Here are some notes about personal diaries at 7 Cups.

A personal diary is somewhere you can write things mainly for yourself, but also to discuss with other 7 Cups members and listeners. Diaries at 7 Cups are not private.

If what you want is a place to keep secret notes that only you can see, do not use a diary. Use 7 Cups’ Notes feature instead. To open your notes, click on your own profile picture at the top right of any 7 Cups webpage, and choose My Notes from the menu. (The link provided here only works if you are logged in to 7 Cups.)

Where to put your diary

You can put your personal diary anywhere in the forum, but there are three places specially set aside for diaries:

Diary Entries & Connections in General Support
This is intended to be used for most diaries.

My Diary in Trauma Support
This is intended to be used for diaries of trauma survivors.

Journals in Personality Disorders Support
This is intended to be used for journals by people diagnosed with personality disorders and their loved ones.

There is no special place for listeners’ diaries, but if you are a listener and you want to keep a diary about listening that only listeners can read, you could put it in:

Listener Self-Care in the Listener Community Center

What you can put in your diary

You can use your diary to post anything you like, except that all the Forum Guidelines apply.

Additional Trauma Support guidelines and Personality Disorders Support guidelines apply in those subcommunities.

For information about posting images, see: Add an image to a post

7 Cups does not support embedded audio or video. You can only provide links to audio and video on other websites, and they must not be websites where you can be contacted. (This is Rule 4 in the community guidelines.)

How to change your diary

You cannot usually edit your diary yourself.

If you need something to be changed for an important reason, send a message to any moderator or mentor in the subcommunity where you put your diary, or ask any of the subcommunity leaders to find out who can make the change.

You can also ask for your entire diary to be deleted, but deleting your diary without warning might alarm your subscribers.

General Support Leaders

Trauma Support Leaders

Personality Disorders Support Leaders

Listener Mentors

You can also e-mail forum@7cups.com if things go badly wrong. Send the e-mail from the address that you used to log in to 7 Cups, and provide full details including a link.

Who can see your diary

Everyone on the Internet can see your diary, unless it’s in a listener-only forum.

If you plan to post secrets in your diary that you don’t want certain people to see, then you must remember never to post any details that could identify you. Don’t let anyone outside 7 Cups know you have a diary at all, unless you completely trust them. If they know you have a diary, they might go looking for it.

Staying anonymous

At 7 Cups most members and listeners keep their real identity secret (although doing so is a recommendation, not a requirement). To keep your real identity secret, you should never publish any identifying information in your diary.

Do not publish anything in your diary if you also publish it somewhere else on the Internet using a different name. Someone at 7 Cups might search the Internet for it and discover your real identity. This particularly applies to original work like stories, poems and artwork.

You can publish original work in your diary and also somewhere else on the Internet if you publish it anonymously, or publish it using the same identity that you use at 7 Cups.

Note that if you publish original work in your diary and also somewhere else on the Internet, you must ensure that no one can contact you outside 7 Cups. For example, if you publish original work on a blog, you must not allow comments or identifying information anywhere on your blog. This is Rule 4 in 7 Cups’ forum guidelines.

Who can write in your diary

If you don’t want other people to post in your diary, you can say so either in the title or in your first post. Some examples are:

You can also mention a particular person in the title and use the thread for a discussion with just that one person. This allows any two or more members to communicate, or any combination of adults and teens.

If people post in your diary but you don’t want them to, message a forum mentor to have their posts deleted.

If you change your mind about who you want to allow to write in your diary, message a forum mentor to have the information in your first post changed.

Keeping a permanent copy

7 Cups does not guarantee that your diary will remain available forever. While it’s very unlikely that diaries will ever be removed, it’s still a possibility.

Note that at one time 7 Cups provided a feed, which was like a personal blog for every member and listener. 7 Cups removed all the feeds with very little notice. It’s possible (although unlikely) that the same thing could happen to diaries.

To keep a permanent copy of your diary you can use your web browser to print it from time to time. You might be able to choose the print destination and print it to a PDF file or to some other form of storage.

If your diary has more than one page, you must keep a copy of each page separately.

7 Cups does not provide an easy and reliable way to link to threads or posts in the forum, and diaries are just the same as any other threads. There are ways to work around some of the limitations.

See: Link to forums

Reposting

Rule 8 in the guidelines means you cannot repost something from someone else’s diary, because it would be a duplicate post.

You can link to another post anywhere else in the forum, and you can quote selectively from any other post.

Tagging and subscriptions

Tags and subscriptions work in diaries in the same way as in the rest of the forum.

To tag someone, mention their name with an @-sign before it, like: @RarelyCharlie
The person you tagged receives a notification.

It is best to type a space or end the line immediately after a tag, in case the tag doesn’t work. This means that to tag multiple people, separate the tags with spaces.

There is no way to tell how many people are subscribed to your diary, or who they are.

Additional formatting

Some additional formatting is possible in diaries (just like in the rest of the forum) if you use an enhanced editor, but this only works in some web browsers. For example, with an enhanced editor you can make quotes, tables and lists, and add a signature to every post you make.

See: Enhance the editor