v2.69.0 — A hand-inked welcome, and a stage for your profile

This release is about arriving. Your first minutes on Stanza — and the first thing anyone sees when they visit your profile — have both been rebuilt.

A hand-inked first run

Signing up now unfolds along an inked pathway — parchment, ink splats and literary type — with each stop introducing a corner of the world rather than dropping you into an empty feed.

• Ways to create — the Writing Space, spoken word, podcasts and live performances.
• Where to connect — inner circles, the Community page, your Library and the resources.
• Your first poem — a piece to read before you begin, set on bare parchment rather than boxed in a card.
• In your language — a language selector right in the onboarding header.

Set your stage

Your profile cover is no longer a photo banner — it's a stage. Choose a theatrical backdrop and it is painted in your own accent colour.

• The Playhouse — a proscenium arch, velvet curtains, a waiting spotlight.
• The Broadside — an Elizabethan playbill in blackletter.
• The Illuminated Folio — aged vellum with a gilded drop-capital.
• Midsummer Night — a starlit wood with a low moon and drifting fireflies.
• The Heraldic Seal — a wax seal pressed with your initial.
• The Curtain Call — swagged drapes and a laurel wreath.
• Or your own — upload a custom backdrop if you'd rather.

Make it yours

A new onboarding step for the things that make a profile feel like yours, with a live preview as you choose.

• Accent colour — carries through your profile and your stage.
• Typeface — Playfair, Cormorant, Caveat or Inter.
• Bio — a line about yourself, optional.

Badges

• Badge notifications — you now hear about it the moment you earn one.
• Stuffed Lettuce — a new badge to collect.

Notifications, on your terms

We now ask inside the app before the system prompt appears, so you can decide in context — and changing your mind later is no longer a trip to your device settings.

Reliability, security & accessibility

• Saving your look — choosing an accent, typeface and stage without writing a bio now saves correctly. Before, leaving the bio empty could silently discard the whole step.
• Your stage, remembered — the picker in Settings › Appearance now shows your current stage after restarting the app, instead of resetting to “No stage”.
• Age verification — accounts that signed up with Apple or Google are now asked for a birth year and month, which had previously been skipped.
• Content warnings — younger accounts once again receive the safer defaults during onboarding.
• Privacy — fixed a case where younger accounts could be identified in analytics.
• Accessibility — screen-reader labels and larger tap targets across onboarding, and decorative stage artwork is no longer read aloud.
• Organizations — improved dashboard metrics.