This is the quick version. The full documentation covers everything in depth, including the command line tool and the API.
Signing in
Branchwork is for UNC Charlotte students, so you need a university address ending in charlotte.edu or uncc.edu. Departmental subdomains work too.
There are no passwords. You give us that address, we send a link, the link signs you in. It works once and expires after fifteen minutes. If it expires, get another one - they are free.
The first time you sign in you pick a handle. That one is permanent, because links and review attribution point at it.
Stacks and changes
A change is one small unit of work, roughly one commit. A stack is a line of changes where each one sits on top of the last.
Every push to a change creates a revision, numbered r1, r2, r3. Nothing is overwritten, which is what makes the review history make sense later.
A change cannot merge while anything below it in the stack is unmerged. The button is disabled and the server refuses it too, so you cannot get around it by being clever with the URL.
Reviewing
Hover any line in a diff and click the blue plus to leave a note. Notes queue up as pending, in yellow, until you submit them together with a verdict: comment, approve, or request changes. You cannot approve your own change.
When you come back after someone pushes, the page opens on Since your last review, showing only what landed after the revision you signed off on. Full change is always one click away. Old reviews are marked stale rather than hidden, because what someone approved is a fact worth keeping.
Notes are resolved separately from reviews, by the person who wrote the note or the author of the change. A note outlives the review it arrived in.
Groups
A group holds a set of stacks and the people working on them. Owners and maintainers can add members; owners can feature the group on Explore. Moving a stack into a group needs both standing in the group and ownership of the stack.
Your page
Every account gets one page of its own, written in Markdown, at /u/your-handle/page-view. Edit it under Settings.
Raw HTML is escaped rather than rendered. That is deliberate: these pages are served from the same domain as everyone else's session, and one script tag from one account would be everyone else's problem.
Search
The box in the header searches changes, code, stacks and people. It takes filters if you want them - author:nadia, state:open, path:parser.js, stack:search - and treats anything it does not recognize as plain text rather than throwing an error at you.
Deleting your account
Settings has it. You type your handle to confirm, we send a link to your university address, and nothing is deleted until you click it. The link works once and expires in thirty minutes.
Your profile, page, sessions and group memberships go. Stacks you own are released rather than deleted. Changes and reviews on shared work are anonymized so the history still makes sense to your teammates.
Still stuck
Tell us. If the answer was hard to find, that is a bug in this page.