About writeonce

What this is

writeonce is a public forum where every post is anonymous, permanent once published, and ranked or removed by community vote — never by a single moderator. There are no accounts, no profiles, no follower counts, and no edit history. You write something. The community decides whether it stays.

Features

• Anonymous by design. No sign-up, no email, no profile. A short-lived browser fingerprint enforces rate limits but never identifies you across sessions.
• Permanent posts. You cannot edit or delete your own post after publishing. The forum is a record, not a draft.
• Community-governed moderation. Each post and comment has a Keep/Delete vote. Once Delete reaches a 3:1 supermajority, the content is removed automatically. Reports trigger admin review.
• Up to 3-level categories. Top-level → sub → sub-sub. Empty categories auto-prune when their last post is gone.
• Markdown-native. Full GFM markdown — code fences, tables, footnotes. Image and video links are text-only and validated against an allowlist.
• Auto-expiry. Optionally set a deletion date when you post. The forum garbage-collects within 48 hours of the date.
• Pre-rendered for search. Every post and category renders to static HTML so search engines and screen readers see the content the moment it publishes.
• Privacy-respecting search. Pagefind runs entirely in your browser — your queries never reach a server.

House policy

writeonce is permissive but not lawless. Posts are passed through an automated content classifier on submission. The following are rejected at the door, before they ever appear on the site:

• Sexual content involving minors. Hard reject. Reported to NCMEC where applicable.
• Threats of real-world violence. Hard reject. Targeted threats against named individuals or groups.
• Self-harm instruction or encouragement. Hard reject. Resources are surfaced instead.
• Graphic violence. Hard reject when the intent is shock or glorification.
• Hateful threats. Hard reject. Targeted hostility toward protected classes.

Beyond those categories, what stays and what goes is decided by the community vote. Toxicity, spam, and low-effort content are handled by Keep/Delete votes — not by us deciding what you may say.

Reporting and admin review

If you believe a post or comment violates the policy above, use the Report action on the post. Reports place the content in an admin queue. Admins review for the hard-reject categories only; they do not adjudicate community disputes.

Admin actions are logged and visible. Posts removed by admins display a tombstone explaining why. Posts removed by community vote disappear without explanation — the vote count is the explanation.

Terms of use

• Your post, your responsibility. You retain authorship and you alone are responsible for the legality of what you publish. We host the message; we do not endorse it.
• Public domain by intent. By posting, you grant writeonce and every reader an irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide license to reproduce, display, and quote your content. Anonymity does not imply private ownership.
• No service guarantees. writeonce is provided as-is. Uptime, search, voting, and ranking may change without notice. Posts may be lost in extraordinary failure scenarios.
• No legal escrow. We do not retain account-recovery records, editor history, or shadow copies of deleted content. There is nothing to subpoena that is not already public.
• Operator-deletable categories. Categories may be reorganised, merged, or pruned by admins. Post URLs are stable; category URLs are not.
• No commercial spam. Repeated, low-quality promotional content will be vote-deleted by the community and may trigger rate limits. There is no allowlist for advertisers.
• Compliance with law. Content that is unlawful in the United States (where writeonce is hosted) will be removed regardless of community vote.

What we do not collect

• IP addresses. Discarded at the edge after rate-limit accounting. Not stored with posts.
• Identifiers across sessions. The browser fingerprint is salted and rotated; it cannot be joined across browsers, devices, or extended time windows.
• Account or contact info. There are no accounts.
• Search queries. Pagefind runs in your browser. We never see what you searched for.
• Tracking pixels or third-party analytics. None. No Google Analytics, no Meta pixel, no fingerprinting beyond what the rate limiter requires.

Contact

Operational issues, takedown requests under applicable law, or press inquiries can be raised by reporting any post and including the request in the report body. There is no separate inbox by design — keeping channels public is part of the model.