How all of it works.

Your page lives at dreaded.lol/yourname. Names are 2 to 24 characters and can use letters, numbers, underscores, dots and hyphens. They are first come, first served.

Type a name on the home page or at /register and it tells you straight away whether it is free. Some names are reserved because they clash with pages on the site, like /login or /help.

You can change your username later in Account. Doing that releases the old one immediately, so if you care about keeping it, add it as an alias instead.

An alias is a second address that points at the same page. dreaded.lol/othername loads your profile without redirecting anyone to a different URL.

Free accounts get 5 aliases. Paid accounts get 15.

Aliases are the right way to keep a name you are no longer using as your main username. Changing your username frees the old one for anyone to take; adding it as an alias keeps it permanently.

There are 12 layouts: Card, Minimal, Sidebar, Terminal, Magazine, Wide, Stacked, Cover, Split, ID card, Grid, Poster.

The layout decides the overall shape of your page: where your avatar sits, how links stack, whether there is a banner, and how widgets flow around them. Changing layout never loses your content.

Free accounts can use 8; paid accounts get all 12.

The bio sits under your name. Free accounts get 400 characters, paid accounts 900.

A typewriter bio rotates several lines with a typing animation instead of showing one block of text. Switch to it with the link under the bio box. Free accounts get 2 lines, paid accounts 10.

Emoji and line breaks both work.

There are four things you can add: icon links, buttons, headers and dividers.

Icon links sit in a row under your bio and show the platform's real brand icon and colour, matched automatically from the URL you paste. There are 91 platforms recognised.

Buttons stack below and show a full-width label. Headers and dividers break long lists into sections.

Neither plan caps how many links you can have. Every link also gets a short dreaded.lol/go/code you can share and track separately.

Every link on your page gets its own short address at dreaded.lol/go/<code>. Use it anywhere you want the click counted.

Clicks are counted per link, so you can see which ones people actually use. That breakdown lives in Analytics.

Short links keep working if you change the destination later.

A scheduled link appears or disappears on a date you choose. Use it for a launch, a stream, a drop, or anything with an end date.

Set the start and end under a link's options. Leaving one blank means no limit on that end.

Scheduling needs a paid plan.

You can set accent, text, card, background, border and icon colours independently, plus gradients and text size.

There are 20 preset themes if you would rather start from something finished: Obsidian, Bloodmoon, Cyanide, Absinthe, Ember, Ghost, Sakura, Deep sea and more. Applying one overwrites your current colours, so save your own design as a preset first if you want it back.

Free accounts get almost everything here. The only colour control behind a paid plan is the muted tone.

There are 28 fonts. Free accounts can use 18, paid accounts all of them.

Fonts are self-hosted, so no request goes to Google when someone opens your page. That keeps your visitors' data out of a third party and makes the page load faster.

There are 42 background effects, from snow and rain through to matrix rain, constellations, plasma and glitch bars.

Every effect has its own controls rather than one shared intensity slider. Depending on the effect you can set the count, speed, size, opacity, colour, direction of travel, drift, link distance, and more.

Radial effects like rings, orbit, vortex and tunnel also have a start position, so you can move the centre anywhere on the page, and a direction so they turn or travel the way you want.

Free accounts get 29; paid accounts get all 42.

There are 18 cursor effects. Some trail behind the pointer, some replace it entirely.

The ones that replace the pointer hide the system cursor so you do not get two. You can also upload your own image to use as the cursor.

Cursor effects are skipped on touch screens, where there is no pointer to decorate.

There are 22 effects you can apply to your name: gradients, glows, glitches, typing, shimmer and more.

These apply to the display name at the top of your page, not to your username in the URL.

You can attach music that plays when someone enters your page. Upload an MP3 or paste a direct file link.

Free accounts get 5 tracks, paid accounts 200.

Beyond the basics there are controls for playback speed, where in the track to start, fade in and fade out length, starting muted, pausing when the tab is hidden, and whether visitors can see the title, the elapsed time, the artwork, or scrub the track.

If you turn a visualizer on it gets its own section with colour, sensitivity and height.

There are 27 widgets: Discord presence, Discord server, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, GitHub, Steam, Roblox, Twitch, Last.fm and more.

Some work as soon as you add them. Others need setting up first — a Discord presence widget needs a linked account, a gallery needs images. Until a widget has what it needs it shows a dashed "needs setting up" card in the editor preview, and nothing at all on your live page.

Free accounts get 10 widgets, paid accounts 40.

Link your Discord account in Account, then add the Discord presence widget. It shows your status, what you are playing, and what you are listening to on Spotify, live.

Linking Discord also lets you sign in with it instead of a password.

Your presence only shows if you are in a server with the presence bot, which the widget explains if it cannot see you.

You can host images, video, audio and documents. Free accounts get 1 GB total with 50 MB per file; paid accounts get 25 GB with 500 MB per file.

Images are compressed in your browser before they upload. A large photo usually shrinks by well over 90 percent with no visible difference, which means faster uploads and less of your storage used.

Every upload is checked against its real file signature rather than trusting the file extension, so nothing can be disguised as something else.

Analytics shows views over time, where visitors came from, what devices they used, and how each link performed.

Free accounts keep 30 days of history; paid accounts keep 365.

Your total view count is a running number and never goes down. The 400-day limit applies only to the individual visit records behind the breakdowns, not to the headline figure.

A view only counts if it looks like a real person.

Every time a page renders it issues a short-lived signed token. That token has to come back with real time spent on the page and a real interaction — a pointer move, a scroll or a key press — from a browser that behaves like a browser.

On top of that we score repeat visitors, bursts from one network, missing browser headers and automation flags. Anything scoring too high is recorded but never added to your total.

Your own visits to your own page never count.

Blocked traffic is kept so you can see exactly what was thrown away.

There are 146 badges. They sit under your name and hovering one explains what it is and how it was earned.

They come in groups: account status, milestones you reach, quests you complete, seasonal ones with a window each year, community ones granted by hand, ones you buy in the shop, and team ones that cannot be earned.

Seasonal badges only appear during their window, but once you have one it stays on your profile forever, stamped with the year you got it.

You choose which badges show and in what order, in Account. Hidden badges stay on your account.

The shop sells cosmetic marks that sit next to your name. Each is a single payment and stays on your account permanently.

Nothing in the shop changes what your page can do. Everything functional is already in your plan. Buying a mark does not unlock features, raise limits, or affect how your page ranks anywhere.

You can filter by rarity or by what you already own.

There are three: Free, Premium at $7.99, and Platinum at $14.99.

69 of our 79 features are free, most at full strength rather than a cut-down version.

Premium lifts every limit and unlocks the rest of the customisation: all layouts, all effects, your own domain, private pages, full link-preview control and a year of analytics.

Platinum is everything in Premium plus the built-in assistant and verified 18+ status.

Both are one payment. Neither renews, neither expires, and we keep no card on file.

Ask within 30 days, for any reason, and you get your money back. Write to support.

That is more generous than the 14-day statutory right in the UK and EEA, and it applies wherever you live.

After 30 days refunds are at our discretion.

On a paid plan you can serve your page from a domain you own instead of dreaded.lol/yourname.

Add the domain in the dashboard, point a CNAME at us, and the certificate is issued automatically.

You can also serve your uploads from your own domain, so shared files carry your name rather than ours.

Two-factor auth is on the free plan. Turn it on in Account with any authenticator app.

You get backup codes when you set it up. Keep them somewhere safe; they are the only way back in if you lose the device.

Changing your password signs out every other session automatically.

On a paid plan you can put a password on your page. Visitors have to type it before anything loads.

Once someone unlocks it their browser remembers for 12 hours so they are not asked on every visit.

There is also an age gate for pages marked sensitive, and a setting to hide your page from Explore and the leaderboard entirely.

Everything we hold about you downloads as JSON from your account page: links, widgets, settings, analytics.

Deleting your account is one button and it is immediate, not a 30-day grace period. Your page, links, uploads, badges and analytics all go with it.

Payment records survive deletion because tax law requires it.

First check the file size. Images are compressed automatically before upload, but video and audio are not, and anything over 4 MB after compression is rejected by the platform before it reaches us.

If the error mentions your session, reload the page and sign in again.

If it mentions storage not being connected, that is on our side, not yours. Check /status, which reports live whether the file store is reachable.

Most widgets need setting up before they render. In the editor preview an unconfigured widget shows a dashed "needs setting up" card naming what it is. On your live page it shows nothing at all, which is deliberate — visitors should not see empty boxes.

Open the widget's options and fill in what it asks for. A Discord presence widget needs a linked Discord account, a gallery needs images, an embed needs a URL.

Check three things.

Opacity and count — some effects default low. Turn both up in the effect's own controls.

Reduced motion — if your system has "reduce motion" on, animated effects are skipped. There is a per-page setting to override that.

Your background colour — a dark effect on a dark background will not read. Change the effect colour, or turn off "use my accent colour" and pick one that contrasts.