Link Ratchet while you sign up
Linking Ratchet to a brand-new Portail account used to be a race. Running ratchet --link opens Portail in your browser, and if you didn't have an account yet, you signed up first. Sign-up asks a handful of questions before it lets you in: your name, your age, your account and the code we email you, and then a few more about your role, your goals and how you use AI. Ratchet only waits a few minutes for the browser to come back, so anyone who took their time on those questions finished sign-up to find that Ratchet had stopped listening, and the link went nowhere. Now, when you sign up on the way to linking Ratchet, Portail sends you back to finish the link as soon as your account exists and your email is confirmed. The rest of the questions wait for you, and the chat asks them the next time you open it. The same goes for signing up to Portail Agents, and for apps that ask you to approve access to your Portail account: you see the approval screen as soon as your account is ready instead of after the whole questionnaire. Nothing about age checks changed. Sign-up still asks your age before it creates the account, teens still get the AI street smarts guide first, and the age bracket is saved before you leave for Ratchet, so the teen guidance applies there too. The next Ratchet release also waits much longer for the browser to come back, up to half an hour, and you can still cancel at any time with ctrl+c or the Cancel button in the desktop app. If you already have a Portail account, nothing changes: you sign in and approve the link as before.
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Signing up from ratchet --link takes you straight back to finish linking once your account is confirmed.
The rest of the sign-up questions wait, and the chat asks them the next time you open it.
Portail Agents and apps asking to use your Portail account get you back as soon as your account is ready.
Sign-up still asks your age, and runs the teen guide, before it creates the account, and your age bracket is saved before you leave.
The next Ratchet release waits up to 30 minutes for the browser instead of 5.
Portail v2.8.6 shipped on 2026-10-31 as a patch release focused on link ratchet while you sign up. Linking Ratchet to a brand-new Portail account used to be a race. Running ratchet --link opens Portail in your browser, and if you didn't have an account yet, you signed up first. Sign-up asks a handful of questions before it lets you in: your name, your age, your account and the code we email you, and then a few more about your role, your goals and how you use AI. Ratchet only waits a few minutes for the browser to come back, so anyone who took their time on those questions finished sign-up to find that Ratchet had stopped listening, and the link went nowhere. Now, when you sign up on the way to linking Ratchet, Portail sends you back to finish the link as soon as your account exists and your email is confirmed. The rest of the questions wait for you, and the chat asks them the next time you open it. The same goes for signing up to Portail Agents, and for apps that ask you to approve access to your Portail account: you see the approval screen as soon as your account is ready instead of after the whole questionnaire. Nothing about age checks changed. Sign-up still asks your age before it creates the account, teens still get the AI street smarts guide first, and the age bracket is saved before you leave for Ratchet, so the teen guidance applies there too. The next Ratchet release also waits much longer for the browser to come back, up to half an hour, and you can still cancel at any time with ctrl+c or the Cancel button in the desktop app. If you already have a Portail account, nothing changes: you sign in and approve the link as before. The work is recorded here because small releases are still product history. They change how people sign in, read responses, pay for access, share conversations, open files, or trust the system when something goes wrong.
The main changes were direct: signing up from ratchet --link takes you straight back to finish linking once your account is confirmed, the rest of the sign-up questions wait, and the chat asks them the next time you open it, portail agents and apps asking to use your portail account get you back as soon as your account is ready, sign-up still asks your age, and runs the teen guide, before it creates the account, and your age bracket is saved before you leave, and the next ratchet release waits up to 30 minutes for the browser instead of 5. That list is intentionally plain. It names what changed without turning the release into theatre. When a release fixes a build, a redirect, a storage path, or a UI edge case, the value is often that users stop noticing the problem. The archive keeps that invisible work visible enough for future debugging and for anyone checking whether Portail has cared about the details over time.
This version also fits into the wider Portail contract. One account, one chat history, and one model picker only work if the smaller pieces keep their promises. Authentication has to fail clearly. Billing has to count honestly. Uploads have to arrive in a form models can read. Admin tools have to show the operator what happened instead of hiding it behind a blank screen. v2.8.6 moved that contract forward in its own narrow lane.
The screenshots attached to this entry show the public release record as it now appears on portail.cc. For older releases, this archive was rebuilt from the git history, package version changes, release modal text, and commit subjects. That means the page is honest about its source: it documents the shipped change and preserves the record going forward, even when the exact old production screen cannot be recreated from a single saved image.
The practical result is simple. Someone landing on this page can see the version number, date, release tier, headline, highlights, and a real rendered screenshot of the archive page. Search engines can index the post through the canonical URL, sitemap entry, and structured data. Future releases now have a standard to meet before deploy, so the history should get cleaner from here instead of fuzzier.