By Michael Szerencsy

Everyone plays the same grid every day, which makes OUTLIER unusually easy to be social about: there is nothing to arrange, no lobby to join, no time to agree on. Orbit is the layer that turns that into something you can watch. You follow whoever you like, and their score on today's Set lands on your board next to yours. This guide covers every part of it, including the parts built to protect you.

What Orbit actually is

Orbit is a board of the people you follow, ranked against you on the same daily Set. It is not a friends list and it is not a chat. There are no requests to accept and no approvals: following is one tap, one direction, and the other person does not have to do a thing.

That asymmetry is deliberate. A friends system makes both people do work before either gets value, and most people never finish. A follow costs you one tap and starts paying the next morning.

The OUTLIER Orbit board, showing followed players ranked by their score on today's Set with avatars, names and scores. — Your Orbit, ranked on today's Set. Played rows sort by score; people who have not played yet sort by how recently they were seen.

If they follow you back, a small glyph appears next to their name. That is the only thing mutuality changes. It is a fact about the pair, not a permission.

Following someone

There are more doors into this than most features have, because the right moment to follow somebody is almost never while you are looking at a follow button.

Search by nameThe type-ahead matches anywhere in a username or display name, not just the start, from two characters up.

From a profileAny player's profile page carries a follow control.

After a resultLock a board somebody shared with you and the offer appears with the score comparison, at the moment you actually care.

Accept a challengeJoining somebody's challenge follows you both to each other automatically. You played the same board; the edge is the obvious consequence.Follow backYour followers page lists everyone following you, non-mutuals first, so following back is one pass down a list.

There is no cap on how many people you can follow. The largest Orbit on the site is 648.

Reading the daily board

Each row is one person and one day. A row for somebody who has played shows their place, their score, their word count while the board is still open, and a coarse note of when they were last seen. A row for somebody who has not shows a dot instead of a rank, and a nudge button.

Rows sort in two groups: people who have played, by score; then people who have not, most recently active first. Somebody who has not played is not ranked last, they are simply not ranked yet.

Three lines sit under the board, and each was written to answer a question without creating a new one:

What it tells youWhat it deliberately does not

The gap to the person directly above youWho is below you, or by how much

The closest finish in your Orbit latelyAnybody's win-loss record against anybody

The score to beat todayWhich words got them there

How many people have playedAnything about the ones who have not

That second column is the design. A win-loss badge publishes the loss by its absence, which makes the board worse for exactly the people who most need a reason to come back.

Days, weeks, months and all time

The daily board is one Set. Four other views average instead. This Week is the seven game days ending on the live one. Last Week is the same board one week back. This Month runs from the first of the current game month. All Time is every settled board you both played.

The period boards are deliberately not filtered for dormancy. An All Time board that quietly omits people who stopped playing is not all time.

The quiet list, and why nobody is ever dropped

Somebody who has not opened a board for 30 days stops appearing on your daily Orbit. They are not unfollowed. They are listed at the quiet page, and they come back the moment they play.

The daily board stays about the people actually playing, and nothing you did is undone.

Nudging

A nudge is the one email on OUTLIER that another player can cause. That is exactly why the rules are strict, and why every one of them is enforced on the server rather than in the button.

1nudge per person per day, from anyone

20nudges you can send in a day

0sent to someone mid-board

The one-a-day cap is per RECIPIENT, not per sender. Somebody with forty followers would otherwise open forty emails on a morning they were merely running late.

A nudge is refused, quietly and without spending one, if you do not follow them, if either of you has blocked the other, if they have opted out of nudge email, if they have already played, or if they are on the board right now. That last check runs before your daily cap, so being stopped from a mistake does not cost you a nudge.

The email carries the sender's name and avatar, the day number, the terrain and a picture of the grid. It never carries a word, a rarity or anything derived from the answer list, and it says at the bottom that at most one arrives a day, from anyone.

Inviting people who are not here yet

Your invite link is your own profile URL with a marker on it, so it unfurls as a real page rather than a mystery code. Somebody who follows it and locks their first board is followed to you and you to them, automatically. It fires at the first lock rather than at the click, because a click is not a player.

The banner shown to a signed-out visitor on the Orbit page, explaining that Orbit needs a username. — Orbit needs a name that is still yours tomorrow, so a guest sees the board read-only and an invitation to claim one.

You can also mint a share card of your Orbit for a day, a week or all time. It is a frozen snapshot of the top ten scorers, reached by an unguessable seven-character code, and it exists only because you made it. There is no endpoint that mints a card for somebody else and none that lists anybody's codes.

What Orbit will never do

This is the part worth reading even if you skip the rest, because it is the set of promises the feature is built around.

A score never leaks a wordScores and word counts go across the wire live. Words, rarities, tiers and letters never do. Everything else bends around this rule.

Your follower list is yoursFollower counts and lists are owner-only. No route anywhere shows a third party who follows you.Presence is symmetricTurn off live presence and you stop seeing your Orbit play AND stop appearing to them. There is no one-way mirror.

Nothing is crawlableEvery Orbit page is noindex. None of this reaches a search engine.

Live means presentA ten-minute window, and an open tab is not enough. Times are shown coarsely on purpose: now, 24m, 3h, 8d.

Three switches, one destructivePrivate, disable Orbit, and hide-who-I-follow. Only disabling Orbit removes existing followers, and it says so before you do it.

Where to start

Follow two or three people you actually know, then leave it alone for a week. Orbit is not a feed and it does not reward checking; it rewards the thirty seconds after you lock, when you find out where you landed.

Open your Orbit, or play today's Set first and come back after you lock. For the competitive version of the same idea, challenges turn one shared board into a running record.