How this works

What the classmate directory does, what it does on its own, and what it will never do without one of us saying so. Written for the committee — if you are a classmate who wandered in, everything here applies to you too, and none of it is a secret.

The one rule everything else follows. We show another classmate a person's phone number, email or address only if that person told us it was theirs and chose to share it. Everything we went and found ourselves — public-records lookups, a tip from a classmate, a note someone typed in — is never shown to anybody, no matter what it says next to it.

Who can see what

Anyone with the link	Yearbook photo, the name from 1986, and whether the person has registered — that is, whether we have verified their identity and their page is live with the permissions they chose. That is all. No addresses, no numbers, nothing we have been told since.
A registered classmate	The above, plus whatever each person has chosen to share — often nothing, and that is a perfectly good answer.
Admins	All classmates' records. This is how we find classmates and update entries or verify new classmates.

What happens when

Somebody registers

They find themselves in the class list and press This is me. We email a sign-in link to the address we already have for them — they never type one, and they are never shown the address we hold. Then one of two things:

Verified email address	They are registered on the spot. No one has to do anything. This is most of the people who came to the reunion or answered an email.
Address found, or given to us	Registration comes to admins for verification. Clicking a link only proves somebody reads that mailbox — and public-records sites put the wrong person's email on a classmate's record all the time. We run a verification process before registering that person.

If we have no address for the classmate at all, or ours is out of date, classmates can provide us an email when registering — and that always triggers an admin to verify, because it is an address we have never seen before.

Registration for verification

As an admin you will get an email, and it links straight to a registration for verification (called a claim). On the admin page you will see what they told us, and the queue is sorted so the ones most likely to be genuine are at the top.

What verifies a registration is an admin. The class list is public, so anyone can read two names off the site and claim to have hung around with them. Saying yes may take a phone call, an email with more questions, or a picture — and then you decide.

Press I am looking at this before you start, and it will tell the other admins that you have it — so two of you do not text the same person. Then approve, reject, or ask them a question, which is emailed to them in your words. If you reject a registration, the person is emailed to say we could not confirm it and invited to reply. Nobody is ever just ignored.

Somebody tells us how to reach a classmate

A registered classmate looking at the page of someone who hasn't registered can hand us a number, an email or a Facebook profile. That is the best lead this project gets — someone who actually knows them, rather than a public-records result — so we treat it as better than anything we bought and worse than the person's own word.

You get an email with the details and, when it matters, the sentence that counts: three classmates have now given us the same number. Every tip is kept, so agreement builds up rather than getting overwritten.

A tip changes nothing by itself. It waits on the Tips tab of the admin page until one of the admins decides: send an invitation (an email asking whether they would like their page, saying who passed the details on), add to record (keep the details without writing to anyone), or not useful. Details from a tip are never made anyone's main address.

The tip then says what became of it — invited, the link opened, "not me", bounced, or registered — so if a classmate asks what happened to their tip, there is an answer.

How classmates can contact each other

A classmate who has registered may choose not to share their email or their mobile number. Another classmate can still reach them.

On the directory page there is an Ask … to get in touch link — shown only for classmates who have registered. Pressing "Ask Byron to get in touch" lets that classmate choose which of their own details to share with Byron, and the site emails Byron: that classmate would like to reach him, here is what they chose to give him. Byron can then email, text or call, at his own discretion, or do nothing at all.

Only details the sender told us themselves can be included, and only the ones they tick. If we hold no verified address for the person being contacted, the request comes to the admins to pass on by hand instead.

Somebody says "you have the wrong person"

Every email we send has a one-click link for this, and it needs no account and no reply. It marks that address as wrong and stops us using it. It never touches the classmate's page: it tells us the address is wrong, not that the person is.

You will get a note when it happens. It is good news — it usually means a public-records match was wrong, and now we know, and we can stop bothering a stranger.

Somebody wants out

They email us. What they get: we will not share any of their details or let anyone contact them through the site. We will still email them about reunions, and they can RSVP or not as they like. Their yearbook photo and 1986 name stay where classmates can see them, because the yearbook has been public for forty years and this is the class's own record of itself.

What the site sends, and who it says it is from

Three addresses, and the one a letter comes from says what kind of letter it is. None of them is a mailbox to sign into — they forward straight to us.

hello@ mountaincrest1986.com	The site writing to a classmate. Sign-in links, an invitation to register, "you are registered", a decision on a registration, and one classmate asking to reach another. These go out on their own as people use the site, at any hour, without either of us doing anything. Replies come to Mark and Julie.
reunion@ mountaincrest1986.com	The committee writing about a reunion. Only the mailings one of us composes and sends by hand — thank you for coming, we missed you, and the careful letters to addresses we found ourselves rather than were given. Replies come to Mark and Julie.
tech@ mountaincrest1986.com	The site writing to us. A registration waiting to be verified, a tip, a wrong address, something that broke. No classmate is ever sent anything from this address. Replies come to Mark.

The reason for the split: a sign-in link will still go out in a year when there is no reunion being planned, and in 2036 a new committee will take over reunion@ while the directory carries on as it is. And an alert about a broken page is plumbing — it should not look like a letter from the class.

Bad addresses now look after themselves. Amazon tells the site when a message could not be delivered, and the address is marked dead straight away — the pages stop claiming we can reach that person, and no one has to read a bounce. If somebody marks our mail as spam, we go further: that person is do-not-contact, by any means, and you will get a note saying so. Please do not write to them by hand either. Complaints are what get a whole domain blocked, and they have said what they want clearly enough.

What the site will never do by itself

Send a mailing. Every send shows the list first and refuses to go until the number of recipients is typed back by hand.
Approve a claim, except when the address is one that person gave us themselves.
Share a phone number, an email or an address that its owner did not choose to share.
Remove anybody from the class list.

If something looks wrong

Tell an admin, and nothing is lost in the meantime: every change keeps the value it replaced, ten deep, and a page can be handed back so the person can start again. The two mistakes worth catching early are a classmate registered as the wrong person, and an address that belongs to a stranger — both are fixable, and both matter more than they look.