Your First Topic

There are two ways to work with a Topic: by going to the Playground, or by creating one under your account.

Playground Topics

You can start working with a Topic immediately by going to the Playground here or from the home page:

This is the easiest way to get started, but this Topic will only be saved within your browser, so you won’t be able to share it with others through a URL or access it from another device. If you don’t care about this limitation, you can jump right to Diagramming Basics.

If you decide you want to share your Topic later, you can always utilize the Download and Upload actions to save your Topic as a file and upload the file to a shareable User Topic.

User Topics

If you want to be able to save your topic to the Ameliorate database, and therefore be able to share it with others via URL or access it from another device, you’ll need to create an account and save your topic under your account.

Creating your User

To create an account, click “Log in” from the home page :

and follow the prompts to sign up with email + password or with Google. After signing up, you’ll be redirected back to Ameliorate. If you sign up with email + password, you’ll need to verify your email address.

Once you create an account, you’ll need to select a username:

After selecting a username, you’ll be redirected to the page you were just on. To get to your user page where you’ll create topics, click on “My Topics” in the header:

You have no Topics yet, so this list is currently empty:

Let’s fix that!

Creating your Topic

On your user page, click the New Topic button:

You’ll be greeted by a page where with a couple of fields:

Title - the name of your Topic, which must not have spaces and will determine the URL of your Topic; this is the only field you need to fill out.
Description - you can put optional details here, e.g. the purpose of the Topic.
Visibility - this determines who can see your Topic; switch to “unlisted” if you want to share with others via URL, or to “public” if want to share via URL and allow people to find the Topic by searching for it.
Editability - check this if you want others to be able to edit your Topic; if you do this, it’d probably be best to set Visibility to “unlisted” and to only share the URL with people you trust to edit the Topic.

Once you fill out the form, click “Create” and you’ll be redirected to the Topic’s page, where you can start diagramming!