About this place

Potluck is the forum for the Anti-Capitalist Computer Club here in Bakersfield. The name's the whole pitch: everybody brings something. We built it small on purpose, and we ripped out a pile of stuff every other forum ships with, also on purpose. This page is the list of what's missing and why we're not sorry about it.

Everything here is public

Anyone can read every thread, logged in or not. Google indexes them on purpose, because that's how people find the club in the first place. Treat this like a flyer taped to the wall at Dagny's: if a stranger reading it would cause you a problem, it doesn't belong here. It belongs in Signal.

What we don't keep

We spend a lot of time reading public records about how much gets collected on ordinary people in this town. 1.4 million license plate searches logged by BPD. A 133-camera Flock network. Read enough of that and writing software that hoards the same kind of data starts to feel ridiculous.

So this one collects as close to nothing as we could manage. Data we never have is data nobody can lose.

• No IP addresses. We never look at them, and we never write them down. The web server underneath keeps its own access logs, like every web server on earth, and the admins handle those separately. Potluck's promises stop where Potluck stops.
• No email addresses. We never ask for one, and there's no field for it even if you wanted to hand it over. Nothing to email you, nothing to leak.
• No "last seen," no "online now." No read receipts either. Who's around and when is nobody's business.
• No record of who invited whom after your first month. We delete an invite code the second someone redeems it, and the link back to whoever vouched for you disappears once your 30-day probation ends.
• No soft deletes. Delete means the row disappears. Resolving a report deletes the row outright. It never sits around tagged as handled. Delete your account and the account itself goes with it. Your old posts stick around with no name attached, and your handle gets wiped out of anywhere else it was typed, including other people's posts and thread titles.
• No analytics. We don't run trackers, and we don't load scripts from anyone else's server. Your browser talks to this one and nothing else.

Handles are hidden from strangers

Not logged in? You see "Member A," "Member B," and so on. Each thread hands out its own set of letters, starting over from A every time. They never carry over between threads, so nobody can scrape one person's posts into a profile. Log in and you get real handles instead. Profile pages show a handle, a join month, and a post count. Nothing else.

That goes for every part of a post, not just the byline: a handle typed inside a code block, inside backticks, or after a hashtag gets the same treatment. If a link's address has somebody's handle in it, logged-out readers get told the link is hidden rather than handed the address with the handle still in it.

Where a name was taken out, the replacement is printed black on orange instead of blending into the text around it. Nothing is hidden about the hiding: you can see exactly where the software stepped in, and count the places it did.

What deleting your account can and can't do

It can take down your account row, your recovery codes, your outstanding invites, and your handle everywhere it was typed into this database. It can't reach copies that already left: a backup on an admin's laptop, the feed somebody already pulled, a search engine's cache, a screenshot. Nobody's software can. Everything here is public and stays readable while it's up, so decide with that in mind before you post, not after.

Why there are no images

An image is a file sitting on our server, one more thing to store and look after. Photos carry location data too, and stripping that out means remembering to do it right, every single time, forever. A hotlinked image is worse in its own way: it quietly pings someone else's server every time the page loads, so a third party learns who read what and when. Skipping uploads entirely means none of that garbage is our problem anymore. Link to it. People can click through.

Other things you won't find here

• Votes, karma, badges, reactions, trending, all of it. Threads sort by whichever one got a reply most recently. That's the entire ranking system.
• Notifications. Nothing pings you or emails you about this place. Show up when you feel like showing up.
• JavaScript, anywhere. This loads fine on a ten-year-old phone or in a text browser like Lynx.
• CAPTCHAs. Guess a password wrong and the site just gets a little slower, and guesses against one account have to wait their turn. Guess it right and it always works, no matter how many wrong guesses came before. There's no lockout here, which means a long passphrase is doing real work. Pick one.
• Embeds, previews, unfurled links. A link is a link. We show you the domain it points at, spelled out in full and never shortened. If a link is written so that different programs would disagree about where it goes, we don't make it a link at all; you get the whole address as text and you decide. What we can't tell you is where a redirect lands after that, and we're not going to fetch it to find out.

What there is

Threads. Posts. Quotes that link back to whatever they're replying to. Search, once you're logged in. An Atom feed. A few people from the club keeping half an eye on things.

The whole codebase is small enough to read in an afternoon. It's released under the AGPL. Copy the folder onto whatever cheap hosting you've already got, and it runs. No cops, no bosses, no bullshit.

Everybody brings something.

P.S. If anything on this page stops matching what the software actually does, tell a mod so we can fix the software or fix the page.