Every alert we send, when it fires, how often it can fire, and the tradeoffs we chose on purpose.
Accountability only works if the people in your circle actually read what we send them. The fastest way to ruin that is to flood their phone. So the system is built around one rule: an ally should only ever get a message that was worth interrupting them for.
This page is the whole picture, including the parts that are a tradeoff rather than a win. Nothing here is aspirational. It is what the software does today.
There are exactly six. Your allies are not subscribed to all of them, and each ally is set individually, so the person who should hear about a slip is not necessarily the person who hears about anything else.
| Alert | Fires when | Most often | Timing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Override askedYou request a pause | You ask to pause the filter, before the cooldown finishes | Every time | Immediate |
| Override onThe filter actually pauses | The cooldown ends and protection actually drops | Every time | Immediate |
| SlipsYou reset your streak | You log a reset | Every time | Immediate |
| TamperSomeone edits the protection | One of seven protected files changes outside the app | Once per 30 min | Immediate |
| Milestones7, 14, 30 day marks | You hit a streak milestone | Once per 60 min | Held til morning |
| Blocked sitesEvery blocked attempt | A device tries to reach a blocked domain | Once per 30 min | Off by default |
The first three have no rate limit, because throttling them would make them lie. If you ask to pause protection three times in an hour, that is the signal, and smoothing it into one message would hide the thing your ally most needs to see.
Quiet hours run 9 PM to 7 AM, local time.
During those hours, celebrations wait. Hitting day 30 at 2 AM does not wake up six people. The milestone is queued and delivered after 7 AM.
Safety alerts deliberately ignore quiet hours. An override request, a slip, or a tamper alert goes out at 3 AM if that is when it happens.
That is not an oversight. 3 AM is the hour most of these actually occur, and it is exactly when a man needs someone to know. An accountability alert that waits until business hours is not accountability, it is a report.
Three separate mechanisms keep volume down.
Tamper and blocked-site alerts are capped at one message per 30 minutes each, and milestones at one per 60. This exists because of a real failure: the tamper check runs every 30 seconds, and while a file sits in a modified state it used to re-fire on every single pass. One edit could produce dozens of texts. The cooldown was added to stop exactly that.
Nobody is subscribed to everything by default. Blocked-site alerts in particular are genuinely noisy, one per blocked attempt, so they are off for allies and used mainly by the account owner reviewing their own activity.
When you edit your own circle inside the app, the system re-baselines its integrity check in the same breath. Your allies are not told that you renamed one of them or changed which alerts they receive. Changing your own settings is not an event. Only changes made outside the app trip the tamper alert.
Every choice above costs something. Here is the ledger.
Open the app, find the ally, and tap Edit. You can change their name, their phone or email, whether they hear from you by text or email, and exactly which of the six alerts they receive. Saving takes effect immediately and notifies no one.
Any ally can also reply STOP to any text to end all messages, or HELP for help. That works regardless of what you have set, because the choice to be someone's accountability partner has to stay theirs.
Email [email protected] and a person will answer. See also the privacy policy for what we store and for how long.