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Welcome to the OWOT Wiki

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Introduction to Our World of Text

Our World of Text (OWOT or OWoT) is a website that lets users type text anywhere in a grid. Users can choose the color of their text and visit other pages known as "worlds." In OWOT, all users start on the main page and can see other worlds by adding the name of the world to the end of the URL after a slash, or by clicking a link in the Center Console or anywhere else on the main page.

The Center Console

OWOT was first launched on June 8, 2010, by the developer and creator of Your World of Text. It was created as an alternative to Your World of Text that allows unrestricted scripting. In early August 2015, it was announced that OWOT would shut down on August 20th due to funding issues. Weeks after its original shutdown, control of the domain was handed to InfraRaven to start a revival of OWOT. The revival was based on the heavily modified YWOT source code from 2010 and featured a new menu design and a loading screen.

In 2016, a new version of OWOT was started, allowing users to change the size of their text and globally chat with all users on a world. It featured a sidebar menu to the left with options such as text color and size, as well as a chat. This version was developed in parallel under the "beta" subdomain. Subsequently, the revival would shut down in late 2016 after a botched attempt at creating a new client.

On October 8, 2017, a new version of OWOT launched. The website's backend was created in Node.js while the frontend used a modified copy of the Your World of Text client in its first few months. Our World of Text is maintained by a hobbyist computer programmer going by the online alias of FP.

On February 25, 2023, OWOT became open source, allowing others to run their own instance of Our World of Text.

Help

Below are some valuable resources. More can be found in the Documentation category.

• Editing guide

• How links work

• Various client functions

• Types of area protection

• What is a member?

• Old worlds prior to 2015

• How the renderer works

• How the tile format works

• The Modal API

• New changes & updates

• Running from source

View all pages

Functionality

A page on Our World of Text is made up of character cells that are lined up to a grid. To add text to a page, a user must click anywhere on the page that isn't protected to bring the text cursor to that position. Once the cursor is focused, the user can add text by simply typing as if it were any ordinary text editor.

Because OWOT is a multiplayer website, other users can see changes added by another user as they're happening. Sites like Our World of Text are special because it's possible to drag the page to a different location and edit there. While, in theory, an OWOT world is supposed to be infinitely large, an upper limit is imposed due to the integer limits within JavaScript.

Each world is divided into 16-cell wide and 8-cell tall chunks called tiles. Each cell can store only one grapheme cluster, allowing Zalgo text to be written since users can create combined characters. However, OWOT's implementation of grapheme clustering is relatively limited and only covers Emoji characters and combining characters. For more information, please see tile format.

Moderation

You are free to express your political opinions.

Using scripts to make the site harder for others to use will be met with rate limits or worse.

Parts of the front page may be reverted periodically due to spam. You may request a rollback if somebody has vandalized something you've been working on.

Accounts

Our World of Text does not require an account to access and edit public worlds or to use chatrooms. OWOT uses Uvias as its authentication system to manage accounts, which was introduced on August 27, 2019. The goal of Uvias is to allow for the sharing of accounts between Our World of Text, Our World of Pixels, and the unfinished project Spooks.

An account is required to own or become a member of a world. The exception is membership keys, which allow world owners to provide temporary membership to even unregistered users given a correct URL parameter.

A guest account is a special account with a small number of limitations, such as not being able to own worlds. Guests can, however, be invited to a world as a member. A guest account's username starts with Guest- followed by a sequential number. Guest accounts are tied to your IP address, and may expire after a certain time.

Since the Uvias account system was introduced in 2019, users have gained access to many additional functionalities, such as changing their username, viewing their login sessions and join date, and disabling their account.

Contributing to this wiki

Only registered users are allowed to edit this wiki. If you'd like to edit this wiki, please create an account on this wiki. You must ask for editor privileges on either of these mediums:

• Discord server
• Developer's personal OWOT page (preferably in chat)

Once you have editing privileges, read the Guide to start editing this Wiki. You can always return to the Guide if you have any editing-related confusion. Remember that vandalism will be reverted and may result in the loss of editing privileges.

Pages and changes created on the Fandom instance may be mirrored to this wiki.

As of today, the Our World of Text Wiki encompasses 191 articles and 243 files.

See Our World of Text Wiki Stats