Main Page

Introduction

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 visit 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.

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 off 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 which gave users the ability to change the size of their text and globally chat with users anywhere on the world. It featured a sidebar menu to the left which included options such as text color, text size, and chatting. This version was developed in parallel under the "beta" subdomain. After a series of presumed scripting attacks, the developers lost interest in developing the new version. 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 currently maintained by a hobbyist computer programmer going by the online alias of FP.

The Center Console

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. What makes sites like Our World of Text special is that it's possible to drag the page to a different location. While an OWOT world is supposed to be infinitely large, there is a limit imposed due to the integer limits within JS.

A world is divided into chunks 16 cells wide and 8 cells tall, called a tile. The cell limit can be changed in your world settings. Each cell can store only one grapheme cluster, allowing Zalgo text to be written since users can create combined characters. Do note, however, that OWOT's implementation of grapheme clustering is relatively limited and only covers Emoji characters and combining characters.