A name you choose, and a code only you have.
When the community boards open you will need an account. It will not ask for your email, your name or your phone, and it cannot be recovered by proving who you are — because proving who you are is the thing we are trying not to make you do.
This page is published before the thing exists, like the community design, so that anyone who joins later knows exactly what they are joining. If you think one of these decisions is wrong, now is the time it can still change.
Nothing on the rest of this site will ever need an account. All 969 pages, every state kit, every fee table, every form link stays open to anyone with no sign-in of any kind. An account exists only so that a post on the boards can belong to somebody.
The whole flow, three screens
Screen 1
Choose a name
This is the only name anyone will see. Most people pick something that means nothing to anyone but them.
Not your real name, and not a name you use elsewhere. You can change it for the first 24 hours, then it is fixed.
Screen 2
Here is your key
This is shown once. It is the only way back into this account.
A screenshot of this goes into your photo library, which may sync to a shared computer or an account somebody else can open. Copy it into a password manager instead, or write it on paper.
If you lose it, the account is gone. We cannot email it to you, because we do not have your email.
Screen 3
That is the whole sign-up
No email. No name. No phone number. No date of birth. Nothing that could be searched for, subpoenaed, leaked or read off a shared device.
Why it is built this way
The ordinary way to build this is an email address and a password, with a reset link for when the password is forgotten. That is easier for everybody, including us, and it is wrong for this site for one reason: a meaningful number of people reading The Cusp are doing it on a phone or a computer that somebody else can open.
An email address is not a small piece of data here. It is the thing that links a person to what they wrote, that a reset link can be intercepted on, that turns up in a breach beside the name of the site, and that sits in a sent folder somebody else reads. The moment the field exists, the people most likely to fill it in are the people most worried about losing access — which is to say, the people for whom it is most dangerous.
So there is no field. The trade is that nobody can get an account back for you, and we would rather say that in large type on screen two than bury it.
What we deliberately did not build
- Sign in with Google, Apple or Facebook. It is one tap and it writes a record of this site into an account somebody else may administer. Convenience is not worth that here.
- An optional email, “just for recovery”. Optional fields are not optional in practice. They get filled in by the anxious.
- Security questions. Every honest answer to one is a fact about you, and the people most likely to guess them are the people you know.
- A profile. No photo, no bio, no location, no join-date badge, nothing to build a picture out of. A name and the posts under it.
- Phone verification. It would cut abuse and it would undo the entire point.
What we are not promising
Being straight about the limits, because a privacy design that oversells itself is worse than none.
- A pseudonym is not anonymity. Your posts are public and they accumulate. Somebody who knows your situation may recognize it from what you write, however careful the account is. Assume anything you post is permanent, public, and readable by the other side.
- We still see technical information. Any website does — a request carries an address and a browser signature. We do not join that to your posts, and we do not keep it longer than we need to, but it is not nothing and we are not going to pretend it is.
- Lost is lost. There is no appeal, no identity check, no support route that ends with your account back. That is the cost of the design and it falls on you, not on us, which is why it is on screen two and not in the terms.
- A name we cannot trace is a name we cannot hold to account. Somebody removed from the boards can register again in seconds. We carry that in moderation instead of in identity, and the rules page says what that moderation actually does.
If you are reading this on a device somebody else can open
This is the situation the design is for, and there are two things worth doing before you make any account anywhere.
- Do not screenshot the key. Photo libraries sync. Copy it into a password manager, or write it on paper kept somewhere that is not the house.
- Check what your browser remembers. A saved login and a history entry are both visible to anyone who opens the device, and neither is something an account design can protect you from.
If you are in danger rather than only in a difficult divorce, digital safety and protective orders are the pages to read first, and neither needs an account either.
Tell us if this is wrong
This is version 1 of a design, published before it is built, and it will change. Every change will be dated here rather than quietly edited — the same commitment as the community rules. If you work in domestic violence advocacy, digital security or platform trust and safety and you can see a failure we have not, we would rather hear it now than after somebody is hurt by it.
Version 1, 29 September 2026. Nothing described on this page is live. The boards are not open and no account can currently be created.