How can we help?

When we rebuilt Upstart Blogger on a new platform, we deliberately left old passwords behind. Carrying them over would have carried over the old site's way of storing them too, so instead every returning member sets a fresh one, once.

Go to Activate your account, enter the email you used before, and follow the link we send (it works for an hour). After that, sign in as usual, and consider turning on two-step verification in Settings.

They came with you. All 5,824 published stories and 10 approved comments were moved over and are already live at their new addresses. Old links to the previous site redirect to them automatically.

Activating your account lets you sign in, see your stories on your dashboard, and edit them.

Click Start writing. You get a large title, a category, an optional website link, a cover image and a roomy writing space that supports Markdown (## for headings, **bold**, *italic*, links), with a live word count.

Drop an image onto the cover area, or click to choose one: it's resized for the web and uploaded straight to our image storage. Your writing is also saved in your browser as you type, so a reload or closed tab doesn't lose it.

Save as Draft to keep it private, or Publish to put it live. Drafts wait on your dashboard, where you can edit them, publish them in one click, or unpublish a live story.

No. Stories brought over from the old site keep the website they promoted, but new stories can stand entirely on their own. If you add a link, readers see a “Visit site” button on your story.

A view counts once per reader, per story, per day, so refreshing a page doesn't inflate your numbers, and known bots and crawlers are ignored. We never store readers' IP addresses: only an anonymous fingerprint used to avoid counting the same visit twice.

Your dashboard adds these up across every story you've written.

While a story is open, it stays quietly connected: new comments and replies appear for everyone reading, and the comment count updates, without a refresh. When someone comments on your story or replies to you, the bell in the header lights up straight away.

To keep spam out, comments with more than two links, or with the kind of link code spam bots paste in, wait for a moderator instead of appearing right away. You'll see a “held for review” note when that happens.

There's also a short limit on how many comments one person can post within a few minutes. Ordinary comments appear instantly.

Use the form below. Tell us the page or story and what's wrong, and a moderator will take a look.