Account & settings

Everything you create in Marginalia belongs to your account: books, lorebooks, tags, inference providers, protocols and settings. Other users don't see them (except books you publish), and you don't see theirs.

Your account

The buttons at the bottom of the workspace:

Button
Change Password	Changes your password, user name and full name, see below.
Logout	Logs you out on this device.
Admin	Only for administrators, see Administration.

Changing the password

Change Password opens a dialog with your Username, Full Name, Current Password, Password and Repeat password:

enter your current password for every change (leave it empty if your account has no password);
to change the password, enter the new one in both password fields;
leave both password fields empty to change only the name and keep the password;
the user name must not be used by another account.

Click OK to save. With a wrong current password nothing is saved.

Changing the password ends all saved logins (Save login), on every device including this one: they have to log in again with the new password. If a device was lost or your password leaked, changing the password logs that device out. Sessions that are open right now (a browser tab still showing the workspace) stay logged in until they log out or their session expires.

Logging in

Save login on the login screen keeps you logged in on this device for 30 days (it needs HTTPS on a server, see Server (Docker)). Logout ends it.

An account can have an empty password; you then log in with the user name only. If an administrator cleared your forgotten password, log in this way and set a new password with Change Password right away. That is handy for the desktop app on your own computer, but never do it on a server others can reach.

Settings

The Settings tab holds your defaults for all your books.

At the top are three buttons:

Import Backup as New Book - creates a book from a backup file, see Book backups;
Discard Changes - throws away the unsaved changes and loads the saved settings again;
Save - saves the settings.

Unsaved changes

Settings are not saved automatically. As soon as you change a field (extension settings included), Unsaved changes appears at the top and the other tabs, Admin and Logout are locked. Click Save or Discard Changes to unlock them.

General Settings

Field
Default Model	The inference provider new books start with.
Default Protocol	The protocol new books start with.
Backup Strategy	Automatic book backups for books without their own strategy: No Backups, After N Messages or After N Minutes, with the number next to it.

Default Model and Default Protocol are used only when a book is created; changing them doesn't change existing books. The backup strategy applies to all books without a Per manuscript override, from their next generated part.

Templates

The defaults for the book prompts:

Field
Master Template	The frame of the prompt, see Master template.
Point of View (POV), Tense	The narrative voice and tense.
Style	Style and tone guidelines.
Default User Prompt	The request for each part, see User prompt.
Default Summary Prompt	The request for a summary.
Default Meta Summary Prompt	The request for a meta summary, which merges summaries.

Each field shows the built-in default in grey while it is empty, and has the hints popover with Insert Default Template and the available variables and macros.

These defaults apply to every book whose own field is empty, immediately - not only to new books. A book that sets its own value on its Prompts tab keeps it. So:

set what all your books share here;
set what is special to one book on its Prompts tab;
clear a book's field to bring it back to the default from Settings.

Extension Settings

Settings of the installed extensions, one section per extension (for example Reviewer Settings and SideQuery Settings). They are saved with the same Save button. The tab is empty when no extension with settings is installed.