Frequently asked questions

Anyone with an interest in architecture is welcome — whether you're a licensed architect, a student, a recent graduate, an urban planner, an interior designer, or simply someone who loves the built environment. There are no credentials required to join.

Yes — free to join and use, and every core feature is available to all members today. Optional paid plans are listed on the Pricing page, but paid checkout isn't live yet, so nothing is charged.

After creating your account, we recommend: (1) completing your profile — add a photo, profession, nationality, and headline; (2) building your resume; (3) posting your first project or thought; (4) following a few architects whose work interests you. The platform's suggestions and feed improve the more you engage.

The platform interface is available in English and Arabic. User-generated content — posts, project descriptions, job listings — can be written in any language.

There's no App Store or Google Play download, but Architectena is an installable web app. Open it in your phone's browser and choose Add to home screen — on desktop Chrome or Edge, Install app. It then launches full-screen with its own icon, like a native app, and it can deliver browser push notifications once you grant permission.

Go to your profile page and click Edit profile. You can update your name, profession, nationality, bio, social links, cover image, and avatar from there.

Yes — the Username field sits on the Edit profile form itself. You can change it once every 30 days; until the cooldown is over the field is disabled and shows the date you can change it again. Your profile URL changes with the handle, the old address stops working, and the name you gave up becomes available to someone else — so update any links you've shared.

The availability badge signals to recruiters and offices whether you are open to new opportunities. The choices are Open to work, Open to hire, Open to collaborate and Not available — or Don't show to hide it entirely. Set it from Settings → Availability. It shows as a pill on your profile, and as a coloured dot on your avatar while you're open to something.

The Workspace, linked from your profile sidebar, is your private toolkit — five tools only you can see: Todo (named lists with priorities and deadlines), Projects (personal projects with a version-update history), Reminders (one-off and recurring), Tasks (kanban boards with checklists and labels) and Vault (private file storage). It isn't a mirror of your public activity: your saved posts live under Bookmarks on your profile, and your notifications under the bell.

A free account gets 3 GB in the Workspace Vault. The meter at the top of the Vault shows what you've used, and an upload that would take you past the limit is refused with the amount of room left. Paid plans and storage add-ons raise the ceiling.

Yes — that's what Deactivate is for, in the danger zone at the bottom of Settings. Your profile and your content are hidden from everyone else and you're signed out, but nothing is deleted. Signing back in with the same email and password — or the same Google account — reactivates everything instantly. Deleting is the separate, permanent option.

Yes — Settings → Your data. Take a JSON file (machine-readable, every field), a printable PDF, or have the JSON archive emailed to you. Your group messages and their attachments are a separate request on the same page, prepared in the background and sent when it's ready.

Go to Settings and scroll to the danger zone. Deleting your account is permanent — it removes your profile, your content, and your uploaded files from the platform (including from our media storage). Export your data first if you want to keep a copy.

Visit any profile and click Follow. If the account is private, your request will be held until they approve it. To unfollow, return to the profile and click Following. The posts of people you follow appear in your Following feed on the home page.

Click Add post from the home page or the Posts section. Write your content, add a cover image and attachments if needed, choose a topic tag, then hit Publish. You can save a draft and return to it later.

You can share written posts (ideas, critiques, discoveries, questions), images, attachments — PDFs, drawings, office documents, CAD files and archives, up to 5 MB per file and 25 MB per batch — and links. Posts can be public or private. Audio and video files can be attached too, but nothing plays them on the page: they arrive as downloads, so a link to a hosted video is still the better choice for anything you want watched.

The home feed has three tabs: Following (posts from people you follow), For you (personalised recommendations based on your field, groups, and engagement), and Topics (posts filtered by your subscribed topic tags). Switch between them at any time.

Yes — click the bookmark icon on any post card or post detail page. Saved posts live under Bookmarks on your profile, where you can also sort them into collections.

Open the post and click Report this post — the flag button in the sidebar — then choose the reason that applies. Reports are reviewed by the moderation team. Reporting does not remove the post from your home feed: instead every control on it is locked for you (no reacting, commenting, saving or sharing) and it stops appearing in the Posts listing, on tag pages, in search and in recommendations. You can withdraw a report after 30 days from Settings → My reports.

Go to Jobs → Add job. Fill in the title, description, location, salary range, and required field. You can link the listing to an office profile and set an expiry date. Job posts are free.

A Listing is a specific job vacancy with a title, salary, and role type. An Open Call is a standing invitation from an office — 'we're always looking for talented architects' — without a specific vacancy. Open Calls have no salary or level fields.

Each listing has an Apply now button that opens a structured form: a cover letter you can type or upload as a file, certificates, photos, contact details for this application only (or reuse the ones on your profile), anyone you'd like to name as a recommendation, and any custom questions the poster added. The poster can open your resume from your application. Some listings also offer Quick apply — a one-click application that sends your profile straight to the poster — but the poster can switch that off for a listing.

Set your filters in the Jobs search bar (field, country, salary, etc.) and click Save this search. Give the search a name and choose alert frequency — daily or weekly. You'll receive an email when new matching jobs are posted. Manage saved searches from the Saved button in the toolbar.

Yes — click the Map button in the Jobs toolbar. A listing whose poster dropped a pin on the map is shown exactly where they put it. Every other listing is plotted from its country at an approximate point, not a real address, so read an unpinned marker as “somewhere in this country” and check the listing itself for the actual location.

Go to Projects → Add project. Fill in the title, description, location, year, programme type, and team. Upload a cover image and inspiration photos. Save as draft or publish immediately.

Yes. Toggle Private when creating or editing a project. A private project is visible only to you, to the collaborators credited on it who have accepted that credit, and to the manager of any credited office — nobody else, signed in or not. It is also kept out of the projects listing, search, recommendations and the inspiration picker. If you want something visible to nobody but you while you work on it, use Draft instead.

Images are automatically resized and converted to WebP on upload — no need to resize before uploading. Cover images are capped at 1920 × 600 px; inspiration images at 1920 × 1920 px. Each file must be 5 MB or smaller.

Yes — when creating a project, select the office from the Associated office field if you are a staff member of that office. The project will appear in the office's portfolio.

Go to Offices → Add office. Fill in the name, country, city, description, website, and founding year. Upload a logo and cover image. You'll become the office manager automatically. A new office isn't public straight away — it's submitted for review and appears once a moderator approves it. You can also Save as draft and keep it to yourself until you're ready to submit, and if a submission is rejected you can fix it and resubmit as often as you need.

From your office dashboard, go to Staff and invite members by username. Invited users receive a notification and can accept or decline. Staff members can post on the office's behalf, add projects, and manage the jobs board.

A verified badge indicates the office profile has been confirmed as representing a real, operating architecture firm. You can start it yourself — no need to write to us. Open the office page, choose Credentials from its manage menu, and pick one of three routes: add a DNS TXT record to the office domain, or click a link we email to an address on that domain (both of those verify automatically — the DNS record is re-checked for you until it propagates), or upload a business document if the office has no domain of its own, which a moderator reviews. Each route earns its own credential, and a request left unfinished for 14 days is cleared so you can start again.

Yes. Click Follow on any office page. News the office publishes reaches you straight away as a notification. New jobs and projects don't ping you individually — they're bundled into a weekly email digest sent on Monday morning, and only when that office actually published something in the past week.

Browse groups from the Groups section and click Join. Open groups admit you immediately. Private groups send a request to the admin who approves or declines.

Go to Groups → Create group. Set a name, description, cover image, and choose whether the group is public or private. As creator you become the group admin.

Admins can approve or reject membership requests, remove members, post announcements, edit the group description and cover, and delete the group. Regular members can post, comment, and react within the group.

Open the group page and click Leave group from the members panel or the group settings menu. Leaving takes effect immediately and there is no ownership hand-over — you are never prompted to appoint a replacement. So if you run the group, promote another member to Admin from the members panel first (only the group's creator can change roles), or delete the group instead.

Situ is Architectena's place-pinning feature. Think of it as a shared architectural atlas — members pin buildings, spaces, and sites they've visited or find significant, with notes, photos, and coordinates. Every pin appears on the world map at Situ → Map.

Go to Situ → Add pin. Enter the place name, location (city, country, coordinates), a description, category, and optional photo. Publish and your pin appears on the map instantly.

Yes — open any pin's detail page and use the comment field at the bottom. Comments appear in real time without a page reload.

The Situ map shows all published pins as interactive markers. Click a marker to see the place name and a link to its detail page. Use the search and filter controls to narrow down by category or country.

Your resume is automatically created when you sign up. Open it from the Resume section of your profile, or go straight to /resumes/. Add sections for education, work experience, skills, languages, certifications, and links. Each section saves independently.

Yes — open your resume, click Export PDF, then Download PDF. We build the file on our side and hand it to you as a download, so it looks the same whichever browser you use and there's no print dialog involved. You can leave your photo out with the toggle in that dialog. Your email and phone appear in the file only if you've marked those fields public on your profile.

By default, your resume is visible to other logged-in members. The Public / Private pill with the eye icon at the top of your own resume flips that. While it's Private nobody else can open your resume, and the PDF download is refused for everyone but you.

Any professional certification — architectural licences (ARB, AIA, RIBA, etc.), software certificates, CPD courses, or workshop completions. You can upload a certificate image alongside each entry.

Direct messages are mutual by design: a one-to-one thread can only be opened once the two of you follow each other, so nobody you haven't followed back can start one with you. Blocking removes the option in both directions, and if you've restricted someone their messages arrive in your requests rather than your inbox.

Because your direct messages are end-to-end encrypted, the key that reads them is derived from your password on your own device — we never hold it, so we can't hand it to a new browser. The first time you open Messages on a device you'll be asked for your account password once, and the unlocked key then stays on that device until you sign out. Until you unlock, your encrypted threads are unreadable there; that's the encryption working, not a fault.

Yes — open a conversation's details pane and set Disappearing messages to 1 hour, 24 hours, or 7 days. From then on, new messages in that thread delete themselves for both of you once the timer runs out; set it back to Off to stop. It works on encrypted threads too, because the timer keys off when a message was sent, never its contents.

Yes. For server-managed threads the search runs normally. For your end-to-end encrypted direct messages it runs inside your own browser, over the messages that device has already decrypted — our servers hold nothing but ciphertext, so they have nothing to search.

Settings → Notification preferences lays every category of event — likes, comments and mentions, follows, new posts from people you follow, jobs, groups and offices, group chats, moderation, billing, reminders, achievements — against three channels: the in-app bell, email, and browser push. Flip any single cell. Reactions and achievements stay quiet by default; switch them on if you want them.

A nightly window, set on the same page, in which the interrupting channels hold off — browser pop-ups and instant emails wait until it's over. Your in-app bell keeps updating throughout, and the daily digest is deliberately exempt: it still arrives at 09:00 carrying whatever you missed. Times are read in your own timezone, and a window that crosses midnight (22:00 to 08:00, say) behaves as you'd expect.

Yes — the same page carries a cadence picker for the email channel: Instant (one email per event), Daily (a single digest at 09:00 in your timezone), or Off (never email). One choice applies across your categories.

One thing: moderation notices. A warning, a removal, or a decision on your appeal always reaches your in-app bell — that switch is deliberately locked on, because you should never be able to hide a decision made about your own account. Whether those notices also email or push you is still yours to choose.

Go to Settings → Security and choose Set up 2FA. It works with any authenticator app (Google Authenticator, Authy, 1Password and the rest): after that you're asked for the 6-digit code when you sign in. You also get ten single-use backup codes for the day you lose your phone — save them somewhere safe, and regenerate them from the same page when you're running low. That page is also where you add a passkey (Face ID, Touch ID, Windows Hello, or a hardware key) and change your password.

After 5 failed sign-in attempts, that username and the address the attempts are coming from are locked out for an hour. A successful sign-in resets the counter, so an honest typo or two costs you nothing.

Yes — Settings → Security → Active sessions lists the browsers and devices with a live session, each with its last-active time, and lets you revoke any of them. Revoking is one session at a time; there is no single “sign out everywhere” button.

Settings → Activity log keeps the last 90 days of actions on your account — sign-ins, follows, posts and the rest — newest first and paginated. It's the quickest way to check whether anything happened that you don't recognise.

Yes — one-to-one direct messages are end-to-end encrypted by default. Your messages and attachments are encrypted in your browser, so only you and the person you're chatting with can read them; our servers relay the ciphertext but can't read it, and it's never searched or previewed. Two consequences worth knowing: you unlock your messages once per device with your account password, and when encryption is first set up you are shown a recovery code exactly once. If you ever forget your password and reset it, that code is the only way back to your old messages — lose both the password and the code and nobody can recover them, us included. Save it in a password manager. Every other kind of thread — group, job, post, project, office, and the office-workspace team and client threads — is server-managed so search and moderation can work: encrypted in transit and at rest, but not end-to-end.

Profiles are visible to all logged-in members by default. The Account: Public / Private button in your own profile sidebar switches that — there is no Privacy page under Settings for it. Private means anyone who isn't an approved follower sees a lock card instead of your profile, and you drop out of people search and out of the suggestions other members are shown. It is not a content-level setting, though: posts you publish stay readable wherever they're listed, so use a post's own Private option for anything you don't want seen.

Open the user's profile and click the red ban icon in the row of action buttons under their name, then confirm. Blocked users cannot see your profile, follow you, or interact with your content, and you won't see theirs. The same row also offers mute (hide their activity from your feeds without telling them) and restrict (quietly limit them — their comments show only to them and their messages go to your requests). Everyone you've blocked, muted or restricted is managed from Settings → Privacy & moderation → User management.

We collect the information you provide when signing up (name, email, profession) and the content you create (posts, projects, etc.). We do not sell your data to third parties. For full details, refer to our Privacy Policy.

Open the user's profile and click the flag icon in the row of action buttons, then describe the issue and submit. Reports are reviewed privately; the reported user is never told who reported them. Note that reporting someone also hides the two of you from each other's feeds and suggestions, in both directions.

You're always told — moderation notices can't be silenced. Any warnings on your account are listed under Settings → My warnings. While a suspension is running, every page takes you to a suspension screen showing the reason, how long is left, and an appeal form you fill in right there: appeals are handled in the app, not by email. You get one appeal per suspension, and the form closes when the suspension expires — so appeal early rather than late. A permanent ban can be appealed too.