Your tag

Your tag is your name here, and it's the only thing that identifies you. There is no account behind it, no email attached to it, nothing on our side to look up. It gets made on your device and it stays there.

This page is everything you can do with it. The plumbing underneath is on How it works.

Picking one

Land on the site → PICK A TAG → type a name → you're in. No email, no phone, no CAPTCHA, no confirmation link, no terms wall.

There's a short "spraying…" wait the first time. That's your device doing a little work to prove you're not a thousand bots — it costs you a couple of seconds and it costs a spam farm real money. It happens again, much faster, every time you put something up. You never have to do anything but wait for it.

Tags are not unique

There's no registrar, because a registrar would be the account system we refuse to build. Two writers can pick the same name. That's what the mark is for.

Your mark

Next to every tag name is a six-character mark and a small generated glyph. It's a fingerprint of your tag that can't be copied or claimed by anyone else.

• Same name and same mark → same writer.
• Same name, different mark → different writer. Somebody's biting.

Read the mark, not the name. Writer chips also carry age dots — how long the tag has been around — so a name that appeared this morning doesn't look like one that's been up for a year.

Your face, your bio

Setup → Edit your tag. You get a bio, a city, the crews you're reppin', and an avatar.

Avatars go through a cropper — drag and zoom until the picture is framed how you want it — and then through the exact same scrub as a flick: the location and camera details are destroyed on your device before the picture leaves it.

Your blackbook

Your tag lives on your device, which means the device is the single point of failure. Phones get lost. Browsers throw out storage. iPhones are especially rude about it — Safari discards a site's storage after about a week of not opening it, unless the site is installed to your home screen.

Your blackbook is the fix. Setup → Save your blackbook locks your tag with a passphrase you choose and hands you a file, plus a scannable block you can photograph or print.

Lose your blackbook, lose your tag. Nobody can recover it. Not even us. Especially not us.

That isn't a support dodge. There is no reset link because there is nothing on our side to reset from — we never had your tag. It's the same property that makes this place safe for you, and it cuts both ways.

Do it right after your first post. The app will nag you until you do. Let it.

Your blackbook is an opsec object

It's the one thing that can prove you're you — which means it's the one thing that can prove you're you. Don't leave it unlocked in Downloads, don't put it in a cloud drive under your legal name, don't screenshot it to a phone that auto-syncs photos. A printed block in a physical place is a genuinely good backup. More on the opsec page.

Getting your tag back

Already got a tag? is the second door on the landing screen.

You have	What to do
Your blackbook file	Restore → Upload your blackbook → enter the passphrase
A photo or printout of the block	Read it with your phone's camera, then Restore → Or paste it here → passphrase
A second device already set up	See "two devices" below
Neither, but recovery was switched on	See "recovery" below
Neither, and recovery was off	The tag is gone. Pick a new one.

Restoring brings back the same name, the same mark, the same history.

Two devices, one tag

Setup → Link a device. Enter a passphrase, and the app draws a scannable block. Open 1NKY on the other device, choose Already got a tag?, read the block with that device's camera, paste what it gives you, and type the passphrase. Same tag, two devices.

That block is your tag

Anyone who photographs the block and knows the passphrase becomes you. Show it, scan it, hide it.

Recovery (optional, off by default)

Setup → Recovery is a spare copy of your blackbook, locked with a passphrase, left on our box.

• It is off unless you switch it on.
• We hold a locked file and nothing else. The passphrase never leaves your device, so we can't open it — not for you, not for anyone who asks us to.
• You get a recovery link. Save it; it's how you point at the locked copy later.
• Lose both the passphrase and the file and the tag is gone, same as always.

It exists because "lost the phone" is the most common way people lose a name, and a locked file we can't read is a safer answer than no answer.

Hanging it up

Writers retire names. Setup → Hang it up is that, done properly.

You type your tag name to arm it. Then the app goes through everything it can find under your tag — what this device remembers and what's up on the wall — and buffs it, tallying as it goes. It puts up one last note saying the tag is hung up, and then the device forgets the tag entirely. If it gets interrupted, it picks up where it left off.

It's a ritual, not an error state. What it can't do is un-ring a bell: anything already screenshotted, downloaded or mirrored by somebody else is out of everyone's hands, including ours.

Where to go next

• Putting work up — flicks, clips, and what gets stripped.
• Install it to your home screen — and why iOS makes you.
• Opsec for writers — how people actually get caught.