How does one turn on writefreely's public reader?

I’ve installed writefreely and I’ve noticed that in the customization menu under Publicity, the Public option cannot be enabled. Instead, there is a not that reads,” The public reader is currently turned off for this community.” Why is this so? Did I miss something in the configuration process?

You’ll just need to enable the Reader, either via the Admin settings or by setting the local_timeline field to true (if working with the configuration file).

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Hi @matt, thanks for this answer. Funnily enough I have the same problem, but the local_timeline field already set to true. I installed WriteFreely on Yunohost, if I recall I did not have any specific settings turned on during installation. Perhaps it’s overkill, but here are my options. Could you maybe point me to what I’m doing wrong here? Really loving WriteFreely so far, would love to keep it for an infosec learning blog, but would really prefer to be able to make it public.

[app]
site_name = WriteFreely
site_description = WriteFreely_Blogs
host = my website’s URL
theme = write
editor =
disable_js = false
webfonts = true
landing =
simple_nav = false
wf_modesty = false
chorus = false
forest = false
disable_drafts = false
single_user = 1
open_registration = true
open_deletion = true
min_username_len = 3
max_blogs = 1
federation = true
public_stats = true
monetization = false
notes_only = false
private = false
local_timeline = true
user_invites =
default_visibility =
update_checks = false
disable_password_auth = false

[oauth.slack]
client_id =
client_secret =
team_id =
callback_proxy =
callback_proxy_api =

[oauth.writeas]
client_id =
client_secret =
auth_location =
token_location =
inspect_location =
callback_proxy =
callback_proxy_api =

[oauth.gitlab]
client_id =
client_secret =
host =
display_name =
callback_proxy =
callback_proxy_api =

[oauth.gitea]
client_id =
client_secret =
host =
display_name =
callback_proxy =
callback_proxy_api =

[oauth.generic]
client_id =

Hi @j8ter, have you restarted the WriteFreely server since updating that configuration file? If not, you’ll want to do that. Otherwise you can set it from the web-based Admin Dashboard while the site is still running.

Hi @matt, I have actually not updated the WriteFreely-configuration file in any way, but a restart might in general be a good idea. Yeah, the Admin Dashboard does not specify any option (I saw you mentioned the Reader option in a comment earlier, but that’s not in my Admin Dashboard):

EDIT: just tried a reboot, did not change the Settings under Admin dashboard, they are still the same as in the screenshot. Hopefully tomorrow I get the time to do a reinstall on my server, maybe there I can find some option I should have set before. Nevertheless, thanks for thinking along!

Ah, I see what the problem is – your instance is configured as a single-user blog. There’s no Reader option, since you’re the only user on the instance.

If you plan to have multiple blogs on this instance, you can set single_user = false in your config, and that will give you the option!

Ah thanks a lot! Will try that out as soon as I can and let you know if that fixed it. Thanks!