About
Unhappened is an encyclopedia of worlds that didn't happen. You name a single point where history went differently. Everything after that is worked out and written down in the flat, patient register of a reference work.
Only a handful of articles exist when a world is founded. The rest exist as links. Follow one and it gets written — for the first time, by you, while you wait. Then it stays. The next person to follow that link reads what you uncovered.
So the worlds here get deeper the more they are read. Nothing is private and nothing is deleted; a world you found is a place other people can walk around in.
What it is not
None of this is true. Names, dates, treaties, quantities, cited scholars and pictures are all invented. It should not be used to settle an argument about actual history, and it is not a reliable source about anything at all.
The one exception is the line marked “our history” on a world's branch diagram. That side is meant to be factually true, so that the two can be compared.
Daily limits
Reading needs no account. Founding a world or opening an article nobody has written yet does, because those are the acts that spend money — an email address, one link, no password and no name. Signing in also puts your name on the worlds you found, which is what lets you have them written again when something in them is wrong.
Writing costs money, so each reader may found 5 worlds and open 60 unwritten articles a day. The count resets at midnight UTC.
Reading is never limited. Anything already written stays free to read, as often as anyone likes — the allowance applies only to asking for something that does not exist yet.
There is also a spending cap for the whole site each day. If new writing stops before you have used your own allowance, that cap is why, and it lifts the next day. Nothing you have already read goes away.
If you run out and want more, write to me and say what you are doing and why you need the room. I lift it for anyone with a reason: yichuan.wang.work@gmail.com
Nothing here is true
Everything on this site is fiction. The articles are written by a language model in response to a premise typed by a reader, and no part of any of them is a record of anything that happened.
Real names appear here — countries, institutions, companies, public figures, places. Nothing this site says about them is a statement of fact. Where a real person or organisation is named, the events described did not happen, are not alleged to have happened, and should not be repeated as though they did.
Premises are supplied by readers, not chosen by me. Publishing the world that follows from one is not agreement with it.
The site is offered as it is, with no warranty of accuracy, completeness or fitness for any purpose. Nothing here should be relied on for anything — not for research, not for schoolwork, and least of all for an argument.
If something here concerns you — you personally, your work, or an organisation you speak for — write to me and I will take it down. I would much rather remove a page than defend it. yichuan.wang.work@gmail.com
Privacy
There are no accounts and nothing that follows you off this site. Readers are counted as a salted hash of an address, one row per person per day — the raw address is never stored, and that table cannot be turned back into a list of people. Reading times are recorded as buckets with nothing attached to them.
The list of worlds you have visited is kept in your own browser and is never sent anywhere. That is also why it cannot follow you to another device: recognising the same person across machines would need an account or browser fingerprinting, and neither belongs here.
There is one cookie, and it holds a random number. Daily allowances used to be counted per network address, which meant two people on one Wi-Fi shared a single allowance and the second of them was turned away. The number tells those two browsers apart and does nothing else: it is not derived from your device, it never leaves this site, and clearing it costs you nothing but a fresh allowance.
Tell me what's wrong
Anything that read badly, looked wrong, or didn't work. Especially if a world's history seemed implausible — that is the hardest thing to judge from the inside.
Who made it
Yichuan (River) Wang — yichuan.wang.work@gmail.com