The short version

OurEffingham is a free, neighbor-run community news site for Effingham County, Georgia and the surrounding Coastal Empire. We only collect what we need to run the porch and send you the news you asked for. We never sell your personal information, and you can unsubscribe with one tap, any time.

What we collect

• Your email address — only if you sign up for our newsletter, The Daily Porch, or for an alert. We don't ask for an email just to read the site.
• What you send us — anything you choose to submit through a form on the site (community posts, photos, tips, event listings, advertiser inquiries) and any details you include with it.
• Basic, privacy-respecting analytics — aggregate traffic numbers (like how many people visited a page) so we know what's useful. This is anonymized usage data, not a profile of you.

We do not require an account, a login, or a password to read OurEffingham.

How we use it

• To send you the newsletter or alerts you signed up for.
• To publish and respond to the community posts, tips, photos and listings you submit.
• To keep the porch running, secure and working well, and to understand what coverage our neighbors find helpful.

That's it. We don't use your information to build advertising profiles, and we don't track you across other websites.

Who we share it with

We share your information only with the service providers that make the site work — and only so they can perform that service for us. We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information to anyone, ever. The providers we rely on are:

• Cloudflare — hosts the site, stores subscriber and community data, protects our forms from abuse, and provides the anonymized traffic analytics described above.
• Resend — delivers The Daily Porch and our alert emails to your inbox.

We may also disclose information if the law requires it (for example, a valid legal request), or to protect the safety and rights of our readers and the community.

Cookies & bot protection

We keep cookies to a minimum. Our forms use Cloudflare Turnstile to tell humans from bots so we don't get flooded with spam. Turnstile may set a token in your browser as part of that check — it's there to keep our forms working, not to advertise to you or follow you around the web.

"Ask the Porch" assistant

Our on-site helper, Ask the Porch, runs on Cloudflare Workers AI to answer questions and point you to the right part of the site. Type only what you're comfortable sharing — you don't need to give any personal details to use it.

Unsubscribing & getting removed

Every email we send includes a one-click unsubscribe link — tap it and you're out, no questions asked and no hoops. You can re-subscribe any time at our newsletter signup.

Want your email address deleted from our list entirely, or have a question about your information? Email us at [email protected] and we'll take care of it promptly.

Children's privacy

OurEffingham is meant for a general, grown-up audience. We don't knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has sent us their information, email [email protected] and we'll delete it.

Changes to this policy

If we change how we handle your information, we'll update this page and move the "Last updated" date above. We'll keep it in plain English, just like this.