This is revision 2 of this page, effective September 25, 2026. Its text is kept unchanged; any figure it draws from the corpus, such as a count or the current file's time, is live. The current revision is in force.

Terms

These are the terms of publishing a message here. They are short because there is little to negotiate: a message, once published, is public, permanent, and in the public domain. They are versioned, because an archive that never edits its entries must not edit its terms quietly either: the revision in force is recorded on every entry published under it, and every past revision stays at its own address.

Who may write

Anyone 18 or over. The archive publishes each message permanently, with figures describing how it was typed, and that cannot be squared with the consent of a minor. By publishing you state that you are 18 or over.

Any language is welcome. The archive's own pages are in English; the messages are in whatever language they were written in.

Three messages, one at a time

Each person may leave three messages. They are written one at a time: publishing a message issues a key for the next, and the key unlocks 7 days after publication. Keys never expire; a set stays open indefinitely, and a second message written years after the first is welcome.

There is no account and no recovery. The key is shown once, on the confirmation page, and stored nowhere else. A lost key forfeits the remaining messages.

What is published

The message, exactly as written, with trailing whitespace trimmed and nothing else changed. The date and time of submission. Whichever of the four optional fields you set. The composition score and the typing figures beneath it. The message's position in your set and links to the others. A hash of the message, so that anyone can check later that it has not changed. Nothing more: no name, unless you write one in the message.

A message may be up to 10,000 characters. There is no minimum beyond a non-empty message.

Public domain

Pressing "Publish and release to the public domain" is your own dedication of the message to the public domain under CC0 1.0 Universal. The archive cannot make that dedication for you; you make it by pressing the button. After that, anyone may copy, quote, republish, analyze, and train on the message, for any purpose, without asking, and the archive itself relies on this to publish the corpus.

Publish only what you wrote or have the right to release. Do not paste in other people's work.

Other people

A signed message, or a country set beside one, is personal information published permanently. The review screen asks you, before you publish, to take out the name of anyone who did not agree to be named here, and to consider whether it is safe to carry your own name where you live. After publication neither can be withdrawn by asking.

A private person named in a message without their agreement has the remedy the removal procedure below describes, where the law of the archive's jurisdiction gives them one. Nothing else does.

Never edited, never curated

Nothing is changed after publication. Not a typo, not a name, not a date. The review screen before publishing is the only chance to correct anything.

The archive does not feature, rank, select, or filter entries, and never will.

No moderation

Nobody reads the queue. There is no moderation, no review before publication, and no crisis response: a message is published the moment it is submitted, and no one at the archive will see it sooner than any other reader. If you are writing in distress, this page is not a way to reach anyone.

Removal

Nothing is removed for what it says. Removal happens only under one of the categories below, by the procedure below, and every removal leaves a public record at the same address: the date, the category, and the hash of the message, never the message and never the demand itself. The corpus records the same, and the log records every demand received, honoured or not.

The archive is operated under the law of the State of California, United States, and that law decides what the categories below mean. Notices go to hello@messagestowhatcomesnext.org. A notice sent anywhere else, including to the host or the registrar, is answered as if it had been sent there.

What counts:

1. An order of a court, or of a supervisory authority with power over the operator, that is recognised in the archive's jurisdiction and directs removal of a specific entry. Recorded as court-order.
2. A valid notice under the notice-and-takedown law of the archive's jurisdiction, naming the entry and the work it is said to infringe, with the counter-notice path that law provides; an entry restored after a counter-notice is restored. Recorded as takedown-notice.
3. A statutory demand for erasure of personal data, only where a statute gives the person making it that right against the operator, including from an identifiable third party named in a message; the review of such a demand is made under the statute and not under any judgment of the message. Recorded as statutory-erasure.
4. A demand from the host or the registrar that would otherwise take down the whole site, where the operator has first contested it in writing. Recorded as host-compulsion, and named as such so that the record shows what was done and why.
5. A verified report that the writer was under 18 when the message was published, which makes the dedication void. The standard of verification is written before the first report and applied without discretion: a written statement of the writer's date of birth and the date of publication, possession of the set's unused next key or, for a complete set, a fact about the set that only its writer could know, and, where the archive's jurisdiction requires it, a document. A sworn statement alone does not meet it, because a statement cannot distinguish a minor from a regretful adult. Recorded as void-dedication.

What never counts: the writer's regret; anyone's offence; a journalist's, employer's, school's, or relative's request; the operator's own distaste; a threat; an order of a court or authority not recognised in the archive's jurisdiction; and popularity, in either direction.

How a demand is answered: in writing, within the period the applicable law sets or, where it sets none, within thirty days; either refused on stated grounds, with the route of complaint named, or honoured with a tombstone. No demand is answered with silence, and no removal is made quietly. Every demand, including a refused one, is recorded in the log within thirty days, by date, category of sender, and outcome; when there have been none, the log says so.

What a removal does: the entry's message and the fields beside it are replaced by a tombstone carrying the date, the category, and the message's hash. The address stays. The place in the index stays. The set stays. Mirrors of the corpus receive the tombstone at their next update and are asked to apply it; a mirror the archive does not control cannot be compelled by the archive.

What the page records

While you write, the page records how you type, not which keys: the times at which text was inserted, deleted, or moved, and whether any text arrived by paste, by an input method, or by autocorrect. It sends only that stream of timestamps and event types to the server, which computes the summary figures shown on every entry and discards the stream. Nothing about which characters you typed ever leaves your browser except the finished message.

The service keeps a salted hash of your network address for one day, to limit bulk first submissions, and for one hour, to limit requests to begin publishing, and nothing else about you. The application keeps no access log. The host, Fly.io, keeps the application's error output for 7 days under its own policy; the application writes no addresses to it. There are no analytics, no cookies, and no third-party assets on any page. The writing page keeps a small count in your browser's storage of how many sets have been started from it.

The composition score

Each entry carries a composition score, from 0 to 100, computed at submission from the typing figures using the published method, or the words "not scored" where the method does not apply to the declared input method. It describes how the text was composed; it does not decide whether a message is published. Nothing about the figures stops a submission.

Revision 2, effective September 25, 2026.