Starpl User Guide ✦

A star page has three tabs: Star friends · Certificate · Guestbook. There is no entries tab because the star's title takes that role.

Press the «someone's star starname» title at the top and you return to the entry list. «total N entries» to the left of the timeline goes to the same place (and clears any date, tag or folder filter on the way).

→ The table can be pushed sideways

A star name cannot change because it is an address. If it changed, every link pointing to that star would break. What people see instead — your nickname, and the star greeting above the star title — you can edit whenever you like (in Star settings). Changing your nickname sends an alert to your star friends.

If the star card's «Certificate» says one of these, that star cannot be received. There are two.

• Already named — a star that astronomers named long ago keeps that name in the sky, for everyone.
• A bright star (the certificate says «A bright star, not for residence») — bright stars already carry a name, or were catalogued long ago, so they are not given out.

So the stars you can receive now are very distant stars that have no name yet. They look like small points only because they are far away; up close, each one burns like the sun. How bright your star truly is can be read in Absolute magnitude and Distance on the certificate.

They simply have no name — telescopes and satellites really did observe them and gave them a number (a Tycho ID). They are stars that truly hang in space, and Starpl holds more than 2.55 million of them.

The Sun (Sol), for the record, is not given away. It is the star that stays beside us all our lives.

Entries that rise as bubbles on the star map pass two conditions.

• Only public entries rise. Star friends and Private entries stay off the sky.
• Only one entry per person rises. A star carries a single bubble, so if you write several in a row, only the most recent one shows.

The star map also floats the entries of the patch of sky you are looking at — if your star is off screen, so is its bubble.

→ The table can be pushed sideways

Following is «watching quietly». Keep a star whose request would feel like too much, and receive its new public entries.

★ Becoming star friends releases the follow on its own. The closer relationship takes that place — so if the follow button is nowhere to be seen, you are already star friends.

A declined request can be sent again a day later.

Email verification has not been finished yet. Press the link in the email and you become the confirmed owner, with star friends, guestbook, comments, empathy and alerts all open (the +100 stardust arrives then too).

If the mail never arrived, Resend verification email sends it again. If you have been signed out, sign in with the email you registered and the resend button appears.

Signing up with Google or Kakao means never meeting this state — social signup does not pass through email verification.

No. In the editor, Time → Set time lets you choose that entry's moment yourself (yesterday, or years ago). The timeline and the lists place it by that moment.

When you edit an entry, the same choice reads Keep as is · Change time. Keeping it leaves the original moment untouched — editing never pushes the time to today.

For sorting you can pick Date created · Date updated · Event date. «Event date» is exactly the moment you just set.

Where a day begins and how times are shown follow Star settings → Time zone (Seoul by default). While travelling, Use browser time zone is the easy way.

Yes. When you attach a photo, one quiet line tells you the time it was taken, and Use this time sets that entry's Time to it. Nothing changes until you press it, and Undo stays right there afterwards. The line sits inside the Time field, so you can watch it change just below.

If the photo carries no time, the line stays away — older photos, and photos that passed through an editor, often carry none.

The time is read inside your browser only, and only the value you press is kept with the entry. The photo itself is stored the way it always was, with its location and device details removed. When the photo remembers its time zone too we move the moment into yours; when it does not, we keep the clock of the place it was taken — so for travel photos, give the shown time a glance first.

Yes. If the photo carries a location, we show several names side by side for that place. A photo taken in Pungdeokcheon, Suji reads Pungdeokcheon · Suji · Yongin · South Korea.

Only the ones you press go into your Tags. Take them all, take just Yongin and Suji, or take none. Press one again and that name alone comes out; the others stay. The chips sit right under the Tags field, so you can watch each word land.

If the photo carries no location, or there is nothing to offer, the line stays away — that is what happens mid-ocean or deep in a desert, where we would rather say nothing than name the wrong place. Outside Korea and Japan we cannot see the finer levels, so you get a city and a country.

★ The coordinates never leave your browser. The whole place list is fetched once and the choice is made inside your browser, so where a photo was taken never reaches a starpl server. What reaches us is the few words you pressed into your tags, and the photo itself is stored the way it always was, with its location removed. Place names come from GeoNames.

It is one photo per entry. JPG or PNG, within 10MB and 12000px, and you can place it above or below the body text.

One photo was chosen for storage and transfer costs, and to keep the work of looking over photos that should not rise onto a star within what one person can carry. Picture diaries were like that too — one drawing to a page, a few lines beneath it.

The notifier is attached to two places: the star page and the star map.

• Desktop — hover over the blue handle on the left edge of the screen and it opens.
• Phone — press the pill at the bottom of the screen.

When something new arrives, that handle turns red. The layout is described under «Reading the notifier» below.

Alerts you have read are cleared after 90 days. Unread alerts are kept.

The system notices Starpl sends (verification complete, the outcome of a report, an answer to your question, a sign-in from a new device, and so on) stay in Star settings → System notices even after they pass by in the notifier.

The writer and the star's owner, those two. Ticking it makes the whole thread, replies included, secret.

Guestbook replies can be left only by the star's owner and the person who wrote the note — a guestbook is the conversation between those two.

The comments on entries are a separate thing, and a comment reply goes one level deep only (there are no replies to replies).

From top to bottom, it is laid out like this.

• Star title — «star greeting + star name». Press it to return to the entry list.
• Today | Total — the footprints left on this star. Who came is not shown, only the numbers (your own visits are not counted).
• Pencil · cog (on your own star) — writing an entry, and the way into star settings. They stay in view on every tab.
• Timeline — the entries of each day, shown like grass. Month/Year changes the scale, ‹ › moves the period, and pressing the «year.month» in the middle shows every entry in that period. Press a single square and only that day's entries are filtered (and on your own star, pressing a day with nothing on it lets you write straight into that date).
• Three tabs — Star friends · Certificate · Guestbook. The entries are the star title's job.
• Entry list — search (title, body, tags) · folder picker · sorting · tag cloud, all together.

Three layers of visibility

• Public — anyone can read it, and it rises as a bubble on the star map and into Explore.
• Star friends — visible to star friends who accepted each other.
• Private — yours alone. Neither a report nor a search opens it to anyone else.

What goes along with it

• Title — optional. Leave it empty and it shows as «(No title)».
• Mood — one of ten: Joy · Happy · Sad · Angry · Surprised · Tired · Thought · Excited · Calm · Longing (optional).
• Tags — several, separated by spaces. They gather into the tag cloud on your star page.
• Folder — a drawer for grouping entries. You can make one as you write, up to 50.
• Photo — one, above or below the body text.
• Time — now, or set by hand.

Marks that shape the text

A few marks written in the body show up the way you wrote them. On the writing screen, the List · Numbers · Quote · Bold · Strikethrough buttons above the body put the same marks in for you.

Length limits

An entry can be edited and deleted whenever you like (Edit · Delete on the entry page).

The basics

• Drag to move the sky, scroll (pinch with two fingers on a phone) to zoom in and out.
• Press a star and its card opens. From the card, Visit star → crosses over to that person's star.
• The / key jumps straight to the search box — you can look for star names, constellations, and the people living there. Enter goes to the first result.
• ESC closes an open card or window.
• ⌂ Reset position returns to the first sky as seen from Earth (on the minimap while signed in, it becomes ⌂ To my star).

How deep you can go

Up to 100×. The further you zoom, the more distant stars appear in turn, until at the end every star Starpl holds is in the sky. Zoom in → on a star card takes you right up to that star, at 50×.

The minimap and its settings

The minimap shows where in the whole sky you are looking (top right on a desktop). The ⚙ at the bottom right inside the minimap turns three things on and off (they are kept per account — while signed in).

• Constellations — draws the constellation lines across the sky.
• Constellation names — shows each name beside its lines (the names belong to the lines — turn the lines off and the names go with them).
• Always show the minimap — turn it off and the minimap stays folded on small screens.

Play — sit back and watch

The Play button holds four.

• Spin the sky — the sky drifts slowly.
• Play posts — visits the latest public entries one by one.
• Random play — wanders from star to star.
• Star friend tour — visits your star friends' stars one by one.

My sky — the sky as your people alone

Turn on My sky and the star map briefly becomes a sky of your people alone. Star friends (lines drawn from your star) and Starred (added with dotted lines) each switch on and off, and turning both off brings back everyone's sky.

On a star friend's card, Their friends → raises that person's star friends into the sky as well.

The notifier is divided into four big rooms.

The closest thing to a «feed» in Starpl is 🔭 Explore → Latest (everyone's public entries, most recent first). What differs is that it does not take the front page — it is there when you open it.

The five tabs of the Alerts room

Which tab holds what is easy to mix up. They split like this.

Empathy sitting in the «Comments» tab may be unexpected, but both are someone responding to your entry or your comment, so they gather in one place.

Tools for tidying

• Unread only — hides read alerts for a while.
• Mark all ○○ as read — marks the current tab's alerts read in one go.
• Pin — keeps an important alert at the top.
• The ✕ on a single alert — closes just that one.

Alerts arrive per person. When someone writes a public entry, one alert goes to each of their star friends, and a Private entry sends none at all.

→ The table can be pushed sideways

What you have given a ♡ gathers in Star settings → What I empathized with, and in the ❤️ Likes room of the notifier.

Stardust is a token that gathers little by little in Starpl. How it accumulates, down to the history, is in Star settings → Stardust.

Your invitation link is in Star settings → Stardust. When a friend signs up through it, you both receive it (the friend picks their own star).

Starcandy is a separate token given out at events, and it is not spent on anything yet. The place to spend it (the star market) is being prepared, slowly — for now it is the fun of collecting.

The Certificate tab on a star page shows «what kind of star this is» in astronomical data — Tycho number · coordinates · magnitude and absolute magnitude · colour index (B-V) · spectral type · distance (light years and parsecs) · constellation · days together.

Below it comes a real photograph of that star (NASA SkyView / Digitized Sky Survey). The star in the middle is yours. It takes a moment the first time, while it is fetched.

How the activity level is worked out

On a scale of 0–100, counting public entries only (star-friend and private entries are not counted).

• Recent activity — rises as you publish public entries, and fades with a 30-day half-life (after a month, an entry's share halves).
• Consistency — a half-year (180-day) rhythm is watched too, so a busy spell without writing does not drop it sharply.
• Legacy — a star that has long written a lot keeps up to 20 levels glowing faintly, even after a year or two of rest.

The final score is the higher of «recent activity» and «legacy». Deleting entries lowers it accordingly, and level 100 is held only by writing steadily.

The size of a resident star on the star map follows this level too — a livelier star shows a little larger.

Account settings gathers the ways you can sign in.

• An email is one per account. Verifying a new address replaces the existing one (a swap, not an addition). An account created with Kakao, with an empty email, registers its first one here.
• A password can be added later (even after signing up socially). It can be turned on once a real email is verified. Letters, digits and a symbol, 8 characters or more.
• Social sign-in (Google, Kakao) can be linked and unlinked. Only the last remaining way in cannot be unlinked (there would be no door left to come in through).
• In the list of signed-in devices, an unfamiliar one can be signed out remotely, on its own. «Sign out of all other devices» is there too.

Tick Stay signed in and your sign-in is kept for 30 days. A sign-in from a new device or an unfamiliar place is announced by alert and by mail.

If you have forgotten your password, «Forgot your password?» on the sign-in screen sends a reset link (valid for 30 minutes).

Export

Star settings → My records downloads the entries, folders and comments you wrote, along with your profile, as a single file.

• .zip — readable text and a JSON backup together (recommended).
• JSON only — for moving elsewhere or keeping.
• Text only — for simply reading.

A service for records should be able to give back what was entrusted to it. That is why this button is on the leaving screen as well.

Leaving

• Ask to leave and your star and records stop being visible right away, then are permanently deleted after 30 days.
• Before that, signing in again cancels it.
• The star name is taken back and nobody can use it again (so that no one else ends up with your old address).
• Comments and guestbook notes left on other stars go with it when the deletion completes after 30 days.

Reporting

Every entry, comment, guestbook note and profile has Report. There are ten reasons — Sexual content · Violence or threats · Harassment or hate · Privacy violation · Spam or ads · Minor safety · Self-harm risk · Defamation · Copyright infringement · Other. The outcome reaches you as a notice (a rights-infringement takedown request is notified to your signup email as well, as the law requires).

Content that has been made invisible

An entry that breaks the operating policy stops being visible to others. When that happens, the author alone sees the Hidden by moderation badge and a note (to everyone else the entry itself is not there). If the measure feels excessive, tell us through Contact under «Report follow-up» — we look again and restore it.

A quiet first pass

Public entries, comments and guestbook notes, and attached photos, pass an automatic review once (a small AI running inside Starpl's own server). Anything caught is hidden temporarily, and a person makes the final call. Private entries are never read first.

Contact

Leave a message in Star settings → Contact and the operator works through them in turn. The categories are Bug / error · Account / sign-in · Report follow-up · General question · Other. The answer arrives as a notice.

The rooms that appear when you press the cog at the top right of your star page.

For a profile picture you can choose one of nine prepared styles, or upload your own photo (an uploaded photo is applied once it has been reviewed).

The same screen folds to fit a narrow width. The star map's buttons stand vertically as icons at the top left, and the notifier opens from a pill at the bottom of the screen instead of the handle on the left.

Add to Home Screen in the browser menu (on iPhone: Share → Add to Home Screen; on Android: menu → Install app) leaves an icon that behaves like an app.