after purchase, "priority support", "early access to new features" and "exclusive content" on the subscription page, "unlimited audio" in six store listings. None of that existed. A confirmation email that tells a paying person something false about what they just bought is the worst place in the entire product for a sentence like that, which is why it was the first thing corrected.

Fixed in passing: on the subscription page, German-speaking visitors were shown the plan descriptions in English. They are in German now.

And for writers: Premium reading time counts

The split is unchanged — 55 per cent goes to the writer. What is new is that reading time by Premium members is now attributed to the writer whose story was read. That is exactly the point of an ad-free subscription: if no advertising runs, the writer's share has to come out of the subscription. We are reconstructing the earlier months from the billing records rather than simply letting them go — it is money that belongs to someone, and that someone is not us.

Who we are, and what we had been claiming about ourselves

The "About" section used to be a wall of tiles with very little text behind it. It has substance now — and, more to the point, it has checkable substance.

• Every team member has their own page. Nine people, with their role, a description and — where they exist — links to public profiles held elsewhere. Eight of the nine carry at least one such checkable link. For the ninth we found none, so there is none. Two further profiles were ready but unconfirmed and stayed out until they were confirmed: a misattributed link on a page whose entire purpose is verifiability points at a different real human being.
• There are no photographs yet. All nine carry a placeholder illustration for the time being. We copied no images from anyone's profile pages — every photo will come from the person themselves, if they want one there.
• The company page now says who runs the company, in plain sentences rather than only in the site notice: Thimo Buchheister, one of its three founders and its CEO. Alongside it, a block giving the registered company name, the register court in Hanover and the commercial register number HRB 228699, plus several independent register listings where all of that can be looked up.

And then the part that stung. We checked every claim on /about, /about/company and the three pages for writers, members and publishers against the actual code. A selection of what came back:

• "AI-generated stories are not allowed." Not true as stated. The real rule is a labelling duty, and the standard is that the story is substantially yours. That is what it says now.
• "Technology developed entirely in-house." Not true — and our own legal texts said the opposite. We now name what we build on.
• "Read via page packages or monthly subscriptions." There are no page packages, there never were, and reading is free anyway.
• "Writers keep every other right." Too generous a phrasing. Our writer terms contain a right of first negotiation and a six-month notice period. Both are now named on the page instead of disappearing behind a nice sentence.
• "Writing at every desk." Imprecise. You can write on tablets too, iPads included — the editor is only blocked on phones.
• "Every published story can be played as audio." A growing share, not every one.
• The description of which age ratings a signed-out visitor sees was exactly the wrong way round. It now states the five bands, and that anything unrated is treated as eighteen-plus.

Two more corrections from the same week that we are not proud of, which is why they belong here. Six store listings said you could export your drafts from within the app. You cannot — delete, yes; export, no. The sentence is gone. And our site notice gave the wrong commercial register number, while two of our published legal texts disagreed with each other about our own postal address. Both are corrected, and they are now checked against each other.

Writing: Word text, right-click, and no lost cover work

• Text from Word can now be dragged into the chapter editor with a defined result. On the way in it goes through the same cleanup as a paste — Word carries invisible special characters that would otherwise sit in your chapter forever. Dragging within your own text to move a sentence still behaves entirely normally; we deliberately left that alone, because intercepting it would have turned a move into a duplicate.
• The Windows app had no right-click menu at all — no copy, no paste, no spelling suggestion — and dropping anything into the window did nothing. Both came from defaults sitting underneath our own app, and were hidden accordingly. Both work now.
• The cover designer protects unsaved work. An accidental reload, a back navigation or a closed tab used to discard every layer, gradient and generated background you had built, without asking. Now it asks — and if something goes wrong anyway, the page offers to restore where you were the next time you open it.
• Serialised stories no longer send you in a circle. Anyone trying to add a new instalment while an older draft version was still sitting in the chain was routed by the app into exactly that draft — where a notice said instalments are released from the published version. Two instructions pointing at each other. The notice now leads with the action that actually moves things forward, and the instalment ends up where your readers can see it.

Getting in, and getting back out

• The sign-in page in the apps was a dead end when sign-in failed. No back, no route to the catalogue — on Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad and Android alike, because that page deliberately has no header and no sidebar and an app has no browser back button. There is now a way back to the catalogue from both sign-in and sign-up, and it works even while the page is still waiting on something.
• The "new version available" notice reaches people again. Anyone who installed from Google Play, the Amazon Appstore, the Microsoft Store or the Mac App Store had received none since late August. And it still only appears once that particular store genuinely has the new build — being told about an update you cannot download yet is worse than not being told.

Faster, lighter, tidier

• Profile pictures are now delivered at the size they are actually shown. On the home page we measured 42 kilobytes for a single avatar, of which around 40 contributed nothing: it was loaded at full size and then shrunk to 48 pixels. That applied to every avatar in every comment list.
• The "Worlds to explore" grid on the home page adapts to the screen — four tiles on a phone, eight on a tablet, twelve on a desktop, plus a link to the full list. It used to be a single column of twelve tiles on a phone that you simply scrolled past. What mattered to us was that even the short selection still contains at least one genre you have had nothing to do with so far — that grid is exactly the place where you should be able to fall out of your own bubble.
• The question mark in the top bar looked wrong on every page, a grey box instead of an icon. On story pages the chapter count, word count and reading time had lost their pill shape. And in four places people were shown the internal name of a text snippet instead of the text. All three are fixed.
• Every public image now carries a real, translated description. Category artwork, hero images, covers, illustrations. For anyone reading with a screen reader, that is the difference between "image" and information.

And the small things

• Six of our emails carried a stray technical code in the middle of the subject line. Four of them were billing emails. Someone getting a payment reminder should not have to read our plumbing as well.
• Changing the sort order or applying a filter on any classics category page threw you off the site. That is the shelf where the public-domain classics live. Fixed.
• Every email we send now carries a working unsubscribe link — including the release announcements, where until now only some recipients had one.

Where things stand

• Six platforms — web, iPhone & iPad, Mac, Android, Windows and Fire tablets, plus the Samsung Galaxy Store and Uptodown for Android without Google.
• Over 9,000 stories in the catalogue, including 8,273 public-domain classics by 2,110 authors — permanently free to read and, in large part, to listen to.
• 713 categories across four levels and 25 main shelves, bilingual throughout.
• 215 FAQ entries and 91 help articles, each in English and German.
• Six tours of at most five steps, skippable at any time and restartable at any time.
• Nine people on the team, eight of them with an independently checkable profile.
• Thirty or ninety days of notice before an account disappears — with a visible date, reversible throughout.

What comes next

First: faces on the team page. Nine placeholder illustrations are an honest interim state, but they are not the goal. Every photo will come from the person in it.

Second: the first euro actually paid out. That was here a week ago too, and it is still outstanding. Premium reading time is the part that now counts in addition; what is missing is a month-end run that goes through from start to finish. We will report on it once it has happened, not before.

Third: the writing prompts by email. Still in progress, and we are deliberately taking our time — the first one that goes out should be good.

And finally, the same as last time: tell us what looks odd. The dead end on the sign-in page, the Word text that would not arrive, the instalment that led in a circle — all of those were reports from people who use OutaStory. They produced no error message; they produced an email. Thank you for that.

Thank you for reading, for writing, and for looking closely.