Privacy

Your account email and optional phone

An account requires a verified email address. We store that address in encrypted form and use it to sign you in, help secure your account, and send necessary service messages. In your account, the address is shown only in masked form. Your account email is never displayed on a post or shared with other users.

After creating an email account, you may optionally verify a U.S. mobile number as a second way to sign in and recover access. We store the verified number in encrypted form and show it only in masked form in your account. It is never displayed on a post. We do not use a recovery number for marketing texts.

Adding or replacing a recovery phone requires a recent email-code sign-in. When a phone is added or changed, we send a security notice to the account email. Replacing a phone also signs the account out on its other devices as a precaution.

You may separately choose to receive occasional bulletin announcements. That choice is optional and unchecked by default. You can use the bulletin without agreeing to promotional or announcement email.

What becomes public

Posts, replies, the display name you choose, and the category and location attached to a post are public. Please do not include an email address, phone number, home address, or other private information in a post unless you deliberately want everyone to see it.

Submitted text passes through an automated safety filter before publication. Ordinary profanity may be replaced with asterisks. Material that appears threatening, hateful, explicit, deceptive, or automated may be held for a local moderator or rejected. Automated decisions and their reasons may be kept with moderation records.

Posts may be reviewed, hidden, edited with notice, or removed when needed to enforce the community guidelines, respond to a report, or protect the bulletin and its users.

Private messages are temporary

Private messages begin from a published post. A signed-in resident may send that post's author one message request without first writing a public reply. The author must accept the request before the requester can send follow-up messages. The author may decline, block the requester, or turn off new message requests at any time.

In normal use, only the two people in the conversation can read its messages. The application encrypts each message body before storing it, but this is not end-to-end encryption: the bulletin must decrypt a message to deliver it to an authenticated participant. If a participant reports a message, a local moderator can view only that exact reported message while it remains unexpired, not the rest of the private conversation. A report does not create a second copy of the message or extend its deletion date.

The first version does not allow message attachments and does not send new-message email or text notifications. Do not send sign-in codes, card or bank information, deposits, passwords, medical records, or other highly sensitive information. The bulletin will never ask for a sign-in code or payment in a private message. Private messages are not an emergency service; contact the appropriate emergency service if someone is in immediate danger.

After reviewing an exact reported message, a local moderator may restrict its sender from sending or receiving new private messages in this parish. This closes conversations for further sending but does not publish or archive their text, suspend the resident's public posting account, or change an expired message's deletion date. A restriction record contains no copy of the message body. The moderator may remove the restriction after review. For a question or appeal, use the private contact form.

Photos and location metadata

Every photo submitted with a post or reply is stored privately and reviewed separately from its text. Clean text may become public while the photo is still private; readers see a review notice instead of the image. Only after a local moderator approves that individual photo can anyone view, save, copy, or share it. Before uploading, check the picture itself for faces, children, license plates, house numbers, documents, or other details you do not want made public, and upload only pictures you own or have permission to share.

Before a photo leaves your browser, the normal uploader resizes and re-saves it as a new web image. This removes common embedded camera information, including GPS location and EXIF metadata. The server also rejects uploaded WebP files that contain EXIF, XMP, color-profile, animation, or unexpected data chunks. These steps cannot remove identifying details that are visible in the picture itself. The original file is not sent to the bulletin; the re-saved copy is stored privately for review and is served publicly only if the containing post or reply and that photo have both been approved for publication.

A prepared upload that is never attached to a submitted post or reply expires from use after 24 hours and may be removed during routine cleanup. Photos on declined or removed posts or replies are not publicly available and may be deleted when they are no longer reasonably needed for moderation or safety.

Service providers

Cloudflare provides the site hosting, database, private-message storage, and private image-storage services. Resend delivers account verification and other service email. When phone sign-in is enabled, Twilio delivers and checks requested verification texts. These companies process the limited information needed to provide those services on the bulletin's behalf. We do not add account emails or phone numbers to outside advertising lists.

Security and misuse prevention

To keep post view numbers useful without following a person around the site, the bulletin places a random, functional identifier in the browser. For each post, the database keeps only a post-specific one-way digest and counts that browser no more than once during a rolling 24-hour period. The view counter does not use or store an account email, phone number, account identifier, or raw IP address. The random browser identifier may remain for up to one year so repeat refreshing does not falsely inflate the count.

We use session records and limited security or rate-limit identifiers derived from network and account activity to slow spam, repeated login attempts, scams, and other misuse. We also keep moderation records when necessary to investigate reports and enforce the guidelines.

We use reasonable safeguards and limit access to account information, but no internet service can promise perfect security.

How long information is kept

Each private message disappears from the service 30 days after it is sent. A scheduled purge then hard-deletes it from the live Cloudflare D1 database. The Bulletin keeps no message archive. Reporting a message neither extends its original 30-day expiry nor stores a duplicate of its text.

Cloudflare's disaster-recovery history can temporarily retain a recoverable earlier state of the database after a message is deleted from the live service. That recovery history ages out under Cloudflare's provider policy, and the Bulletin does not use it as a message archive. Block relationships and limited anti-spam or security metadata, including the status of a local messaging restriction, may outlive a message body so the bulletin can honor a block and slow repeated abuse; those records do not contain an archived copy of the message text.

We keep account and site information only as long as it is reasonably needed to operate and secure the bulletin, honor user choices, resolve reports, and meet legal obligations. Expired login, verification, and rate-limit records are removed as part of regular maintenance.

You may ask to correct or delete your account by contacting the Bulletin. Deleting an account ends access and removes or de-identifies its private account information. Public posts may be removed or left in a clearly de-identified form when conversation history needs to remain understandable. Limited records may be kept when necessary to prevent serious abuse or honor an email opt-out.

No sale of account information

We do not sell email addresses, phone numbers, or other account information, and we do not share them with advertisers for targeted advertising. If the bulletin later earns money, account contact information will not be the product.

Adults only at launch

Accounts are for people age 18 or older at launch. We do not knowingly collect account information from anyone under 18. If you believe a minor has created an account, contact the Bulletin so it can be reviewed.

Questions or requests

For a privacy question, account correction, or deletion request, use the private contact form. We may need to verify that you control the account before making a change. The form asks for a reply address and delivers the message through our email provider to the moderator's private inbox. Contact messages are not added to the bulletin database or displayed publicly.