A Better Platform: What We've Been Building
OpenFiction Team13 April 20266 min read
OpenFiction has been in beta for a while now, and if you've visited recently you may have noticed things feeling a little sharper, a little more considered. Over the past few weeks we've added a significant batch of improvements across the platform - some visible, some invisible, all of them making OpenFiction more useful for readers and more reliable under the hood. This post covers what's changed and why.
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New ways to explore characters across a series
OpenFiction Team6 April 20262 min read
OpenFiction started as a spoiler-safe character reference. But the more series we add, the more it becomes something else too: a genuinely useful way to explore who's in a series, how they're connected, and where they show up. Today's update adds to that.
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OpenFiction Isn't Just for Fantasy and Sci-Fi
OpenFiction Team9 March 20264 min read
When people hear "character tracking database," they tend to think of epic fantasy - Sanderson's Cosmere, Tolkien's Middle-earth, massive casts of characters with unpronounceable names and complex magic systems. But the problem OpenFiction solves - "who is this person and what have they done so far?" - isn't a fantasy problem. It's a reading problem. And it applies to far more genres than you might think.
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Contribute as You Read: Building the Database One Chapter at a Time
OpenFiction Team9 March 20264 min read
One of the most common questions we get is "how does the data actually get into OpenFiction?" The answer is: people who read books add it as they go, and curators review it for accuracy.
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How OpenFiction Tracks Characters Across Books
OpenFiction Team8 March 20265 min read
Most character databases treat a character as a single page of information - a description, some attributes, maybe a list of books they appear in. OpenFiction does something different: it tracks characters through books, chapter by chapter, recording what changes and when. This post explains what that means in practice and why we built it this way.
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The Story Behind OpenFiction
OpenFiction Team8 March 20265 min read
OpenFiction didn't start as OpenFiction. It started as a feature that didn't fit inside another project.
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