How We Handle What Readers Send Us

What we collect

Submissions to the letters page, recipe swap, classifieds board and obituary notices are sent voluntarily by readers and community groups. When you use the submission form, the fields you fill in are your name, email address, the type of material, an optional town or province, the text itself, your choice between the print run and the weekly digest, and your permission to publish.

The handler also records the time of submission, the form identifier, the page language, the source query string from the address bar, and the values you entered. This is written to a local log file at /private/submissions.jsonl on the site server. Nothing is forwarded to a mailing platform, a customer database or an advertising network.

How long it stays

There is no automatic deletion schedule. Entries remain in the local log until the site owner removes the file by hand. If you want your submission taken out before that happens, write to us and we will delete the entry once we have matched it to your request.

Material that has already gone to print in a past issue cannot be recalled from those copies, but we can remove it from the digest archive and from the log.

Your choices as a contributor

• Ask for a name to be shortened, initials only, or left out of the print run.
• Ask for a contact detail to be withheld from publication.
• Request a copy of what we hold about your submission.
• Request a correction, an amendment or full deletion.
• Withdraw your permission to publish at any point before the issue goes out.

Readers in the European Union and California have additional statutory rights of access, portability, correction, deletion and opt-out. We apply the same handling to every request, wherever it comes from.

Editorial checks and corrections

Listings for lift shares and club notices are checked for a clear town and a meeting day before they are placed. Recipes are read for workable quantities. Obituaries are handled with care and confirmed with the person who sent them.

We do not promise a fixed response time, a guaranteed place in a specific issue, or any tracking of your submission. Corrections sent through the contact form are handled in the next suitable issue. This applies to both the fortnightly print run and the weekly email digest.