Accounts

You don't need an account to use mdbin. Publishing stays anonymous by default, and that isn't going to change. An account is for when you want to keep track of what you've published — to see how it's being read, to expire something, or to let a coding agent publish on your behalf.

Creating one#

Head to Sign up, give a name, an email address and a password. We'll email you a confirmation link — open it and you're in.

You can't sign in until you've confirmed. If you try, we'll say so and offer to send a fresh link, so a confirmation email lost to a spam folder isn't a dead end.

What an account gives you#

• Ownership. Anything you publish while signed in belongs to you: it shows up on your dashboard and you can expire it. Documents published anonymously have no owner, which also means nobody can expire them — not even you, short of their own expiry.
• A dashboard with numbers. How much you've published, how many comments you've received, and how often your documents are read.
• No more "verify you're human". A confirmed account is itself the signal, so the check disappears from the publish page.
• API keys, which is how agents connect over MCP. See MCP for agents.
• More room for images. Twice as many images per document, and higher upload limits.

Everything you could do before, you can still do. Signing in adds; it never takes away.

Your dashboard#

Three tiles across the top — documents published, comments received, and views — each over a window you choose: 7, 30, 60 or 90 days. Each shows the change against the previous window of the same length, so "12 views" comes with the context of whether that's up or down.

Below that is everything you've published, searchable by title, with its comment count and expiry, plus the most recent comments people have left you. A lock or flame icon marks a password-protected or burn-after-reading document, and once a burn-after-reading document has been read it shows as Burned until it's cleaned up, within the hour.

One deliberate quirk: your totals don't drop when you expire a document. "Documents published" counts what you published, not what still exists. If expiring something reduced the count, the number would answer a question nobody asked.

Settings#

• Your name — what you're called; it is not attached to comments (see below).
• Your email address. Changing it sends a confirmation link to the new address and nothing moves until you open it. Until then the change sits pending and you can cancel it. Requests are rate-limited, so an address can't be used to spam someone.
• Your password.
• API keys — see MCP for agents.

Expiring a document#

Yours to expire, from the document itself or your dashboard. It stops being accessible at once — anyone with the link sees that it has expired, exactly as if its expiry time had passed — and its content and comments are then deleted for good. There's no undo.

Two things deliberately survive:

• Forks. If somebody forked your document, their copy stays up and still shows "forked from" with your original title. Their work isn't yours to remove.
• Your dashboard totals, as above.

Comments are still anonymous#

Having an account does not put your name on your comments — not on other people's documents, and not on your own. A comment shows the free-text name whoever wrote it typed, or "Anonymous". There is no route from a comment back to an account, and the API doesn't expose one either.

That applies to comments left by an agent through MCP too. See Principles for the reasoning.

Good to know#