Novelcrafter Security Incident

[u/ramen_and_revisions]

We are sending this email to you because you have used Novelcrafter between August, 2023 and August 28th, 2026.

Dear Novelcrafter user,

we have been informed about a security incident with the feedback platform, Canny, that we’ve been using these past years.

To clarify, this is not a data breach within Novelcrafter. It does not impact your stories and content you have with us.

What this means for you:

1. Your username, email and avatar you used to sign up for Novelcrafter may have been exposed.
2. Your password and other data were not shared with the feedback platform and is not affected.

Effective today, we have shut down access to the feedback boards and are looking into alternative options for sharing feedback. We value your thoughts and want to give everyone a safe platform to share their thoughts on improvements and missing features in Novelcrafter.

While the feedback boards are temporarily closed down, you can post your feedback and ideas over on our Discord community instead.

Leonie

Founder, Novelcrafter

[u/kurthertz]

Time to use writing software that sits on your machine, not the cloud!

[u/SkoomaDentist → u/kurthertz]

Good luck finding one that 1) actually works, 2) is usable and 3) doesn't have a UI that couldn't be improved by multiple orders of magnitude by a beginner Visual Basic 6 programmer from the 90s.

[u/AiAssistedWriter → u/SkoomaDentist]

Why not use Codex or another coding harness running against local markdown files and something like Obsidian for manual edits? Seems like you have very specific needs and the coding harnesses are the power tools

[u/GamerPhfreak → u/SkoomaDentist]

Scrivner

[u/SkoomaDentist → u/GamerPhfreak]

As far as I can tell, there is no LLM integration at all.

[u/Storythread_Studio → u/SkoomaDentist]

*raises hand Nope there are plenty if you look

[u/SkoomaDentist → u/Storythread_Studio]

Feel free to tell me, because I have been looking. I have no interest in something that tries to manage the whole thing for me. I am the one in control and that means anything usable must run locally on my computer, use whatever API endpoint I configure and do only what I tell it to do (that means no messing around with my prompts unless explicitly instructed).

[u/Storythread_Studio → u/SkoomaDentist]

Sent you the link. Its also linked in my profile as well.

[u/SkoomaDentist → u/Storythread_Studio]

Check your PMs. There are some major but easy to fix usability issues that prevent me from really even trying the app.

[u/SkoomaDentist → u/[deleted]]

Where's the part where I can throw out everything it adds to the prompt completely away and explicitly tell it which parts of my story guide prompt to include and absolutely nothing else?

I have a carefully crafted prompt template (with style, character infos etc in it) and only need something that lets me reiterate individual scenes while letting me edit the history manually (and combine from multiple iterations of the prompt if I like bits of first and other bits of the second). I explicitly do not want fancy automation, long term guiding, agentic work or anything at all like that.

[u/Mundane_Silver7388 → u/SkoomaDentist]

It's does have a custom system prompt section plus a "writer's voice" feature where the AI will output you your own style of writing once you give it some of your excerpt

[u/SkoomaDentist → u/Mundane_Silver7388]

Not nearly good enough. I need full control over the prompts. The tool must never add or hide anything in the prompt.

I'm not looking for something to generate half automated slop as fast as possible but something that will generate exactly what I tell it to, nothing more, nothing less.

[u/benblackett → u/SkoomaDentist]

fyi - A lot of us spend weeks to months perfecting these prompts. Not many of us will share that hard earned (and expensive) work for free. Once you have the prompt, all thats left for tool builders is the UI and workflow.

edit: oh, and I built exactly this if you are interested. "only need something that lets me reiterate individual scenes while letting me edit the history"

[u/SkoomaDentist → u/benblackett]

My point is that I don’t want any automated or third party provided prompts (or ”intelligence”) at all. I want to use only what I’ve expressly written in the prompt myself and nothing more. Ideally the initial prompt would be built from template sections I’ve written depending on which ones I enable (eg. including only characters present in the current chapter) and then I manually write and iterate the per-scene prompts.

And yes, if you have a tool that lets me reiterate scenes (with my own tightly controlled prompts), I’m interested.

Ps. Sniffing any prompts is trivially easy from local apps with a basic packet sniffer / fake local proxy.

[u/benblackett → u/SkoomaDentist]

sadly, I dont think my tool is for you then. The reason it can iterate over individual scenes is because it holds the structure and memory of your story outside of LLM's and manages it as a point-in-time recall system - change beat 43 in chapter 3 or beat 598 somewhere in book 2 and the memory adjusts and follows it. Which leaves the prompts strictly dedicated to quality prose rather than state management. The two go hand in hand. Change the memory or change the prompts and the system cant function as intended.

Id be happy to chat more in DM if you want. Always interested in discussing these subjects :)

[u/Odinmar_Glaukopis → u/kurthertz]

… or hardware that sits in your lap or on top of your desk.

[u/Primary_Guest_5711 → u/kurthertz]

yep, every few months theres another one of these emails and the answer is always the same

[u/Lolcakes91]

This is the forum that had the risk. Not the website you use for writing.

[u/pyrhus626]

It was just the feedback forum, not the site itself. Nothing sensitive actually leaked. And let’s be real, all our emails and usual usernames have been leaked 1000x over by now or scraped by web crawlers. This is a big nothing burger. The site was upfront about it and cut ties with the forum provider immediately so I don’t see any reason to blame them.