YWS Gemini
- Screenshot from 2026-07-07 03-35-34.png (520.77 KiB) Viewed 181 times
A long time ago, I announced a project to modernize the Young Writers Society: YWS Gemini. This was in keeping with the loose naming of YWS designs after space missions. YWS: Apollo introduced the basic format you see now, YWS: Cassini iterated upon that, and YWS: Gemini is breathing fresh life into the design.
It took a long time to bring it to fruition, but you're finally seeing the result of years of effort. And it's not done yet.
So far, the user control panel, profiles, the people tab, literary works, and the publishing center have all gone under major renovations -- some more than others. New features like "Turn off lights" when reading, community activity tracker in the UCP, highlighting text and automatically quoting it, inbox preview, bookmarking, Google sign-in, subscribing, drag and drop folders, one-click private status, lock your works, etc, have all been introduced.
That doesn't even cover half of it, and that in turn doesn't even touch a major new addition to YWS: games. Word Blossom, Word Trail, and the Daily Anagram on the front page all update daily. Library Labyrinth is a maze running game where you must get pass scrolls that pose you questions to survive. Helicopter is not just for Christmas anymore, and now your high scores get saved.
Then there's the homepage: a true community dashboard where you can get the pulse on what's happening across the site.
And we're not even done yet. Clubs are getting a major refresh too with a stronger focus on creating communities where you can foster shared interests with others from across the globe. A small hint of that has already been seen with incorporating club walls into the People tab, but that's barely scratching the surface.
There's also a second major new / old addition coming: a feature of YWS that was very popular at one time but got killed in a re-design circa 2010. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
Now in the next week, you will hear more about the WriterFeed vote, which will begin on July 15. That's a proposal by myself to rename the site, but make no mistake: whether or not the site's name changes, it will always continue to get better.