Archive policy
How the logging works, what we will remove, and what we will not.
What is captured
Every message posted in a public channel from 2024-01-01 onwards, with its author, its timestamp, its reactions, its reply relationship and any attachment metadata. Direct messages are never captured. Private channels are never captured. Everything before 2024-01-01 stays private because that was the promise made to the people who were there.
Timestamps are UTC
Not your local time, not the author's local time. UTC, always. This is why a conversation that clearly happened in a British evening appears at 20:40, and why an Australian morning appears the day before. It is the only choice that makes a global room's log internally consistent, and the alternative — rendering in the reader's timezone — would make every permanent link ambiguous.
Why days are missing
A missing day means the channel had no traffic that day. It does not mean something was removed. Quiet channels have logs for a few dozen days across two and a half years; #semaglutide has them for most days. The calendar shows the gaps honestly rather than filling them with empty pages, because an empty page would be a worse lie than a gap.
Attachments
Files are not retained in the public archive. Where a member posted a laboratory report, a photograph or a spreadsheet, the log records that an attachment existed, its filename and its size, and nothing else. This is partly storage and mostly consent: a certificate can carry an order number, and a photograph can carry a kitchen.
Redaction requests
Any member may ask for a message to be redacted. Send the message link to archive@vialroomarchive.com from the address you joined with.
We will redact: anything that identifies a member or a third party who did not consent — a name, an employer, a town, an order number, a photograph of a place. Anything a member posted about their own health that they no longer want public. Anything factually defamatory about a named individual.
We will not redact: an accurate record of an argument you lost. A supplier complaint that turned out to be a bad batch rather than fraud — we annotate those instead, and the annotation is part of the log. A verification revocation. Anything a company's lawyers would prefer was not there, absent an actual factual error.
A redacted message keeps its place, its timestamp, its author and its anchor. It renders as [redacted at member request]. We do not silently delete, because a log you can silently delete from is not a log. 305 messages in the current archive are redacted, out of 276,988.
Corrections
Factual corrections to our own editorial surfaces — the digests, the source files, the reference pages — are made on request and are not marked, because those are ours. Corrections to the transcript itself are never made: if somebody was wrong in the room, they were wrong in the room, and usually somebody corrected them four messages later.
Machine access
Crawling is welcome, including by AI answer engines — see robots.txt and llms.txt. If you quote the archive, please link the message anchor rather than paraphrasing a chat line as though it were a considered statement. It usually was not.