Editorial standards
How this is written
A good deal of this library is about grief, illness, disability and caring for someone. You should be able to see who wrote it and how it is checked before you take any of it seriously.
Who writes it
The BeingKind editors. BeingKind is written and edited by hand. Every entry is checked by a person before it goes live.
There are 293 published ideas. Every one was written specifically for this site. None of it is syndicated, spun from another site’s content, or assembled from a list somewhere else — which is why the reasoning in each one is the part worth reading.
What each idea has to contain
An idea only earns a page if it is specific enough to act on today. Every entry has to say plainly what to do, and — more importantly — why it lands on the person receiving it. That second part is the whole point: most lists of kind acts tell you to brighten someone’s day and never explain what actually works.
Where an act involves somebody in a difficult situation, the entry also carries a note about the one thing to be careful of. Good intentions and getting it right are different things, and an entry that told you to ask a widow about her husband without also telling you to let her decline would be doing harm.
How we handle evidence
Where an entry says something is well established — that falls cause lasting harm in older people, that late payment closes small businesses, that children read routine as safety — it should be traceable to something. Where it cannot be, it is written as an observation rather than dressed up as research.
This is the part of the site most actively being worked on. If you find a claim here that reads like a finding and has nothing behind it, that is a fault and we would like to know.
What this is not
Nothing here is medical, legal, psychological or financial advice. Several entries suggest helping somebody with a benefits form, a hospital appointment or an official letter; in each case the entry says to involve a qualified adviser rather than substitute for one.
If you are worried that someone is in immediate danger, this site is not the right tool. Contact your local emergency services.
Questions
- Are the counts on each idea verified?
- No, and they are not meant to be. Anyone can tap the button to say they did something, and we have no way to check. That is why the page says people say they have done this rather than presenting it as a rating or a review. There are no points, badges or leaderboards anywhere on the site, because attaching a score to kindness changes why people do it and gives them a reason to claim things they did not do.
- Do I need an account?
- No. There are no accounts on the public site. You can mark something as done, leave a one-line note and start a ripple without giving an email address or a name. A first name and a town are optional, and both are labels rather than an identity — never verified, never used to build a profile.
- You have an email list now. Does that not undo all of that?
- It would if the address were joined to anything. It is not. The list lives in its own table with its own file of queries, and that file has no way to reach an act, a note, a chain or the device cookie — which is checkable rather than a promise. An edition is built from the situations somebody ticked when they signed up and from the public library, so the same email could be composed for a stranger who has never used the site. It is asked for in one place, never beside an act, and confirmed by clicking a link before anything is sent.
- What do you store about me?
- A random value in a cookie so the same browser cannot inflate a counter twice, hashed with a server secret before it is saved. Raw IP addresses are never stored; rate limiting uses a salted hash that rotates daily, which is enough to stop abuse and useless for tracking anybody. Nothing derived from either is ever shown on a page.
- Who decides what gets published?
- A person, before it goes live. Notes written by readers are screened for links and abuse automatically, then held for a human to look at if anything trips the screen. Ideas are written and edited by hand in an admin queue, and each page shows when it was last read by somebody.
- What is a ripple?
- A chain of kind acts passed between people. When you mark something as done you can start one, which gives you a short code to hand to whoever you did it for. When they do something kind they add themselves, and pass it on. Chains are never listed publicly and are not indexed by search engines — the only way into one is to be given the code.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, unkind in effect, or would cause harm if somebody followed it, say so and it will be changed or removed. Notes left by readers are moderated before they appear, and anything can be taken down on request.