The rules here are short, and every one of them was written after something went wrong. This is the annual restatement, published so that newcomers can read the reasoning rather than discover the rules by breaking them.
The board covers a handful of streets and exists for practical neighbourhood matters: things to lend, things to give away, things that are broken, things that have gone missing, and things happening in the courtyards. That is a narrower remit than a general local group, and it is narrow on purpose. A board that accepts everything becomes a board nobody reads, and an unread board is no use on the evening you actually need a ladder.
National politics, opinion pieces about the city at large and arguments with people who live elsewhere are all out of scope. This is not a judgement about whether those conversations matter; it is a judgement about what fits in a space that has to work on a Tuesday night. There is no shortage of other places to have them, and nobody here has the energy to moderate them. The remit has been narrowed twice since the digest began and has never once been widened.
Nothing commercial. A neighbour selling their old sofa is fine; a business posting the same offer weekly is not, and the line is drawn at whether the item exists once. No naming of individuals in complaints, because a public post about a specific flat has never once solved a noise problem and has several times made a stairwell unpleasant for a year. No photographs in which people are identifiable without their agreement.
Post once. A repeated post to get back to the top is the most reliable way to have everyone scroll past your request permanently. Threads are closed when the question is answered, which is not censorship but tidiness, and anybody can ask for a closed thread to be reopened if something genuinely changed. The rules fit on one screen and are meant to stay that way. Anything longer would require interpretation, and interpreting rules is how a neighbourhood quietly acquires a committee.
Complaints go to the moderator by email, not into the thread, and they are answered within a few days by one person who also has a job. The usual outcome is a quiet message asking somebody to edit a post, and the usual response to that message is that they edit it. Very little here requires anything stronger, which is worth saying out loud because the rules read more severe than the practice is.
When a post is removed, the person who wrote it is told why. Removals are not announced to the board, because a public removal notice is simply the original argument with extra attention. A repeated pattern leads to a break from posting, agreed rather than imposed where possible. Two such breaks have happened since the digest began, and both people are back and posting normally. Neither has been mentioned publicly by name or by flat, and neither ever will be.
This board is not the housing association, not the municipality and not a legal authority. It cannot resolve a dispute about a lease, order anybody to move a trailer, or decide who is right about a hedge. When a thread reaches that point, the honest moderation is to say so and to point at whoever does have the power, rather than letting forty neighbours perform a court case in a comment section.
What remains after all that is modest and genuinely useful. A drill arrives within an hour. A cat comes out of a cellar. A bookshelf finds a fourth floor. The digest exists to make that visible, once a month, in an ordinary flat tone, for the people who never read the board and benefit from it anyway. None of it is remarkable, and all of it depends on a handful of people continuing to bother.
Digests are written after the fact and cannot be replied to here. Additions and corrections go to hello@kettlebridgeforum.com and appear in the next one.