What's different from the old Open Diary?

If you were a member of the old Open Diary site, you will notice some interesting changes in the new site. Some of the big ones are:

1) New login

On the new Open Diary, you can only log in with your email address and password (on the old site, you logged in with your username). This is a security measure to help make the site and your account more secure.

For more information see: Logging into your diary

2) The Friends list

On the old OD, you had Friends, and you had Favorites - and they were two separate lists. We always found this confusing, and it's not really how the online world works anyway. On the new OD, your Friends list is one list. The Friends list is important because the people on that list can see your Friends-only entries, and you can see theirs.

You will find people on your Friends list already on the new site, if that person was both a Friend and Favorite of yours on the old site.

For more information see: Friends

3) Saved Entries

On the old OD, you could save people in your Favorites list - this has been changed now to Saved Entries. The Saved Entries function lets you bookmark entries for later reading, so you can come back any time from the main menu and find those again.

For more information see: Saved Entries

4) New diary front page

The old OD had descriptions for both yourself, and for your diary. We've combined this into one description field that will be displayed next to your name and picture in your diary front page. The diary title has also been discontinued.

For more information see: Your Diary

5) Expiring Entries

When you write an entry now, you have a choice to make it expire in a day or a week. When an entry expires, it disappears to everybody, but remains in your diary as a private entry.

For more information see: Changing entry expiration

6) Draft Entries

You can now save entries as a Draft, which is only visible to you. You can keep as many draft entries as you like, and can change them to published (visible to others) when you are ready.

7) Scheduled Entries

If you want to write an entry now, but have it publish automatically in the future, you can do that by setting the date and time for the entry to publish.

8) Embedded images and storage

You can add images directly to your entries now, and they are stored for you with your diary.

For more information, see: Adding a key image to an entry and Adding an image to the body of your entry

9) Private Messaging

Open Diary now has a built-in private messaging feature, for sending messages between members.

10)  Blocking and Muting other members

If somebody is bothering you on Open Diary, you have options now to block them from your diary, or to mute them for a number of days.