Asked and answered
These are real questions from real people — publishers, business owners, and one very sharp developer who was asked to check me out before his client replied. They are worth answering in public.
If you write or publish here
No. The board shows your headline and your name as the source, and that is all. No excerpt, no summary, no rewriting, no AI retelling. The display is six rows of 22 characters — there is not room to take anything even if I wanted to, and I don't. A headline that makes someone want the story is the entire point.
No. It reads your RSS feed and nothing else. No crawler ever touches your pages. If your feed goes away, your stories simply stop appearing.
Straight to your page — the story's own permalink, taken from your own feed. It does not pass through my server. There is no redirect and no click counting, which also means I get no analytics about your readers. Someone scans it, lands on your site, and I learn nothing about it.
Yes — including the parts nothing forces me to. One local publisher's file asks AI systems not to train on their work. I read that as a person saying what they wanted, not a lock to test, so I switched them off and wrote to ask first. They are still off. Nothing technical was stopping me; that is rather the point.
Immediately, by asking, and you never need a reason. One email to the address at the bottom of this page and your feed is gone from the rotation the same day.
A fair question and it deserves a straight answer: this is a product. I build software split-flap boards and sell them to venues. The community board is the working demonstration. A board carrying live local information is worth more than a board carrying weather — and the reporting here is yours, so pointing at it costs me nothing and is worth something to us both. If it sends you readers, good. If it doesn't, you have lost nothing.
Under the hood
Partly, and I would rather say so than pretend otherwise: I build with heavy AI assistance. What I would push back on is the implication that usually follows. It is a zero-dependency Node server — no frameworks, no database, no third-party analytics on the display — polling feeds on a timer and rendering to a 22×6 character grid. I can tell you why the feed parser sanitises pipe characters and why QR images are cached rather than re-fetched, because I hit both problems and fixed them.
Please do. I will walk a developer through it, hand over the URL to poke at, or answer anything in writing. I would rather be checked than believed.
No, and no affiliation is implied. Vestaboard makes excellent physical split-flap displays and they are a fine thing to own. This is software: the same idea on a screen you already have, for a fraction of the price, with live local data behind it. The mechanical-board look is a century older than any of us — it comes from the Solari departure boards in Italian railway stations.
A screen with a web browser and an internet connection. A TV, a monitor on a stick, a spare tablet. There is nothing to install and no special hardware to buy.
If you run a business here
Nothing, for community information — events, hours, the things a neighbour needs to know. Paid sponsor slots exist and they are what keeps the board running. The details are here.
Yes — your own board, your own content, your own screen, with the local feeds already built. Pricing is here.
No. The live channels — weather, roads, ferries, transit, the library's calendar, tournaments — keep themselves current with nothing from you. You add your own boards when you have something to say, and take them down when you don't.
The display collects nothing about the people looking at it. The phone version counts how many people are watching, at country level. City-level dots appear only for viewers who opt in — by accepting the analytics banner (an approximate city; the address itself is discarded on the spot and never stored) or by answering “where are you watching from?” It is aggregate only — never a name, never a precise location, never anything sold to anyone. The privacy page spells it out.
Every post — a selfie and a short statement — passes two independent AI screeners before it airs, checking for anything that doesn't belong on a family screen, and every post deletes itself after one hour. The venue can switch the whole feature off, and anything the screeners aren't sure about waits for a human instead of airing.
Live numbers — weather, transit, river flow — come straight from the agencies that publish them. Anything written in prose is held to a harder standard: our news engine splits stories into individual claims and runs each through sixteen checks, and nothing it isn't sure of airs without a human approving it. When a source breaks, the board says so rather than guessing.
Have a question that isn't here? Ask it and I will answer — and if it's a good one, it will end up on this page.