Explore & your creator profile
Published sites are discoverable on a public gallery and on your own creator profile, and you can opt any site out.
Open in the interactive manual →The interactive version has full-text search, a table of contents, and light/dark themes.
Publishing a site mints a link, and it can also make your work discoverable. Two public surfaces do that:
The Explore gallery
/explore is a public, crawlable gallery of published 3dCMS sites, each shown with its social-card thumbnail (or a brand card if none was captured). It's server-rendered with proper canonical, Open Graph, and structured-data markup, so it's a genuine front door that search engines and visitors can find your scenes through.
Featured scenes
A scene can be featured: it sorts to the front of Explore and of every profile grid, with a small Featured pill beside its title, and the one at the very front is also the live scene embedded on the 3dCMS home page. Featuring changes placement only (no URL moves and nothing about the scene itself changes), and every feature carries an expiry, so it lapses on its own.
Most of the time it happens by itself: each month the previous month's most-viewed eligible scene is featured automatically, badged Last month's feature. Being featured never overrides the listing rules below: a site you've hidden from Explore stays hidden however it's picked.
Your creator profile
Every creator gets a profile at /<your-handle> that lists your public sites in one place. Because every shared link can point back to it, one visitor who likes a scene can find the rest of your work in a click.
Achievement badges
Above your sites, the profile shows small pills for milestones you've reached. There are two:
| Badge | Earned by |
|---|---|
| 🚀 Published creator | Publishing your first public scene. It's yours from then on. |
| 🎉 Nth publish anniversary | Each full year since that first publish, your "3dCMS birthday". It counts up every year, and on the day itself it gets a cake and a little flourish. |
They appear automatically; there's nothing to switch on, and no badge row is drawn at all until you've earned one. 3dCMS never asks for your date of birth: the publish anniversary is the milestone it celebrates instead. Dates are counted in UTC, so the anniversary lands on the same day for everyone.
Listing is on by default, and easy to turn off
Newly published sites are listed by default. You control it per site in two places:
- The Show on Explore & your profile checkbox in the Share dialog at publish time.
- The same toggle on each site row of your Account page.
Turn it off and the site stays fully live at its own URL: it's just removed from the gallery and your profile. A hidden site stays hidden across future publishes until you re-list it.
That's a different thing from taking a site down, which stops it serving to anyone. A taken-down site also disappears from Explore and your profile, but the two settings are stored separately, so putting it back restores the listing choice you'd made.
It closes the guestbook too. An unlisted site stops accepting visitor entries, whatever its own guestbook switch says, and its Account-page toggle reports it as off rather than claiming to be open. The reasoning is that an unlisted scene is usually one you've stepped away from, and an unwatched open guestbook on a direct link is a spam surface nobody is reading. The trade is real and worth knowing: you can't run a private, invite-only guestbook by unlisting the site. Re-list it and the guestbook comes back exactly as you left it.
It reaches the search engines too: hiding a site marks its pages noindex and sends a one-off IndexNow notice so an already-indexed page gets dropped rather than lingering for months. See what "unlisted" does to a crawler.