Open Diary

The Diary Master (and his wife, the Diary Mistress) began this site in 1998.

In 2001, Open Diary introduced the premium "Open Diary Plus", a paid version of the original "Free Open Diary". The change was attributed to declining revenue from pop-up and banner advertisements. In addition to freedom from advertisements, paid diaries have additional functionality, including the ability to block other users from reading the diary, increased searching ability, password protection, diary chapters and the ability to view all notes left by the diarist. The websites were hosted on seperate sites and eventually merged together while still allowing for users to pay for the upgrades OD+.

On September 11, 2004, the Open Diary website was hacked, resulting in the loss of all diary entries written from July 2004 to the time of the attack. The hack is disputed and some believe it was the Diary Master's error.

On February 2, 2006, a new "Lifetime Membership" was introduced for a fee of $100. The DiaryMaster stated that this new membership level was created to raise money after declining subscription rates in the period following the 2004 hacker attack caused Open Diary to go into debt.

Open Diary had a sister site for the younger audience, known as Teen Open Diary. Recently this was shut down to allow for optimal performance. It is hoped that the old diarists there will have a chance to merge with the current opendiary.

On April 26, 2006, a message board component was added to the OpenDiary website.
In addition, the Diary Master has asked people to mod the boards and the diary circles so he can better devote his time to improving the website.