How this works

What this is

An archive of Paite landscape, craft, language and memory — photographs, textile and craft documentation, recordings of oral literature and music, and articles written by members. It is held by the community that made it, not by a platform.

Who may join

Registration does not grant access. It creates a pending account and an open application, and the account is activated only when 5 established members endorse it.

That threshold is not an administrator's setting to soften. It cannot be set below three, and there is no code path that activates an account below the threshold — an administrator can reject an application but cannot approve one. Endorsement rules that stop a burst of new sign-ups admitting itself:

• One endorsement per member, enforced by a database constraint.
• No endorsing your own application.
• Accounts younger than 30 days cannot endorse.
• An endorsement stops counting if the endorser is later suspended.
• A curator or above can object, which freezes the application for review.

The reason is the material. The archive holds funeral songs, genealogies and photographs of living people. Deciding who sees that is a community decision, not an administrative one.

How things are ranked

The front page is ordered by member ratings, not by recency and not by an editor. Two deliberate choices shape it:

1. A Bayesian prior. Thinly-rated items are pulled toward the site mean, so a single five-star vote cannot outrank a broadly loved photograph. An item rated 4.9 by 17 members ranks below one rated 4.5 by 52.
2. Bounded recency. Age nudges the order; it never dominates it. A thirty-year-old photograph stays eligible for the front page, which is the whole point of an archive.

Members cannot rate their own contributions. Re-rating updates your score without inflating the count.

Who decides what

Roles and permissions are rows in the database, not constants in the code, so the community can adjust them — and every change is recorded. Curators and elders moderate; administrators manage the filing system, roles and configuration. Two rules close the obvious hole: you cannot grant a role at or above your own rank, and you cannot act on a member who outranks you.

Every privileged action is written to an append-only audit log. There is no function anywhere in the code that edits or deletes an entry in it.

Reading it

Browse the archive · Read what members have written · See the collections · Apply for membership