Chapter 46 · Working With Others
Reviewing Someone Else’s Draft
Somebody sent you a link, and now their manuscript is open in front of you. This is the view from that side of the share: how to get in, what the page lets you do, which controls are greyed out and why, and how to hand your notes back without breaking a draft that is not yours.
Opening the link
A Storskarvia invite is a URL of the form storskarvia.com/share/ followed by a
long random token. Storskarvia emails nothing, so it reached you however the writer sent it.
You need a Storskarvia account to use it. Open the link while signed out and you land on the sign-in page with the invite remembered; sign in and you arrive on the document. With no account yet, use Create an account beside the sign-in form, because that link carries the invite with it. An account made any other way drops you in the Studio with no sign of the document, and the cure is to open the invite again once you are signed in.
Two things can stop you at the door:
- The beta is full. Signups are capped during the founding beta, and with the seats gone you reach the waitlist page instead of a signup form. The invite does not expire while you wait.
- Somebody already claimed it. A link belongs to the first signed-in account that opens it, and anybody after that is told This invite was already used by someone else. Ask the owner for a link of your own.
Where it lives afterwards
Claiming an invite does not add the document to your projects. It appears on your Studio page under Shared with you, below your own work, as one row: your role, the title as a button, and from plus the owner's email address.
That row is the only route back to it inside Storskarvia, and the role word on it is the fastest way to remember which access you hold. Bookmark the document's own address if you expect to be in and out of it for a week.
The editor from this side
Most of the editor is the editor. Where Share ▾ and Versions ▾ sit on the owner's toolbar, you get a chip reading your role and the owner's name, for example reviewer · mara's doc, with their full address in the tooltip. Export ▾ stays where it is.
| What | How it behaves for you | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Check Facts, Continuity, Research | Not shown on the Review tab | A check spends the owner's allowance |
| The storage chip and Set daily goal | Not shown in the status bar | Where the document lives is the owner's decision |
| Reference on the View tab | Not shown | It lists the rest of the project |
| Story Bible tab, and its + Add from selection | Empty, and the button is gone | The bible belongs to the project |
| Title, fonts, size, line spacing, Structure, scene numbers, UK style, two-column and play layout | Greyed, tooltip The document owner sets this. | Stored against the owner's document |
The last row is greyed rather than removed so you can see the setting exists. Left live, a collaborator could pick a font, watch the status bar say Saved, and find the choice gone on the next open.
Doing the pass
If your role is reviewer, the Suggest checkbox on the Review tab is already ticked and cannot be unticked. Every word you type is recorded as a tracked change for the owner to accept or reject, which is covered in Chapter 44. The formatting buttons are disabled with the tooltip Reviewers suggest and comment. The owner formats and restructures.
If your role is editor, you type straight into the draft, and Suggest is yours to turn on when a change is big enough to want asking about.
Either way, comments are the other half of the job. Select the passage, open Review, press New Comment, and the thread files itself in the rail. Chapter 45 covers threads and replies. Two limits are yours:
- You can resolve, edit and delete the comments you wrote. On somebody else's, Resolve does nothing visible: the request is refused and the list reloads unchanged. Delete says why in the status area. Reply instead and let the author or the owner close it.
- Your display name on a thread comes from your account. Without one, Storskarvia signs your
notes with the part of your email address before the
@.
The tabs that are not yours
The Changes tab lists every tracked change and its Jump button works for you. Accepting and rejecting do not. Accept all and Reject all are not rendered, and the per-change buttons answer in the status area with Only the document owner can accept or reject changes. Resolving a suggestion rewrites the document, which is a decision rather than a note.
Facts and Continuity are stranger, and worth knowing about in advance. A check belongs to the account that ran it, so the owner's findings are not readable from your session. If they have run one, the tab tries to load it, is refused, retries a few times, and settles on "Lost contact with that check. It may still be running on the server: reload the page to pick it up." Reloading does it again. Nothing is wrong with the draft, so ask the owner what the check said.
When your saves stop landing
The reviewer rule is enforced on the server, not only in the buttons. If a structural edit reaches it, a changed word, a heading, a bold run, a paragraph split, that save is refused and so is every save after it until you undo the change.
On screen the status reads Saving…, then reports Save failed and that it is retrying. After the second failure an alarm appears reading Not saving (server said 403), with a count of failed attempts, a note that your work is safe on this device but has not reached the server, and a Try now button.
The fix is ⌘Z or Ctrl+Z until the status goes back to Saved. Nothing you wrote is lost meanwhile, because the editor writes to your device before it writes to the server. The controls that would cause it are disabled for reviewers, so meeting this at all means something got past that guard, and undo is the way out.
Your suggestions land in Storskarvia and are pushed on to the owner's Dropbox or Drive using the owner's connection, never yours. If they keep the document in a folder on their own computer, your changes wait in Storskarvia until they next open it, because that sync runs in the owner's browser. Chapter 3 describes the model.
Taking a copy away
Export ▾ is open to both collaborator roles, with the full list of formats, including the Watermarked draft PDF… that most reviewers want for reading away from a screen. Screenplays and audio dramas can also pull their production reports.
One item is missing. PDF with revision stars… is the owner's, because those marks are computed against their private version history, and asking for one anyway is refused with Revision marks are for the document's owner.
Two things to expect in the file. A novel PDF prints the owner's email address on the author line, since it is their book, and no export carries comments. Part VIII covers what each format does and does not carry.
When the share ends
The owner can revoke a link whenever they like, and you get no warning. The next thing you ask for is answered as though the document does not exist, and the row leaves your Studio. Everything you added stays in their draft: comments, replies and suggestions all survive the revoke.
Before assuming a vanished document was revoked, check which account you are signed in as. An invite belongs to the account that claimed it, so a different address shows you a Studio without it.
Closing your own account behaves the same way from the owner's side. Your comments stay on their document under the name they were written with and lose their link to your account, so only the owner can resolve or delete them afterwards. Their manuscript is not edited by you leaving.
The same events from the owner's side, including minting and revoking links, are Chapter 43.
Updated 2026-09-22 · Full contents · Something wrong or missing?