Frequently Asked Questions

We know that a site like Dreamwidth can be difficult to find your way around, and the changes we've made to some things you might be used to can be confusing. We've put together some basic Guides, and written a set of FAQs that should help you do what you want to do on Dreamwidth, whether it's configure your OpenID account or customize your new journal.

If you already have a Dreamwidth account, you may notice your name appearing in some of the FAQs as you read them. If you view the same sections when logged out, the text will simply say "username".

If you aren't sure where to find what you're looking for, the FAQs and the Guides are fully searchable.

Available Categories

  1. Guides
  2. About Us
  3. Your Account
  4. Paid Accounts
  5. Journal Entries
  6. Images and Media
  7. Comments
  8. Comment Security
  9. Journal Styles
  10. Your Profile
  11. User Icons
  12. Communities
  13. Managing Communities
  14. Relationships
  15. Notifications
  16. Organizing
  17. Feeds, OpenID, and Other Sites
  18. Importing and Crossposting
  19. Explore
  20. Site Options
  21. Current Issues
  22. Conflicts With Other Users
  23. Miscellaneous

Guides (view all)

  1. Welcome to Dreamwidth!
  2. The ethos and ideas behind Dreamwidth Studios: What makes us special?
  3. A guide to Dreamwidth for LiveJournal users
  4. How do I protect my privacy on Dreamwidth?
  5. What HTML tags can I use on Dreamwidth?

About Us (view all)

  1. What is Dreamwidth Studios?
  2. How can I report a bug?
  3. How do I find information on scheduled maintenance or unplanned outages when Dreamwidth is down?
  4. Where can I leave suggestions for site improvements?
  5. Who works on Dreamwidth?

Your Account (view all)

  1. How do I create an account?
  2. Why are invite codes sometimes required to create a free account?
  3. How do I confirm my email address?
  4. How do I invite someone to Dreamwidth?
  5. How do I change my email address?
  6. How do I change my password?
  7. How do I delete my account?
  8. When and how are deleted accounts permanently removed (purged)?
  9. How do I change my username?
  10. What are my options when I rename my journal?
  11. How can I recover my lost username or password?
  12. What is the difference between my journal style and the site skin?
  13. How do I control who can private message (PM) me?
  14. How can I resecure my account if someone breaks into it?
  15. What is a memorial account? Why and how does an account gain this status?
  16. Can I have the username of an apparently-abandoned account?
  17. Why do I get an invalid password error when logging in when I am certain my password is correct?

Paid Accounts (view all)

  1. What is a paid/premium paid/seed account?
  2. How much are paid accounts?
  3. What are the extra services available?
  4. What extra services can communities benefit from?
  5. How do I buy paid time for my account?
  6. How do I pay for an account with a credit card?
  7. Can I use a prepaid credit card to buy paid time?
  8. How do I pay for an account with a check or money order?
  9. When will my paid time be applied to my account?
  10. How can I buy extra icon spaces for my account?
  11. What are Dreamwidth Points?
  12. What happens when my paid account expires?
  13. Why do I get errors when making multiple payments?
  14. Why is my credit card being declined?

Journal Entries (view all)

  1. How do I post an entry?
  2. Can I change what style I see entry pages in?
  3. How do I post an entry to a community that I administer or am a member of?
  4. How do I control who can read my entries?
  5. How can I choose which user icon to use?
  6. How can I show my mood, music, or location on a post?
  7. How do I set age restriction filters on my journal or entry?
  8. How do I edit or delete an entry?
  9. How do I make a link to another Dreamwidth account, or an account on another service?
  10. What is a cut? How can I hide part of my entry behind a cut?
  11. How do I make an entry sticky, so it's always at the top of my journal?
  12. What is a client? What clients can I use with Dreamwidth?
  13. How do I make all my posts private?
  14. What is the Rich Text Editor? What is the HTML Editor?
  15. What HTML can I use in my entry?
  16. How can I use Markdown to format my entries?
  17. How do I post an entry without it showing on my subscribers' reading pages? Why would I do this?
  18. How do I create a poll?
  19. How do I close or reopen a poll?
  20. What is Auto-Formatting?
  21. How can I email entries into my journal?
  22. How do I view entries in my journal by security?
  23. How do I add a slug to change the URL of my entry?

Images and Media (view all)

  1. How do I post an image in an entry?
  2. How do I use Dreamwidth's image hosting? How do I manage my images once they've been uploaded?
  3. How do I post a video or audio clip in an entry?
  4. What are image and video placeholders?

Comments (view all)

  1. What are comments?
  2. How do I post a comment?
  3. How do I identify myself when I comment?
  4. How do I reply to comments from email notifications?
  5. What is Quick Reply? How do I turn Quick Reply on or off?
  6. How does comment threading work?
  7. How can I tell which comments belong to which thread? What is the "Comment Hierarchy" setting?
  8. What happens when there are large numbers of comments on one entry?
  9. What are the limits on comments?
  10. Can I use HTML in comments?
  11. How do I quote part of an entry I want to reply to?
  12. Can I edit or delete my comment?
  13. How can I control comments posted to my journal?
  14. How do I find my comments?
  15. What is comment tracking?
  16. Can I get comments sent to me by email?
  17. Why does my anonymous comment not display the way I want it to?

Comment Security (view all)

  1. How do I control who can comment on my journal?
  2. How do I control who can comment on a particular entry?
  3. How do I ban someone from commenting?
  4. What can I do about unwanted comments?
  5. What are spam comments? What can I do about them?
  6. What is comment screening?
  7. What is selective screening?
  8. What is comment IP logging?
  9. Why are people who comment on my journal being shown an antispam test (CAPTCHA)?

Journal Styles (view all)

  1. How do I change the appearance of my journal?
  2. Which journal styles are available on Dreamwidth?
  3. How do I change my journal's title or subtitle?
  4. How do modules and sidebars work?
  5. How do I add a link list?
  6. How do I add a web counter to my journal?
  7. What is the Advanced Customization page?

Your Profile (view all)

  1. What is a profile?
  2. What are interests?
  3. How do I add an interest someone else has?
  4. How do I edit my profile?
  5. What does my profile contain? Who can see the information on it?
  6. How do I change which members of my circle show on my profile?
  7. Why do some names show up in bold or italics on other people's profiles?
  8. Why does my profile not display some HTML I enter properly?

User Icons (view all)

  1. How do I upload an icon?
  2. How many icons can I have?
  3. What happens when I change the keyword for an icon?
  4. What are the "Description" and "Short Description" fields for?
  5. What are the restrictions on icons?
  6. What is the icon browser? How does it work?
  7. Can I set my icon page to display in my journal style?

Communities (view all)

  1. What is a community?
  2. How do I join a community?
  3. How do I post to a community?
  4. What security settings can I use when I post to a community?
  5. What if a community I belong to has been abandoned by its administrators?
  6. How can I find entries by just one user in a community? How can I see all my entries in a community?

Managing Communities (view all)

  1. How do I create a community?
  2. How do I turn a personal account into a community?
  3. How do I manage my community?
  4. How do I change the settings for my community?
  5. What are the membership, posting, and content settings for my community?
  6. How do I make my community members-only?
  7. How do I control posts to my community?
  8. What changes can I make to entries in my community?
  9. How do I add users to my community?
  10. How do I remove a user from my community?
  11. How do I rename a community I admin?
  12. How do I transfer my community to a new admin?
  13. How do I delete a community I admin?

Relationships (view all)

  1. What is my Circle?
  2. How do I subscribe to other journals?
  3. How do I subscribe to several journals at once?
  4. How do I give people access to read my protected content?
  5. How do I grant access to several journals at once?
  6. How do I unsubscribe from or revoke access for another journal?
  7. How do I get access to read a journal's locked content?
  8. What is my reading page?
  9. What are filters?
  10. How do I filter my reading page?
  11. How do I set up access filters?
  12. What is my Network page?

Notifications (view all)

  1. What are notifications?
  2. How do I send people messages on Dreamwidth?
  3. What is tracking?
  4. How do I stop tracking something?
  5. What different ways can I receive my notifications?
  6. How do I use the inbox?
  7. How many notifications can I have?
  8. Why aren't my comment or notification emails reaching me?

Organizing (view all)

  1. Can I delete all the entries in my journal?
  2. Can I download my Dreamwidth journal?
  3. What are tags?
  4. How can I merge two tags, or rename my tags?
  5. What are memories?

Feeds, OpenID, and Other Sites (view all)

  1. What are feeds?
  2. How do I create or subscribe to a feed (RSS/Atom)?
  3. Where can I find feeds to subscribe to?
  4. How do I view my feeds separately from the rest of my subscriptions?
  5. The feed I'm following isn't updating. Why?
  6. Can I get an RSS or Atom feed of my Dreamwidth journal?
  7. Who can read the feed of my journal?
  8. How much of each entry shows in the feed of my journal?
  9. What is an OpenID Account?
  10. Why has my OpenID account left so many comments?
  11. How can I claim my OpenID account with my Dreamwidth account?
  12. How do I comment using OpenID?
  13. Why don't OpenID accounts show up on my reading page?
  14. Why do I receive errors when logging into Dreamwidth with my OpenID?
  15. I can't log in using my Google account on Dreamwidth.

Importing and Crossposting (view all)

  1. How can I crosspost entries?
  2. Which journalling services can I crosspost to?
  3. How do I import my journal from another site?
  4. How can I import a community from another site?
  5. Can I delete all my imported entries?

Explore (view all)

  1. How do I search Dreamwidth?
  2. What is the Directory?
  3. What official Dreamwidth communities are there?

Site Options (view all)

  1. What is the Navigation Strip?
  2. How do I change the look of main site pages?
  3. What is "Adult Content"? How can I keep from seeing it?
  4. Why don't I see an image for the antispam test (CAPTCHA)?

Current Issues (view all)

  1. DISPLAY: Site pages do not display properly in older browsers, including Internet Explorer 6.
  2. DISPLAY: There are display problems with imported icons with non-ASCII comments.
  3. DISPLAY: I can not use the icon resizing tool when uploading an oversized image from URL
  4. DISPLAY: Pages on the site aren't updating properly.
  5. DISPLAY: My HTML is not working properly.
  6. DISPLAY: I'm getting unwanted comment notifications in my inbox.
  7. DISPLAY: I composed an entry in Word and used the RTE to post it.
  8. DISPLAY: My icons aren't showing up after I purchased paid time.
  9. DISPLAY: Icon keywords are not acting correctly.
  10. GENERAL: How do I run a traceroute?
  11. GENERAL: How do I clear my browser's cache or cookies?
  12. STYLES: The style I copied from another site has errors on Dreamwidth.
  13. STYLES: My Reading page is displaying incorrectly: stretched, distorted, or just generally 'broken'.
  14. IMPORTER: Tags that were deleted on the import source site are imported to Dreamwidth.
  15. IMPORTER: Embedded media on my imported entry isn't working.
  16. IMPORTER: My import isn't working.
  17. CROSSPOSTER: My entries crossposted with a more-secure security setting.
  18. CROSSPOSTER: I am getting an incorrect password message.
  19. CROSSPOSTER: I am having trouble crossposting to JournalFen.
  20. OTHER: What is the difference between a Dreamhack and a Dreamwidth Account?

Conflicts With Other Users (view all)

  1. How do I report a violation of Dreamwidth's Terms of Service?
  2. How do I report a violation of my copyright on Dreamwidth?
  3. Why is my blog content appearing on Dreamwidth?

Miscellaneous (view all)

  1. What Dreamwidth-specific markup/HTML tags can I use?
  2. What are Dreamwidth's new features?
  3. How do I keep my journal from being indexed by search engines?
  4. How do I use Google Analytics with my journal?
  5. How does my Dreamwidth forwarding email address work?
Need more help? Go to the Support Area.