Questions, answered.

RippleCore is a place to share the good you see. You post a moment — something kind you did, or something kind you watched happen — and the people in your Circle see it.

The part that makes it different is what happens next: somebody can read your moment and do something of their own because of it. That link is kept, so the idea has a trail rather than disappearing into a feed.

A Circle is a community inside RippleCore — your university, your school, your workplace, your town, your club. It is where the moments go, and it is who can see them.

You can belong to more than one, and they stay separate: a post shared in one Circle is read by that Circle’s members, unless its author chose to share that moment with all RippleCore members.

Somebody in the Circle shares a code, or a link, and that is the way in. There is no directory of Circles you can sign up to in general — a Circle is joined from inside.

What happens next depends on how that Circle is set up. An open Circle admits you on the tap. An approval Circle puts your application in front of one of its officers, who may ask you a question or two first — and you can see that it is waiting rather than wondering.

Codes do not last forever: an invite can be withdrawn by the Circle that made it, or expire on a date.

No. RippleCore runs in a browser, so there is nothing to install and nothing to update: open the link your Circle shared and sign in.

If you would rather it felt like an app, adding the page to your home screen works the way it does for any site.

• Post a moment — a photo or two, a sentence about what happened, and tags for the people who were there.
• Start a ripple — read somebody’s moment and log your own, keeping the link back to what inspired it.
• Join a challenge — one goal for the whole Circle for a month, joined with a tap and marked done when you have done it.
• Sign up to volunteer — open opportunities with a date and a place, and a register of who came.
• RSVP to an event — the clean-up, the social, the end-of-season do.
• Earn badges — read off what you have actually done, never handed out.

And the thing you can do in any of them: react. Love it, celebrate it or call it insightful, in a couple of taps.

A ripple is one person doing something because they saw what somebody else did.

When you log a moment, you can say which moment inspired it. That link is kept, so the idea has a trail: your moment sits underneath the one it came from, and the next person’s sits underneath yours. A moment’s ripple count is how many people it reached in that way.

It is the reason the app is not a feed. A feed tells you what happened; a ripple shows you what your own moment caused.

Yes — up to five on a moment, and you choose the shape they are shown in rather than living with whatever the camera decided.

You can also tag the people who were there, so a moment credits everybody it belongs to.

Nothing is awarded in RippleCore. Every badge is read off something you have actually done — a first moment, a run of them, a challenge finished, an event you turned up to.

That is the point: a badge you can grind is a badge that means nothing. These are a record, not a reward, and nobody can buy one.

The members of the Circle you shared it in. Not other Circles, not the Circle next door, and never somebody who is signed out and browsing.

If you are 18 or over and your Circle allows it, you can choose to share a moment with all RippleCore members as well. You choose each time, and it starts on “Circle members only”. A moment shared that way names nobody and shows its place no closer than its town, and you can take it back to your Circle from its menu. A safeguarded Circle never offers this.

If you want to note something for yourself alone, that is what a quick act is for: a private record of what you did. It still counts towards what you have done, and no other member ever reads it — not the Circle, not its officers.

You can also delete a moment you wrote. It goes.

A moment can say where it happened, and the point on the map is coarsened before it is stored — by default to the town, not the street. The coarsening happens on the way in, so a search cannot find what was never kept, and the range the app offers runs from exact all the way to hidden. A place name you type is kept as you typed it, unless you choose hidden.

Nothing else in RippleCore asks where you are.

A Circle is either community or safeguarded, and that decides whether strangers can come across it.

Community. The Circle itself is listed publicly, so anyone can find it, signed out included.

Safeguarded. The Circle itself is not listed, so people who are not members will not come across it. Its page opens only to its members, and to someone holding a live invite.

That is a separate decision from how you join one: a Circle can approve its applications and still be listed. Nothing inside is readable without an account in either case, and the events and the member list are readable by the Circle’s own members and by nobody else.

So are the posts, with one exception that is yours to control. In a community Circle, a member who is 18 or over can choose to share a moment of their own with all RippleCore members. The Circle’s admin can turn that off in Settings, which also takes back anything already shared that way. A safeguarded Circle never allows it.

You can report a post, and say why. The report goes to the officers of that Circle, who are the people who already run it — and they can take the post down.

RippleCore is deliberately built so that the loudest thing on screen is somebody else’s good news. There are no follower counts to chase and no argument to win, which is why the unkind case is the exception rather than the daily weather.