54 Comments

Please add categories and tags so readers can reference past articles rather than spending days scrolling. For the love of God, please. Or even a key word search within Substack. As a writer, I shouldn't have to go to Google to look up references to my own articles. Thank you.

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TAGS!!! Essential for SEO, y'know?

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We hear you on that! We've shipped some recent search improvements to the substack homepage (substack.com) and are still working on it.

For categories, would the sections function work? Or is there something else you have in mind? More info on sections here: https://on.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-publication-sections

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Jasmine, thanks for the reply. Really, it's about our readers' ability to search by topic or keywords, and then have search results populate in an easy to see way. It seems very difficult for our readers to search and find past articles, and with the number of writers you now have on your network and the growing body of content, I would think this would be a huge priority to make each writer's site stickier. Thanks again for the reply - happy to help with this somehow if you need it!

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Thanks Dan, appreciate the feedback. We're thinking about things like post tags and will pass it to the rest of the product team.

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This would be an excellent feature- I second Dan’s request- has this happened since it was written?

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This is urgent. I second this.

The search function as it now currently works, penalizes both readers and writers.

How is it possible that we are not able to showcase rich content, by not even being able to show everything that been written. It is a great disservice to writer efforts.

Why is it so difficult to have a good search function by keywords for example.

Will be grateful if this fixed asap.

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Nice updates. How about the ability to underline words as well as strikethroughs?

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And colors for text???

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ooh yes this would be a nice little feature

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Love the new features. Word count display is something I’d like. Or more simply a duration calculator default. Thanks!!

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Yes, please! I feel lost without a word counter telling me to shut up.

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Love the new flexible paywall insert. Hope it grabs me some more subscribers. I'm still the only writer I know of pumping out compelling, diverse, original fiction daily.

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I like that self promotion. 🙂

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Got to. Nobody else is gonna promote me. It's one of those things that people will look back and marvel at, but while I'm publishing every day, I'm doing it for a small group of very loyal subscribers

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It’s really the way to some stability and predictability. I subscribed by the way. The ending for Rabbits and Hats… 😩

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Thanks. Check out Eggshells. Way back in the archive, a bit longer than my average piece but some people think it's the best story I've ever written. It's about an eccentric single mother and her bullied son.

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Now that Instagram is going to allow link stickers for all users, can you please include it in the "Share" button?

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Where can I learn more about the IG button?

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Great feedback! Let's see if that's possible

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Also, what happened to the LinkedIn and the HN share options?

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Yeah, I want the LinkedIn, HN, and Reddit options back too! Not every topic's communities are concentrated on Twitter and Facebook.

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A substack profile is like a bookcase, makes me think of twitter lists

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Great stuff Substack. Would love a tool that helps me figure out when's the best time of day/week to send my newsletter

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Hello, Ben. I work on the data team at Substack. Just took a peek - generally, open rates are slightly higher on weekends, and Sundays are better than Saturdays. I want to build a tool that helps each writer optimize their sending time, but it's not on the roadmap for us yet.

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A small request that may seem silly, but drop caps? I just really like them for starting a piece and for creating obvious breaks in the content.

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File uploads finally! Awesome. However, there should be a visual button in the Editor too to upload files. Without it, many writers wouldn't realize they can drag and drop files into the Editor.

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These tools look great—a step toward a smoother experience for everyone.

Feedback:

- I would like to see anchor links. Useful as one creates more high-effort posts and wants to link back to specific tracts. Also, and this is much bigger, a TOC feature would be great to see.

- There's a bug if an image is the first thing in a post: if there happens to be a newline above that image, it can't be removed (except by mucking about with the underlying HTML).

- As others have said, underline and strikethrough are quite useful sometimes.

- Another handy thing would be portal links to webpages: i.e. a little preview of what's being linked to.

- More urgently in my case though: the ability to post YouTube links *without* it blowing up into a playable panel! I wrote a post where I wanted to include a roundup of YouTube links at the top. A panel for each was unacceptable. I ended up having to create tinyurl links to each one and include those.

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Thanks! We're working on a slew of editor improvements coming up soon, so perfect timing to bring up these issues - duly noted.

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Mattias you can include YouTube links without it turning into a playable panel; I do it all the time. Just type the title of the YouTube video as text, highlight the text, click the link button, and paste the YouTube link into the url box. When you make it a text link, it doesn't create a preview.

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These are all great improvements, thank you for keeping Substack updated and user-friendly! Would you ever consider adding something such as ads to the platform or within articles for writers to make money off of free subscriptions directly through Substack?

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Here is a great news for all writes who use excel. Now they can convert excel into web app easily from this link: https://www.sheetcast.com/

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I’d like to change my paywall description? Is that possible? I only paywall weekend posts and my weekday posts are free - I’d like to explain this after the paywall break to reduce unsubscribes and negative comments from people who don’t realise I give the majority of my content away freely…

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Can PowerPoint also be embedded?

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please subcribe me

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