Hey everyone — quick update: the site is back up.

If you're still seeing the Railway "404 Not Found" page, that's not RedQuill being down — it's your browser hanging onto the old error page from earlier and not bothering to check whether anything's changed. Annoyingly common, easily fixed.

On desktop, do a hard refresh (this forces your browser to reload the page from scratch instead of serving its cached copy):

• Chrome / Firefox / Edge (Windows): Ctrl + Shift + R (or Ctrl + F5)
• Chrome / Firefox (Mac): Cmd + Shift + R
• Safari (Mac): Cmd + Option + R
• Or hold Shift and click the reload button

On mobile, there's no hard-refresh shortcut. Easiest fix: close the tab, give it a minute or two, then try again — your phone's browser will eventually notice the site is back. A normal pull-to-refresh on its own often isn't enough.

If you can't wait, you can clear cached data — but be careful which option you pick. The wrong one will sign you out of every site you're logged into and wipe browsing history you might want to keep. Stick to the surgical options:

• Chrome (mobile): ⋮ menu → Delete browsing data → tick only "Cached images and files" → Delete data. Leaves your logins and history alone.
• Safari (iPhone/iPad): Settings app → Safari → Advanced → Website Data → swipe left on the RedQuill entry to delete just that one site. Most surgical option iOS offers.

If none of that works, try opening the site in a private/incognito tab — that bypasses the cache entirely and is a quick way to confirm caching is actually the culprit.

Thanks for sticking with us through the wobble. 🙏 While we wait

Hey everybody

We're giving you a bit more control over how your stories generate. Instead of one invisible model working behind the scenes, you'll now see three options on your story-creation screen:

✨ Auto: Let us pick the writer for you based on what's working best.
🔥 Ember: The writer you've been using. It’s highly creative and loves flourish—denser prose, bigger swings, and more texture. But, it can struggle to stick to strict rules, especially for longer chapters or complex components.
✒️ Ink: Better at story structure, logic, and nuance. It should follow your prompts, components, and guidance much more reliably.

On tools and taste

Like any creative tool, the best fit is personal. Some of you will prefer Ember's bold swings, while others will appreciate Ink's tighter discipline to finish chapters faster. You'll probably swap between them depending on the story you're telling.

We're going to run this setup as an experiment for the next week or so, just to understand if this is a helpful approach for everyone.

Try Ember, try Ink, and report back here. We'd love to hear which model works better for your style, and where each one falls short.

On continuity

We want to be upfront: while having different tools helps, this isn't just a tool preference thing. We know we still have more work to do to optimize continuity overall, and we are actively working on it.

We're still investigating the continuity bugs that have shown up, particularly with Ember, and we really need your help to track them down.

Please check the Continuity Issues thread and drop a reply with:

• Where — story link or chapter URL
• When — roughly which chapter, and which writer you had selected
• What you were doing — your prompt, active components, what you expected vs. what actually happened

The more specific you can be, the faster we can trace, fix, and deploy updates.

— Quill

Busy week. Here's what we got up to:

Two things up front: the sensitive-info bug fix is live, and everyone affected has 300 Quills already credited to their account.

This is also the start of a Friday(ish) habit: a weekly catch-up for people who don't live in the sub. The big mid-week things — incidents, launches, anything urgent or interesting — will still go out as they happen.

Bugs squashed this week

The "sensitive information" bug. This was the big one. It took a lot of work to get right. We've landed somewhere things are looking properly better. Thanks for sticking with us through the rough patch. You kept the faith and it mattered.

• The fix is live. Chapters that were dying on you should now generate through.
• Story-writing quality has stepped up. "Five straight chapters of absolute bangers" was one of the nicer takes (u/Aydrianic). u/l_anonym79 put it well: "The last hours felt like some sort of an apology to me for the mediocre performance — can you please keep that for a while now?" That's the bar.
• Everyone affected has been credited 300 Quills. If you logged in today and noticed a top-up appear out of nowhere (yes, that was us) — that's why.

A few of you are still seeing the censor message on chapters that should be totally fine. I see those reports and we're chasing them — if it happens to you, drop a comment or DM with the story / chapter so we can look at the specific case.

Other fixes and improvements this week:

• Story-preview pages no longer murder your scroll position when comments open.
• Image generation has had a proper platform-wide upgrade. Outputs should look much better than they did before.
• Image generation refunds your Quills automatically on failure — no need to chase us for it.
• Chapter generations now have thumbs up / thumbs down feedback, so you can tell us when a chapter lands or misses. Please use this a lot.
• Private stories no longer leak view counts, and randoms can no longer comment on them.
• Edit-mode confirm dialog now actually asks before discarding changes.
• One-click story save shipped — fewer ways to lose drafts.

On our radar

A few things we're actively digging into:

• The "Continue chapter" prompt occasionally inserting odd text into options.
• Chapter titles coming out a bit weird with the new model — we're tuning.
• Collections tab showing zero collections for some accounts.
• Free-tier daily Quill reset behaving oddly after subscription cancel/refund.
• A handful of you have flagged stories or chapters going missing. We take that very seriously — if it's happened to you and you haven't already, DM Modmail with the story title and a rough date.

Community spotlight

Three from the last few weeks worth your time:

• Iron Fang: Smoke Corridor by mjsimmons — nine chapters of furry literary fantasy with a real voice. Also the same person making magic on Discord as ithiaca.
• oshun's body of work — four stories across fanfic, horror, and fantasy. The platform's most reliable cross-genre author right now. Goddess' Champion vs. Mercenary is the doorway in.
• Gilded Lilies and Knives In the Dark by vixien — twenty chapters of gay literary fantasy. The title alone earns the pick; the commitment makes it stay.

If you've made something this week you're proud of, drop a link in the comments — perhaps we'll spotlight it next week.

This week's challenge — One-Shot Challenge, week 1

One component. One chapter. One prompt. That's it. Best story wins.

The idea is simple: build or pick a component, write one prompt, generate one chapter, and show us what came out. No long iteration chains, no polishing passes, no five-chapter runway — just what you can make RedQuill do in one clean shot.

Rules:

1. Use one component. Build it yourself or use one you've already made.
2. Use one prompt. Include it with your entry so other people can learn from it.
3. Generate one chapter. That's the entry.
4. No editing or rewriting. Otherwise, it's not really a one-shot story, is it?
5. Drop the component, prompt, and chapter as a comment on this post.

Prizes:

• 🥇 1st place — 1,000 Quills
• 🥈 2nd place — 500 Quills
• 🏅 Editor's Choice — 100 Quills (we'll reward a few of these for entries that catch the team's eye on craft, even if they don't take the top spots)

Judged on story quality, prompt craft, and how cleanly the component helps the chapter land. Winners announced in next week's Recap.

The nice list

Some of you have been carrying this place lately and you should know it's noticed.

On Reddit:

• u/Raptorfu — for being constructive in the middle of the outage when most of us, fairly, wanted to vent. Your "good chance to flesh out your larger stories with some world-building chapters" nudge reframed the whole thread.
• u/pervcore — for sharing a working Rewrite prompt — the "making the minimum necessary changes" one — that's quietly one of the more useful techniques anyone's posted in the sub. If you've got the full version, post it.
• u/l_anonym79 — for doing genuine upstream research on the bug, finding that other AI platforms had hit the same wall before, and posting it so everyone could see what was actually happening.
• u/Aydrianic — for the thoughtful Latest Opinions thread and for keeping faith long enough to find the five straight bangers post-fix.
• u/MissxVenomxPoison, u/Feisty-Signal4483, u/Repulsive_Second8097, u/Middle-Explanation99, u/No_Rope9362 — all dropped genuinely interesting feature ideas in the wishlist thread. Comics, Lorebook expansion, Library categorisation, component descriptions, locations-as-a-Lorebook-tab — every one is on the ideas list.
• u/SimplyBlue09 — for flagging Infinite Kink in the TIL megathread. Underrated discovery surface.
• u/MilodicMellodi — for the story share mid-outage. Took the edge off the day.
• u/LateCampaign9060 — for April's Editor's Choice, which deserved more eyes than it got in the bug noise.

If I missed you and you've been carrying the sub or Discord — DM me, I'll catch you next week. (And yes, there's a naughty list. It's much shorter and I'm keeping it to myself.)

If something's broken, post it. If something's good, post that too. See you next Friday.