For members

You are a member: someone who lives in a mess, or is about to. This is the manual for everyone who is not running the mess and not administering the platform.

Every account gets the MEMBER role the moment it registers, and never loses it — being made a manager adds a role on top of it rather than replacing it.

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1. Getting an account

Registration is open: go to Register and give a username, an email, a password of at least ten characters, and your full name. A phone number and gender are optional; the gender you give (if any) only decides which default avatar figure you get before you upload a picture. The gender field offers Male or Female — leave it blank if you would rather not say, which is what an unanswered field means.

The username rules are shown under the field as you type, and characters that can never be valid are simply not accepted — you cannot type a space into a username.

Confirming your email

A six-digit code is sent to the address you gave. Enter it on Confirm your email (/verify-email) — there is a banner at the top of every screen linking to it until you do.

You can sign in and look around without confirming. What you cannot do is create a mess or join one. That is the whole point: from the moment you are in a mess, that address is where a fine notice, a payment receipt and a password reset all go, so it has to be an address you actually hold.

Practical details:

• The code lasts ten minutes and you get five tries before it is thrown away. Ask for another if you run out — nothing is lost.
• The code is only ever in the email. It does not appear in your bell, and neither does a password-reset link. That is deliberate and it is the whole point: a code you could read while signed in would prove nothing about whether you hold the mailbox.
• Resend has a one-minute cooldown, shown as a countdown on the button rather than a button that looks broken.
• After confirming, the app refreshes your session for you. If you skip that somehow, creating a mess will still look blocked — reload the page.

If the address is wrong, you are stuck, and this is worth knowing before you type it: there is no way to change an email address in this release. A mistyped address means the account cannot be confirmed and cannot be used, and the only fix is a platform administrator releasing the identity so you can register again. Check the address before you submit.

You now have an account and no mess. That is a normal state, not a problem, and the app takes you straight to the screen for fixing it.

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2. Getting into a mess

Two ways, and both start from Get started (/onboarding).

Join someone else's mess

You need its join code: eight characters, from an alphabet that deliberately excludes I, L, O, U, 0 and 1, so a code read off a sticker cannot be mistyped into a different real one.

Three ways to use it, all landing on the same screen:

• Type it into Enter a code.
• Scan the mess's QR with your phone's camera.
• Open the invite link somebody sent you.

You will see the mess's name, its slogan and its logo — enough to know you have the right one. Nothing else is shown, on purpose.

Press Request to join. The manager's queue shows your name and your profile picture, taken from your account at the moment you send the request — so upload a picture first if you want to be recognised. Add a note as well if you can: "Rafi, room 3B, moving in on the 1st" is the difference between an approval and a message asking who you are.

Renaming your account afterwards does not change the name on a request already sent. That is deliberate: the request is a record of who asked.

Then you wait. Nothing about your access changes until the manager decides.

Create your own mess

If nobody has invited you, Create a mess makes you its manager instead — see the mess manager's manual.

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3. Waiting for approval

While a request is open, /onboarding sends you to Waiting for approval. That screen is the whole story of your request:

• Its status, when you sent it, and the note you wrote.
• When it expires. A request left undecided for 14 days lapses on its own.
• Check again — press it to re-read the status. There is no automatic refresh and no notification in this release, so nothing will tell you: you have to look.
• Withdraw — takes it back. You can then apply to a different mess.

You can only have one open request at a time, across the whole platform. That is deliberate: approval creates your membership, and you can only have one, so three pending requests would mean two managers approving and one of them getting an error for a decision they were entitled to make.

When it is approved, the screen offers Go to your mess. Use it — it re-issues your session, which is what makes the mess's screens appear.

If it is rejected you will see the manager's reason. You can apply elsewhere, or to the same mess again.

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4. Once you are in

Three navigation groups appear — Mess, Dining and Finance:

Screen	What it is for
Mess → Overview	Your mess at a glance: how many members are eating, how many are paused, how many meal types it offers, how much of the roster has set a plan, and how many requests are waiting. Plus the weekday chart — how many people the mess is cooking for on each day of the week.
Dining → Today's board	Today's meals, yours and everyone's. See §6.
Dining → Meal calendar	Your month, day by day, with your totals. See §6.
Dining → Weekly meal plan	Your own standing weekly pattern. See §5.
Finance → Grocery & expenses	The meal rate, what the mess has spent, and your own submissions. See §7.

Members, Meal types, Join requests and Settings are the manager's screens and do not appear for you. They are not merely hidden: your account holds no permission for them, so the server refuses those requests too, and a link somebody sends you will not work.

That is a change from the previous release, where the roster and the approval queue appeared in a member's sidebar. Neither was ever yours to act on — the roster carries everyone's status and pause state, and the queue is a list of decisions you cannot make.

The numbers on Overview still cover the whole mess, and the tiles that used to link to the roster and to meal types are now plain numbers rather than links.

What a "weight" means

Each meal type carries a weight, shown as ×0.5, ×1 and so on. It is the multiplier used when the month's cost is shared out: breakfast at ×0.5 means somebody who only eats breakfast is billed half of what a full diner pays. ×0 means served and tracked but never charged.

Since this release those weights are live: the meal rate (§7) divides the mess's grocery spend by everyone's weighted meals, so a ×0.5 breakfast costs half of a ×1 dinner. Settling up between members — who owes whom, and paying it — is still a later release.

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5. Your weekly meal plan

This is the one thing in the mess that is yours to set.

When you join, every meal is switched off, and that is deliberate. The plan is what the nightly generator reads, and the month's cost is divided by the meals it generated — so a plan that started switched on would charge you for meals you never asked for, from a template you had not looked at. Nothing is counted for you until you turn something on here. The cost of that is the opposite mistake: if you eat before setting your plan, your first days read as zero and somebody has to enter them by hand (§6). Set the week on your first day and it never comes up.

Open Members, find your own row and press the calendar icon, or use Weekly meal plan from your row's dialog.

• On a phone: one section per weekday, with a switch per meal type. Monday is open by default.
• On a bigger screen: a grid, weekdays across, meal types down.

Switch on the meals you normally eat. Copy Monday copies Monday's column onto Tuesday–Friday and leaves the weekend alone, because the weekend is usually the part that differs.

Nothing is saved until you press "Save the week". The footer tells you how many changes are pending, and the button stays disabled while there are none.

You can only edit your own plan. Opening somebody else's is refused — a manager can edit anyone's, you cannot, and both use the same permission. That is checked on the server, so a link somebody sends you will not work either.

A plan is a standing pattern, not a promise about a particular day — §6 is how you change one day.

Changing your plan changes what gets generated from today onwards. Days already recorded keep the numbers they were recorded with: last week's meals are what you ate, not what this week's plan says you would have eaten, and the month's cost is shared out on those numbers.

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6. Your meals, day by day

Your weekly plan is turned into actual meals for you, one day at a time, by the mess's nightly generation. You then adjust individual days.

Today's board (/meals)

Your own meals for today, with a switch on each, plus what the whole mess is eating — the headcount per meal type is what the cook actually needs. Toggling is optimistic: the switch moves at once and a confirmation follows.

Your calendar (/meals/calendar)

The whole billing period, one row per day, with your raw meal count and your weighted total for the period. Future days can be set in advance — a week away, a guest coming on Friday — and anything you set by hand is never overwritten by the nightly generation.

The cutoff

Your mess has a cutoff time (its settings screen shows it; many messes use 22:00). Before it, you can change today and tomorrow freely. After it, both are locked and the app says so — ask your manager, who can still change any day.

Two things you cannot do at all:

• A day before you joined. Your meals start at your joining date.
• A day in a closed month. Once the manager closes a billing period, its numbers are fixed. Reopening it is a manager action with a recorded reason.

A past day is likewise not yours to change, cutoff or no cutoff.

Guests

A guest is an extra portion on your own entry: set the count to 2 instead of switching it on. It is counted, weighted and billed as yours, because it is your guest.

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7. Grocery and expenses

Finance → Grocery & expenses (/finance/expenses) is where the money for food appears.

What you can see

• The meal rate — the mess's approved grocery spend for the period divided by everyone's weighted meals. It is what one weighted meal costs, and it moves as costs are approved and meals are recorded.
• Total grocery spend, shared mess expenses, and the per-member share of those shared costs.
• Your standing: what you have spent, what your meals come to at the current rate, and the difference. It is an estimate that moves all month, not a bill.
• History, filterable by month, category, status and submitter.

Submitting an expense

Add expense takes an amount, a date, a category and an optional receipt.

Category	How it is shared
Meal / grocery	Into the meal rate — paid for in proportion to the meals people ate.
Cleaning supplies	Split equally among active members.
Maintenance & repair	Split equally.
Shared household	Split equally. Describe it.

A receipt may be a JPEG, PNG, WebP or PDF, up to 3MB. The file is checked by its actual contents, not its name — renaming something to .jpg does not get it in, and nothing else is accepted.

Your submission is pending until a manager approves it, and a pending cost is in no total on the screen. If it is rejected you keep seeing it, with the reason. Some messes turn the approval requirement off in their settings, in which case what you submit counts immediately.

You can edit or cancel your own submission while it is still pending. Once a manager has ruled on it, it is theirs to change — and once its month is closed, nobody's.

Utilities and your share

Finance → Utilities shows the categories your mess pays every month — rent, electricity, gas, wifi — and how each is divided. Three ways, chosen per category by your manager:

• equal share, one part each, which is how rent and wifi usually work;
• by meal units, in proportion to what you actually ate, which is how gas usually works;
• by days present, so that joining on the 20th means paying for ten days of electricity, not thirty.

You can read all of it; the amounts are your manager's to enter.

Finance → Monthly closing shows the month once it is settled: the meal rate, your meals, your meal cost, your utility share, your share of the flat costs, and what you already paid out of your own pocket.

When a month is closed

Once your manager closes a month, nothing in it can change — not your meals, not an expense, not a utility amount, and not by an administrator either. That is the point: the figure you settled against is the figure that stays.

If something in it really is wrong, your manager can reopen the month, and has to give a reason for doing so. Closing it again produces a new revision, and the version you were shown before stays on record next to it — so a change to a settled month is always something you can see, never something that happens quietly.

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8. What you owe, and paying it

Finance → My statement (/finance/statement) is the answer to "what do I owe". It shows two figures, and it never adds them together:

• Your balance — what the mess's books say. It is built from months that have been closed, plus every payment, advance and correction since. This is the number to settle against.
• This month so far, badged Not yet billed — what the current month is shaping up to cost you. It is not in your balance, because nothing about an open month is final: the meal rate moves as costs are approved, an expense can be deleted, a utility bill can be re-entered. When your manager closes the month, these figures become fixed entries and the card disappears for that month.

Under them is the month's list of entries, each with the balance after it, and above it a brought forward figure — last month's balance carried in. There is no "carry forward" line in the list, because carrying a balance forward is arithmetic over the same entries rather than a transaction of its own.

Downloading it as a PDF

Download PDF on the statement gives you the same month as a document: the two figures, the entry list and the running balance, laid out to print. It is generated when you press the button, from the same numbers the screen is showing.

The header carries your mess's logo and your profile picture where they exist. Where they do not — nobody has uploaded a mess logo, you have not set a picture — you get a lettered badge instead, and that is the normal appearance rather than a failure to load. The same is true if the document is generated at a moment the mess or account service cannot be reached: the figures are this service's own and are never affected.

Entries are permanent

Nothing on your statement can be edited or deleted — by anyone, including an administrator. If something is wrong, your manager posts a correction with a reason, and both lines stay visible: the original and the thing that cancels or offsets it. That is deliberate. A ledger you can quietly edit is a ledger you cannot rely on, and the pair of lines is the proof of what happened.

Claiming money you paid

Finance → Payments & claims (/finance/payments) → New claim is how you get credit for money you handed over or a bill you paid yourself.

Claim	What it is
Advance	Money you gave ahead of a bill, against nothing in particular.
Bill I paid	A specific utility bill line you paid out of your own pocket. You pick the line, so your manager can check it.

A claim changes nothing until your manager approves it. It starts as a request, exactly like a cost entry does, and for the same reason: money somebody reports about themselves should not move anyone's balance before it is verified. Your balance is untouched while it says Waiting for approval, and you can withdraw it until then. If it is rejected you keep seeing it, with the reason.

You are credited the whole amount you paid, not just your share. If the electricity bill is ৳1,500 and your own share of it is ৳300, approving your claim credits you ৳1,500 — the bill is still split across everyone, so paying it directly changed who funded it, not who owes for it. The extra ৳1,200 carries forward as your advance.

For groceries there is nothing to claim: an expense you submit already records you as the one who paid, and the month's closing credits you for it automatically.

Payments your manager records

When you hand over cash, bKash or a bank transfer, your manager records it and your balance moves straight away — no approval, because they are the one who received it. It appears on your statement as Payment received, and in your own list on Payments & claims.

A payment can be recorded for a month that is already closed, and that is normal. A month is closed to work out what everyone owes; the collecting happens afterwards. Closing freezes what you were billed, not what you have paid.

Caution money

If your mess takes a security deposit, it sits in a separate place from your dues and is shown on your statement as Caution money held.

• It does not pay your meals or your utility share. It is money the mess is holding on your behalf, not money it has earned — which is why your first months are not free.
• Nothing is credited to you because you joined. It appears when your manager records that the money actually arrived, and instalments are fine.
• It comes back when you leave, through a settlement — see below.

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9. Your own details

In the mess

Your display name is what you are called in this mess — "Rafi (3B)" — and editing it changes nothing about your account. Open your row on Members and change Name in this mess.

If you forget your password

Forgot password on the sign-in screen now works. Give the address on your account and a single-use link arrives; it lasts 30 minutes and can be used once. Setting a new password signs out every session on the account, including anybody else who may have been using it — that is the point of a reset.

The screen will not tell you whether that address has an account, and neither will the email. It says the same thing either way, deliberately: any difference would let somebody test who has an account here. So if nothing arrives, check the address and check your spam folder before assuming anything.

If you no longer have access to that mailbox, the old route still exists: ask your mess manager or a platform administrator for a temporary password. You will be asked to change it the first time you sign in.

On a development or self-hosted setup with no mail server configured, the reset screen says so and tells you to use the fallback code from the deployment's .env instead of a link. On a normal deployment you will never see that.

Your account

Your account (/me) holds your name, username, email, phone and gender, and lists every permission you currently hold. Permissions are what decides what you can do; your role name is not.

• Edit changes your name, phone and gender.
• Profile picture: upload a JPEG, PNG or WebP. You choose the framing before it is saved — the cropper opens rather than guessing a centre crop, which is what cuts the top off a portrait photo. Your picture is private: it is served through the app to signed-in users and is not a public link.
• Change password needs your current one.
• Forgot your password? There is no self-service reset in this release. Ask an administrator; they issue a one-time password that you change on your next sign-in.

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10. Leaving

Leaving is on your own profile card. It is confirmed, and you can give a reason that the manager sees.

You will be signed out. Ending a membership invalidates every session that account holds — including yours — because your old sign-in still claimed to be in a mess you have left. Sign in again and you are back at Get started, free to create a mess or join another.

What stays behind: everything the mess recorded about you. Leaving removes your access, not the history.

If you are the mess's only manager and other members remain, you cannot simply leave — you will be asked to hand the mess over first. That flow is in the mess manager's manual.

Getting your caution money back

Leaving does not automatically return your deposit. Your manager runs a settlement, which works out what comes back:

1. The mess's refund percentage is applied to what you have on deposit. Some messes refund all of it, some keep a share for wear and tear.
2. Any deductions the manager records — a broken chair, an unreturned key — come off that, and each one has to carry a reason you can read.
3. What is left first clears whatever you still owe, and the remainder is handed back to you in cash.

If your deposit does not cover what you owe, you still owe the difference. Leaving does not write off a debt, and the settlement says so in plain terms rather than quietly rounding it to zero. If you are in credit beyond your deposit, that is separate money the mess owes you and the settlement flags it — it is handed back rather than folded into the deposit refund.

A settlement can be voided if it turns out to be wrong, which reverses it rather than deleting it, and then run again on corrected terms.

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11. Your duties

Under Duties in the menu: the calendar, your claims and swaps, and the fine fund.

Seeing your turns

Calendar shows every duty the mess runs, one row per kind of work, with turns drawn as bars across the days they cover. Flip Only my turns to see just yours.

Tap a day to open it. That page lists every duty on that day, who holds it, and what you can do about it.

A turn can be one day or a stretch of them. A bar that breaks in the middle means somebody else holds the day in the gap — usually because that day was swapped out.

Marking a duty done

How you tick it off depends on the duty:

• A per-day duty — the bazaar, usually — is marked done one day at a time.
• A per-turn duty — the washroom this week — is marked done once for the whole turn.

The button says which. If you share a turn with somebody, either of you can mark it done for both — you serve together, so waiting for both of you to press a button would leave the turn open when one of you is asleep.

You can only mark your own turns. A manager can mark anybody's, and can reopen one that was already recorded as missed.

If the calendar is empty, there is nothing to ask for

Claims and swaps are both requests about a specific day that already belongs to somebody, or to nobody. A manager sets up the duty types and the rotation, and then presses Fill it in to turn that into actual days. Until they do, the calendar is empty and neither button exists — not because you lack permission, but because there is no assignment to point at. If the duties calendar shows nothing for the month, that is what to ask a manager about.

Claiming an open slot

A duty with nobody on it shows as an open slot and has a Take it button. Claiming submits a request — a manager has to approve it, and nothing changes on the calendar until they do. There is no other member whose agreement could stand in for theirs, which is why a claim always goes to a manager even when a swap would not.

An open slot is nobody's failure and is never fined. It just means the rota has a gap.

Swapping a turn

On a duty you hold, Ask somebody to change days sends a request to the member you choose.

If the turn is longer than a day you can ask them to take just one day of it — I hold 11-16 but I'm away on the 13th. You keep the rest; only that day changes hands.

What happens next depends on the mess:

• They accept, and a manager approves. This is the default.
• Or they accept and it takes effect immediately, if the mess has turned manager approval off.

Either way the dialog tells you which before you send it, and Claims & Swaps shows where the request has got to. You can withdraw your own request while it is still waiting.

Every refusal comes with a reason.

Missed duties and fines

If a duty you hold passes without being marked done, it is recorded as missed. That happens whatever the fine settings say — the mess keeps an honest record of who did what even when nobody is being charged.

Whether a miss also costs money is the mess's choice, per duty. When it does:

• A per-day duty charges for each missed day.
• A per-turn duty charges once for the whole turn, however many days it spanned.
• A turn you share charges each of you, because what you owe is recorded per person.

A fine appears on Finance → My Statement as Fine, and it increases what you owe like any other charge.

On that page each line shows two numbers: This line — what this one entry was — and Running total, which is where you stand after it, with still to pay or in your favour written underneath. The second column used to be headed Balance with no word beside it, so a ৳50 fine read as "৳50 … ৳50" and the second figure was taken for money already handed over. It never was: a running total is what is left to settle.

A fine is dated the day it was noticed, which is usually the day after the duty. If your mess had already closed that month, the fine lands in the current one instead — its description still names the day of the duty, so nothing is hidden. Your statement is never rewritten behind you.

Every fine you have been charged is listed under Duties → Fines, with the duty, the day it was for and the day it was raised. You see your own and nobody else's.

A fine a manager added themselves says who added it. A fine the nightly check raised says nothing extra — the duty and its date on the row are where it came from.

A manager can waive a fine. When they do, you are credited back and both the charge and the credit stay visible on your statement — nothing is deleted, which is what makes the record worth arguing from. The reason they gave is shown beside the fine, so a waive is never something you have to ask about.

A fine you already paid

If you handed the money over there and then, the manager can record that when they raise the fine. You will see it marked Settled on the spot, and on your statement it appears as two lines — the fine, and your payment for it — which cancel out. Your balance does not change.

Both lines are there on purpose. A fine that was simply left off your bill would be money you paid with no record you could check afterwards.

One thing to read carefully: a fine without that badge is not necessarily unpaid. The badge only says how the fine was settled on the day it was raised, and it never changes. If you were charged in October and paid in November, the payment shows on your statement as a payment — the fine keeps its original wording. What you actually owe is always the balance on Finance → My Statement, never a badge on a fine.

And if a fine you had already paid is waived afterwards, you end up in credit — the mess owes you that amount against your next bill, because the charge was cancelled and your payment was not.

The fine fund

Fines go into a mess pot, and you can see it — under Duties → Fine money, along with every movement in and out.

Four figures, and the second one is the one to read carefully:

• Money in — what has actually reached the pot.
• Not paid yet — fines charged that nobody has paid. Not money the pot holds.
• Spent — what has gone out.
• Money left — what the mess can actually spend.

Being fined does not put your money in the pot. Until you pay and your manager records it, your fine sits in Not paid yet. Before 2026-08-27 the screen counted a charged fine as pot money straight away, which made the fund look funded by fines nobody had paid — including yours.

A movement marked nobody paid this yet in the list is your fine being charged. Money collected is the money actually arriving. Both stay visible; nothing is ever removed.

You cannot spend from the fund, and you cannot mark a fine collected — both are a manager's action.

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12. Notifications

The bell in the top bar is real now. It shows what has happened that concerns you, and See all notifications at the bottom of that panel opens the full list. There is no Notifications entry in the sidebar: the bell is already one press away on every screen, so a menu row would only repeat it.

What reaches you

Everything that concerns you now notifies. The pattern is worth learning once rather than reading a table of forty rows: money and deadlines reach your mailbox; everything else is the bell and a push.

Four things earn an email, and only these four:

1. Money moved, or what you owe changed — a payment recorded, a claim decided, a caution deposit, an adjustment, a settlement, a fine, a month closed or corrected.
2. You have to do something, by a time — a duty tomorrow, the meal cutoff approaching, a swap waiting on your answer.
3. Your access or your account changed — added to a mess, your role changed, your membership ended, your password changed.
4. A rule that will later cost you money changed — the fine for a duty, the caution-money policy.

Everything else — a meal you or a manager changed, a meal type renamed, a duty marked done, the rota being published, a bill drafted, the mess settings edited — is in the bell and on your phone, never in your inbox.

What happened	What you see
A fine is charged to you	Bell, email, push
A fine of yours is waived	Bell, push — it only ever helps you, and the reversal is on the statement you were already mailed about
A payment or caution deposit is recorded against you	Bell, email, push
A payment claim of yours is approved or rejected	Bell, email, push
Your balance is adjusted by hand	Bell, email, push — with the reason your manager typed
Your settlement completes or is voided	Bell, email, push
A month is closed or corrected	Bell, email, push — your share is final and on your statement
A month is reopened	Bell, push — with the reason. Nothing has moved yet; the second close is the mail
An expense you submitted is approved	Bell, push
An expense you submitted is rejected	Bell, email, push — this is the one you have to read and maybe redo
Your turn is tomorrow, and again on the morning	Bell, email, push
The meal cutoff is approaching and you have nothing down for tomorrow	Bell, email, push
You missed a duty	Bell, push
A claim or swap involving you is submitted, approved or rejected	Bell, push — plus email on the one waiting for your answer
A duty turn of yours is reassigned	Bell, push
The rota is published for a date range	Bell, push
The fine for a duty changes, or the caution-money policy changes	Bell, email, push
A meal of yours is changed by a manager	Bell, push — grouped
Your weekly meal plan changes	Bell, push
A meal type is added or changed, or the mess settings change	Bell, push — grouped
A utility bill is finalised	Bell, push — the charge itself arrives with the month's close
The fine fund is spent	Bell, push — it is everybody's money
Your password is changed, your account is suspended, or your platform role changes	Bell, email, push — and these ignore quiet hours

The last row is the only one that will reach you during quiet hours. "Your password was changed" exists to reach you in case it was not you, which is not something to hold until morning.

The inbox is the record, and it cannot be switched off

Email and push are copies. The bell is the thing that keeps the record, and there is deliberately no way to turn it off — for anybody, including you. The reason is narrow and worth stating: if "you were fined ৳100" could be made invisible, a charge could arrive with nothing to point at afterwards.

Everything else is yours to silence. Open the bell and press the gear in the top-right corner of the panel — that is the preferences screen, and it is the only way in. There you can turn email or push off for each kind of notification separately.

Quiet hours

Set a quiet window and push notifications wait until it ends. Two things about it:

• It is read in your mess's timezone, not your phone's. If you are travelling, your quiet hours are still the hours your mess keeps — the same rule the rest of the app follows for dates.
• Email is not held. It arrives whenever it arrives, because an email does not wake you up.

Push notifications

Push is the only thing that reaches you when the app is closed, and it is off until you ask for it: open the bell, press the gear in its top-right corner, and press Enable push. Your browser then asks permission.

If you say no, that decision sticks. Browsers do not ask twice — the only way back is to allow notifications for the site in your browser's own settings and reload. The screen says so rather than showing a button that quietly does nothing. Without push, your bell still updates, about once a minute.

Push is per browser. Turning it on on your phone does nothing for your laptop.

Grouping

Meal changes are chatty, so they are grouped: five changes in half an hour become one email. Every one of them still appears separately in your bell — grouping reduces the noise, not what you can see. You can change the window under Preferences.

The unsubscribe link in an email

Every email has one, and it works without signing in. It switches off that kind of email — not your inbox, and not the other kinds. It cannot switch anything on, which is why it is safe to be a link anybody could click. If you press it by mistake, sign in and turn it back on under Preferences.

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Maintenance, and two things an administrator can do to your mess

Maintenance. Occasionally the platform stops accepting changes for a while. You will see a message saying so when you try to change something — toggling a meal, submitting a cost. Everything you can read stays readable: your statement, the meal board, the duty calendar and every figure are still there and still up to date. Try the change again in a few minutes.

Suspension. If your mess is suspended by a platform administrator, nobody new can join it. Nothing of yours is hidden or deleted, and your manager is told why.

Support sessions. Somebody from platform support can open a read-only session inside your mess for thirty minutes. They see what you see and cannot change anything. Your mess's managers are notified the moment it starts, so it is never invisible.

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13. Things that surprise people

• Approving takes a moment to show up. After a manager approves you, your member row is created a second or two later by a background message. If a screen looks empty, refresh it.
• Your email address is permanent. There is no way to change it in this release, so a typo at sign-up means an account that cannot be confirmed and cannot join a mess. A platform administrator can release the identity so you can register again; nothing else recovers it.
• Being suspended tells you nothing. If a manager freezes your membership you can still sign in and still see your mess, but every write is refused — and there is no notification for it yet. Ask your manager if the app suddenly refuses everything. (Your account being suspended does notify; a membership being frozen does not.)
• Some notifications are grouped rather than sent one at a time. Meal changes, meal-type edits, duty completions and settings changes collapse into one message per window. Every one still appears separately in your bell — grouping reduces the noise, not the record.
• Your session survives a permission change. If a manager gives you something new, it appears within fifteen minutes without you signing out — or immediately if you reload after a change.
• "Paused" is not "removed". A manager can mark you as not currently eating — for a month away, say. You are still a member, and nothing about your account changes. Your duty turns are skipped the next time the rota is generated, and anything already on the calendar stays yours.
• Joining a mess does not put you on a rota. A manager adds you to each duty's rotation deliberately. Until they do, you have no turns.
• A fine can be dated after the duty it is for. The check runs the day after, and if the month has been closed in between, the fine lands in the current one. The description still names the day of the duty.
• Leaving does not cancel what you owe, and it does not erase a fine already charged. Your future turns become open slots for somebody else.

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14. The public site, and where the guides live

Neer has a front page now, and it is at / — the address with nothing after it. You can read it without signing in, and so can anybody you send it to.

Your own home screen moved to /dashboard. Nothing about it changed; it just has its own address, because / is now the page a stranger lands on. If you have Neer on your phone's home screen and it opens the marketing page for a moment before showing your dashboard, that is why — the installed app remembers the address it was installed with, and it is being redirected. It sorts itself out; nothing is wrong.

The guides

/docs has this manual and the mess manager's, in full, and you do not need to sign in to read either.

Each guide has a search box and an on this page list. The search only looks inside the guide you are reading, which is usually what you want — if it finds nothing, the other guides are one link away. On a phone the contents list is a tap-to-open panel rather than a column beside the text.

Three more guides are listed there and marked requires sign-in: they describe how the platform itself is run, and reading one needs a platform account. They are listed rather than hidden so that you can see they exist and know you are not missing anything.

These guides describe what is actually built. Where something does not work yet, or works in a way that will surprise you, they say so — this section of this manual exists because of that rule, and so does §13.

The terms, the privacy policy, and the rest

/terms, /privacy, /about and /contact are linked from the footer of every public page and from the sign-up screen. They are readable without an account, which is the point: you should be able to read what you are agreeing to before you agree to it.

If one of those pages says it has not been written yet, that is honest rather than broken. Neer ships them with a placeholder saying so, because a legal page that renders empty looks like a fault and you would have no way to tell the difference. Whoever runs your platform writes them.

The live demo

/demo runs the real application on a made-up mess, and it is there for somebody who has not signed up yet — so you will mostly meet it when you send the link to a flatmate. If you are signed in and you open it, it offers you your own dashboard instead: you already have the real thing, and a demo running beside your real account would be confusing rather than useful.

Everything in the demo is invented — the names, the numbers, the mess, all of it. Nothing anybody does in it is saved anywhere.

Reporting a problem to the people who run Neer

/contact carries a form under whatever your platform has written there: your name, your email address, an optional phone number, an optional subject, and the problem. You do not need to be signed in, which is deliberate — the person who most needs it is somebody locked out, or waiting on a verification email that never came.

You get a reference back, like NR-7K3QF2AB, and it is shown once. Keep it. Nothing is stored in your browser and there is no account behind it, so that reference plus the email address you used is the only way to look the message up again.

Track it on the same page. The tracker beside the form takes the reference and the address, and shows four steps:

Step	What it means
Sent	It reached us.
Viewed	Someone on the platform team has read it.
Contacted	They have replied — by email or by phone.
Solved	It is finished.

All four are shown whether or not they have happened, so you can see what is still to come rather than only what has.

A status only ever moves forward. Something that comes back is a new message with a new reference, because a status that went backwards would look like your report had been dropped.

Limits, named. This is not a conversation: the reply arrives in your email or on your phone, not on this page, and there is no way to add to a message after you send it — send another and mention the first reference. One email address may send five messages a day. And the platform team can leave notes on your message for each other; those are never shown to you, and yours is never shown to anybody but them.