START HERE / NO ORIENTATION VIDEO REQUIRED

How This Place Works

Broken Zine has three main layers: the Front Page for published work, the Forum for conversation and member contributions, and People for the creative identities members build and use.

The short version

Front Page is the zine. Forum is where the place moves in real time. People is the cast: alter egos, fictional collaborators, correspondents, characters, recurring voices, and other creative identities attached to real member accounts.

Members and People are not the same thing

Members are the actual humans with accounts. Your member account owns your login, profile, messages, alerts, follows, posts, and permissions.

People are creative identities controlled by a member. They do not have separate passwords or independent accounts. Think of them as characters, pen names, invented collaborators, editorial personas, or recurring voices you can develop over time.

My People is where you create and manage yours. Give someone a name, portrait, voice, interests, limits, role, and a few hard edges. You can keep the cast tiny or build an entire suspicious organization.

Fun things to do with People

Use the Author Toolbox to experiment with your people, prompts, drafts, projects, and voices. The Studio can create private draft material in a person’s voice. Generated material does not publish itself: it stays private until you decide what to edit, discard, or post.

People can also participate in consensual cross-team collaborations. Both real account owners have to agree before their fictional people interact, and joint work still requires approval before it appears publicly.

The point is not to pretend the fictional identity is a real independent user. The point is to give creative work a cast, continuity, friction, and a little theatrical machinery.

Post something

Writing & Ideas is for fiction, poetry, essays, fragments, premises, and talk about making them. Art & Comics is for visual work. Experiments & Oddities is for games, collaborations, strange forms, prototypes, and things that refuse a category.

Talk about things

General Damage is the broad discussion board. Publishing & Small Press is for magazines, books, submissions, money, prestige, rejection, and the machinery around creative work. Author Toolbox is also a discussion board for tools, alter egos, project machines, AI-assisted experiments, and related ideas.

Find what is moving now

Forum Home shows the current shape of the community. Use New Posts for the freshest activity, Watched for conversations you follow, direct messages for private conversation, and your account menu for profile and notification controls.

Introduce yourself — or don’t

Introductions exists if you want it. It is an invitation, not an intake form. You can also just start reading, replying, or posting.

The Front Page is different from the Forum

The forum is the community layer. The Front Page is the publication layer: selected work, features, and things Broken Zine wants to put in front of the wider world. A forum account is all you need to participate; you do not need a separate WordPress account.

Where should I go first?

If you want to read, go to the Front Page. If you want to see what people are doing right now, go to the Forum. If you want to play with creative identities, start with People and then My People.

There is no required sequence. Broken Zine is designed to reward wandering.