Write.as is our official instance of WriteFreely, and includes additional functionality on top of the base product. Here’s a list of the differences, and reasons they’re not included in WF.
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Anonymous (no-signup) publishing. We left this out of WF because while it’s a nice feature, it requires an immense amount of admin work to keep spam and abuse at bay. Most admins would probably decide that the feature isn’t worth the trouble.
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Publish via email. This is a fairly complex feature that we ultimately didn’t see a ton of demand for, so we decided not to spend the necessary time on bringing it to WF. If we see more demand for it, it may come to WF.
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Cross-posting to Twitter, Ghost, and Tumblr. This requires additional administrative work and needs more development on our part to support various configurations. We’d like to eventually include this in WF.
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Subdomain and custom domain support. Right now this isn’t in WF because it adds more administrative work configuring a server, instructing users, generating SSL certificates, etc. We may support it eventually.
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Custom Javascript. All WF blogs on a multi-user instance show up on a path, e.g.
example.com/my-blog/, so custom Javascript can be a security risk. We also disable the custom Javascript on path-based Write.as blogs, but allow that for blogs on subdomains or custom domains. -
Email subscriptions. This is coming to WriteFreely in v1.0!
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Automated password resets. This is dependent on an email system being in place. It should arrive in v1.0, along with email subscriptions.
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eBook Downloads. This feature is still incomplete, but we want to bring it to WF once it covers all the basics.
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Write.as Labs. This is our test ground, where we try out new potential features before launching them for everyone. The idea for successful features is to eventually bring them to WF.
I’ll update this over time, as things change.
