Legal & Privacy

Orindanomics is an independent, resident-run civic project. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or connected to the City of Orinda or any government agency. Nothing here is an official statement of the City. The city’s name appears because that’s the town we write about — the same way a newspaper names the place it covers.

Every figure on this site is drawn from the City of Orinda’s own published public records — chiefly its annual audited financial reports. We host the source PDFs in the Library and link the city’s official archive for every year, so you can check our work against the originals at any time.

We transcribe and present these records carefully and in good faith, and we verify the arithmetic with automated checks. Even so: everything is provided “as is,” without warranty of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any purpose. Transcription mistakes are possible; the city’s own documents occasionally revise themselves (we track those revisions openly in the Restatement Ledger). Nothing on this site is financial, investment, legal, or tax advice, and it should not be the sole basis for any decision. If you spot an error, tell us and we’ll fix it.

Around Town is an anonymous community forum. Everything posted there is the speech of the person who wrote it — not of Orindanomics or its operator. We do not author, pre-approve, or endorse user posts, and federal law (Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act) treats platform operators accordingly. Each author is solely responsible for what they write.

• →By posting, you agree to the four guidelines and you confirm your post is lawful under California and U.S. law.
• →Posts pass through automated content filtering before they appear. Filtered posts are simply not published.
• →We reserve the right — but assume no obligation — to remove, edit, or refuse any content at any time, for any reason, without notice.
• →Posts are currently held in temporary server memory and may disappear at any time (including on redeploys). Don’t treat the forum as permanent storage for anything.
• →No commercial solicitation, spam, scraping, or automated posting. Rate limits are enforced server-side.

Moderation should be inspectable. Posts are screened against the open-source bad-words list plus a custom Orindanomics list, with a normalization pass that catches disguised spellings. The custom categories:

• →Base list: standard profanity and slurs (publicly auditable on npm).
• →Personal attack language: common terms used to demean individuals.
• →Targeted harassment patterns: terms used to shut down civic discourse rather than contribute to it.

Think a word is wrongly blocked in a civic context? Write us — we actually read our messages.

We don’t want your data. There are no user accounts, no names, no email collection, no advertising, no analytics, and no third-party trackers. Here is the complete inventory of what the site stores:

• →One session cookie (ot_session): a random, meaningless token set when you post in Around Town. It contains no identity, lasts about a week, and is httpOnly. We use it for exactly two things: keeping your pseudonym consistent within a thread, and rate limiting. The server only ever stores a one-way hash of it.
• →A hashed IP address, in memory only, used solely for rate limiting. It is never written to disk, never logged, and disappears when the server restarts.
• →Your posts and replies, stored with their auto-generated pseudonym and a timestamp — nothing linking them to you beyond the hashed session token above.

That’s the whole list. Pseudonyms are randomly generated and are not derived from anything about you. We never sell, share, or transfer any of the above to anyone.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Orindanomics and its operator are not liable for any damages arising from use of the site, reliance on its contents, or anything posted by users. The site may change, break, or go away at any time. We may update these terms; the date at the top is authoritative, and continued use after a change means you accept it. These terms are governed by California law.