Our design choices

No vote scores, no karma, no reputation

Nothing here can be upvoted or downvoted and no member has a score. We have "hearts" and "me too" instead, which are acknowledgements rather than rankings — they say I read this and it landed, not this is the correct answer.

Voting systems are excellent at surfacing the most confident answer and terrible at surfacing the most useful one. In a support setting they do something worse: they teach people to perform. Somebody's frightened, badly written, three-in-the-morning post is often the most valuable thing on a page, and it would never win a vote.

No follower counts and no leaderboards

You cannot follow anybody, there is no count of anything on a member page, and there is no most-active list. Being here a long time is visible, because it is a fact and it is useful to know; being here a lot is not measured.

The moment a community keeps score, the score becomes the point. We would rather have twenty people who each write a paragraph when they have something to say than five who write every day because a number rewards it.

No before-and-after, no goal weights, no photographs of people

There is no facility to post a photograph of a person anywhere on this site. There is no field for a starting weight, a current weight, or a target. Members mention weight where it is a genuine fact of their medical history, and it is never a score.

This is the choice we get asked about most and defend most easily. A very large number of members arrived here from an eating disorder, or from decades of being weighed and judged in clinical settings, or both. A wall of transformation photographs is, for those people, a wall of triggers. It also quietly redefines the community's purpose: within about a month, a place for support becomes a place for display.

What we foreground instead is on the milestones page: stairs, floors, jars, hills, pools, an insurance appeal won, a conversation with a daughter. Those turn out to be what members actually tell each other about anyway.

Body-neutral language, enforced

We ask members not to describe bodies — their own or anyone else's — as good or bad, and not to talk about food in moral terms. No "being good", no "cheating", no "guilt". This is in the community agreements and facilitators name it when it drifts.

Body neutrality rather than body positivity was a deliberate choice. Positivity asks people to feel a way they may not feel. Neutrality asks only that a body be allowed to be a body, which is achievable on a bad day.

No numbers in the recovery-aware circle

The recovery-aware circle permits no numbers at all: no intakes, no weights, no measurements, no doses framed as achievement. It always has two facilitators present, and if only one is available the circle does not meet that week. It is the most constrained space on the site and its members are the reason the constraints exist.

A visible support-resources surface

Support resources is a primary navigation item, not a link in a policy footer. It appears in the footer of every single page as well. You should not have to be in crisis to find it, and you should not have to go looking.

Circles rather than boards

There are no boards and no subforums here, and conversations do not live in a general pool. They live inside a named circle with a stated purpose, a facilitator, and its own agreements on top of the sitewide ones. A conversation in nausea-and-eating is held to different rules than one in research-reading-group, and that is the point.

Circles are also deliberately small in feel. A big forum rewards the loudest. A room of twelve rewards whoever needs it most that week.

Journals as a first-class object

Most communities have threads and a profile. We gave members a dated journal instead, because the single most useful thing on this site is being able to read one person forwards across six months. A thread tells you what somebody thought once. A journal tells you what happened to them, in order, including the parts that did not resolve.

Sourcing pages, honestly

We were in two minds about the vendor reference pages for a long time. The argument that won was simple: members ask these questions, and if we refuse to discuss them the questions get answered by people with something to sell.

So the pages exist, they are non-promotional, they say plainly what can and cannot be verified, they carry no links out and no contact details, and every one of them states that buying outside a prescription carries risk that this community cannot remove. If that ever stops being true of them, they should come down.

No instant messaging, no phone number

We run no group chats on any messaging platform and we publish no telephone number. Real-time group chat cannot be moderated to the standard this community needs, and a phone number implies a service we do not provide and could not staff.

Quiet sponsors

The site is supported by a small number of sponsors — independent testing services and a reagent supplier — shown as labelled cards. They are styled quietly on purpose. This is a support community and the advertising must not shout. Sponsors see no member data, have no editorial influence, and cannot appear on the recovery-aware or grief circles at all.