Community Guidelines

What the Community is

The Walkable Community is a feature of this website. It is separate from the private, account-free Walkable app: your walks, routes, photos and notes stay on your phone and are never posted here. The only thing that reaches the Community is what you deliberately type into the form.

It is also public. A published post can be read by anyone, found by a search engine, and quoted elsewhere. Write with that in mind — the section on private information below is the one that matters most.

There are no followers, no leaderboards, no streaks and no scores here. Nothing about this space is designed to keep you scrolling.

Who you are here

• A display name you choose. It does not have to be your real name, and nothing checks that it is. Please do not choose one designed to look like someone else.
• A random id kept in your browser. It is generated on your device the first time you use the Community and is never published — not on a post, not on a reply, not to other readers. Its only job is to stop the same browser marking one post helpful twice, or filing the same report over and over.
• No email address. We never ask for one, and there is nothing to verify. That also means there is no way to prove a post was yours later, other than writing from the address you tell us about.
• An optional, broad location. A city or a region if you want to give one. Never an address.

Clearing your browser data removes that id and display name, and the browser becomes a new one. Posts already published stay published — see removing something.

What is welcome

Five kinds of thing, which are the categories on the form:

• Walking Stories — A walk that meant something, told the way you would tell a friend.
• Suggestions — Something you wish the app did, or did differently.
• Questions — Anything you are stuck on, however small.
• Routes & Places — A neighbourhood, a park loop or a stretch of path worth knowing about.
• Milestones — A quiet one of your own. Not a scoreboard.

The four house rules, shown next to the box you write in:

1. Be kind and share honestly.
2. Protect private information: never publish an exact home address or live location.
3. Keep medical details personal; Walkable is not medical advice.
4. Help make walking feel welcoming, not competitive.

What is not

• Exact addresses and live locations. Not your home, not anyone else’s, and not where you are walking right now. A neighbourhood or a park name is fine; a street number, a front door or a “I am here at the moment” is not. This applies to photographs too.
• Other people’s private information. Phone numbers, addresses, workplaces, photographs of identifiable people who did not agree to be posted.
• Medical advice. Your own experience of walking is welcome. Telling someone else what to do about a condition, a medication or a symptom is not — Walkable is not medical advice, and a stranger’s health is not a place to guess.
• Harassment, hate, and pile-ons. Abuse, slurs, threats, sexual content, or singling a person out. Disagreeing is fine; being unkind about it is not.
• Spam and promotion. Advertising, affiliate links, engagement bait, repeated posts, or anything that is really an advertisement wearing a walk.
• Off-topic posts. The Community is about walking and about Walkable.
• Competitive framing. This is not the place for “beat your time”. Milestones are welcome; making someone feel behind is not.

How moderation works

1. You write a note under a display name you choose.
2. A Walkable person reads it before anyone else does. Until then it is not on the page — not to you, not to anyone.
3. Once approved it joins the conversation, and you can mark other people’s notes as helpful.

A contribution can be published, hidden or rejected. We do not publish a reason for every decision, and holding something back is not an accusation — a moderated space with one person reading is slow by nature, and slow is the price of the page being safe to read. Replies work the same way and stay one level deep, so a thread cannot spiral.

Reporting something

Every post and every reply has a Report control. It asks one question — why — with four answers:

• Something feels unsafe or inappropriate
• It contains private information
• It looks like spam
• It is not about walking or Walkable

A report goes straight to a moderation queue and is never shown publicly. Your browser id is stored with it, so that a moderator can tell repeat reports apart from a wave of them; it is not revealed to the person you reported, and not to other readers. Reports are kept for as long as moderation needs them.

If something is urgent, or the Report control is not enough, email Automat4ed@gmail.com with a link to the post.

Removing something you posted

There is no account, so there is no “my posts” page and no delete button of your own. Removal is an email, and we do it:

Write to Automat4ed@gmail.com with the subject Walkable Community Removal, and tell us which post or reply you mean — a link is easiest, or the title and roughly when you wrote it.

One honest limit: because nothing here is tied to an identity, we may be unable to confirm that a post was yours. That is the ordinary consequence of a space that never asked who you are. Where a request is clearly about private information that should not be public, we act on it regardless.

The rest

What happens to the text you submit, and for how long, is in the Privacy Policy. The rights you give us to publish a post, and the limits on how it may be used, are in the Terms of Use. Deleting data — in the app, in your browser, and here — is on Delete your data.