Product news for writers: recommendations, account security, bug fixes and more

A rundown of the latest product improvements to help Substack writers succeed

At Substack, we’re focused on building for and with writers. Read on for a rundown of what we’ve released in the past few weeks—from increasing account security to launching new leaderboard categories. Please chime in, in the comments section, with your feedback.

Introducing recommendations

We rolled out a new feature to allow writers to directly endorse each other’s publications on Substack: recommendations. A writer can select a number of publications to recommend to new subscribers, and the writers of those publications will be notified and prompted to recommend back.

Find out more about recommendations and how to set them up in our announcement post and thank you to writers sharing feedback on the feature in last week’s Office Hours. 

We still want to hear from you! Feel free to share your questions and feedback on recommendations in the comments section.

Read more: How can I recommend other publications on Substack?

Introducing two-factor authentication

We introduced an extra layer of security to help protect your account. Also known as 2fa, this multi-step authentication process means you’ll need more than a password to sign in.

Turning on 2fa means two things. First, your Substack account will be much harder to break into, which gives writers peace of mind. Second, if you need to contact our support team, we can easily verify your identity. 

When the new two-factor authentication is enabled, you can use an authenticator app to gain a confirmation code to access your account. Any app which supports time-based one-time passwords will do, such as Authy or Google Authenticator. 

Head to “Account settings”, and look for “Account security” to set up 2fa today.

Read more: What is Two-Factor Authentication? How do I use it?

New leaderboard categories: Humor and Fashion & Beauty

We’ve been listening to writers’ feedback on the category leaderboards. We are excited to bring you two brand new categories: Humor and Fashion & Beauty.

In addition, we’ve updated Health and Faith to be more representative and inclusive of the greater writer community. Those categories have been updated to Health & Wellness and Faith & Spirituality. 

We know there are many different unique topics and their intersection which you are covering. We will continue to listen and keep our eyes on the categories bubbling up among writers on Substack.

Scheduling posts bug fix 

We found and fixed two separate technical issues, one on April 8 and another on April 9, that resulted in some posts being sent twice to subscribers. 

We truly apologize for the frustration this caused and will be investigating how to make sure this does not happen again.

Some of the affected posts were still published to substack.com at the correct time but were not emailed to subscribers, causing statistics to be lower for those posts.

You can check and trigger an email for previous posts by going to Edit Post > Publish > and making sure “Send via email and Substack app inbox” is checked. If this box was not checked and you still wish to send your post via email, you can check the box and click the send button.

Read more: Check Substack’s status page anytime for bugs and issues

New help text on loading stats

Sometimes, post stats can take a while to load in your dashboard. Nothing shows up, which can be frustrating. We added a new help text to clarify when data is still loading or taking a while to collect. The text reads: "We're still gathering data on this post," and stays in place until we have all the data we can show in the relevant categories. 

An upgrade to editor

This month, we launched a new upgraded editor. This change will enable us, in the future, to build features writers have asked for—specifically audio and video embeds in text posts. (For writers who are technical, the new editor uses TipTap on top of ProseMirror.)

Read the announcement post here.

We hope you give these new tools and features a try. As always, please feel free to leave feedback and ideas in the comments.

Edit: This post was edited to make it clearer that audio and video embeds are yet to come.