The Croton Community Forum is a volunteer-run space for neighbors to share perspectives and find common ground on local questions. It's free to use, and by using it you agree to these plain-language terms.
Topics and statements you write are public and may be read, voted on, and summarized by anyone. Keep them:
You keep ownership of what you write, and you grant the forum a permanent license to display it and include it in vote tallies and consensus summaries.
Anyone may open a topic, within posted rate limits. The person who created a topic can close it from the browser they created it with. Nobody else's topics can be closed or edited by you.
Petitions here are not legal filings. Nothing you create or sign on this site is a designating petition, a nominating petition, a referendum or permissive-referendum petition, or any other document governed by New York Election Law, Village Law, or the Municipal Home Rule Law. Those have statutory forms, witness requirements and filing deadlines, and they do not accept electronic signatures. A petition here is a record of who asked for what. If you need a statutory petition, use the official form and speak to the Village Clerk.
Anyone with a confirmed forum account may start a petition, and they are named on it as its organizer. The text of a petition is frozen as soon as the first person signs — people put their name to specific words, and those words must not change afterwards. Organizers can post updates underneath instead.
Sign under your own name, once, and draw your own signature. If you sign on your own device without being signed in, your signature counts once you confirm it by a link sent to your email; if you are already signed in with a confirmed email, or you sign on a collector's device with them standing there, it counts straight away. Do not sign on behalf of anyone else, and do not enter another person's details.
If you collect in person: hand the device over and let people sign for themselves. Signing for someone who is not there, or entering names you were told rather than shown, is falsifying the record and will get the signatures removed and your collector access revoked.
If you collect signatures on paper: the sheet you print is yours to carry, but the names on it belong to the people who wrote them. Do not publish, post, or pass on a photograph of a filled sheet anywhere else. Uploading it here keeps it private to you and the organizer; only a copy with the names and addresses blacked out can be made public, and only by the organizer. Organizers who download the signature list are responsible for handling it as the personal information it is, and for using it only to deliver the petition.
Moderators may remove a petition, a signature, or an uploaded sheet that breaks these rules — including fabricated signatures, petitions targeting a private individual, and sheets published without redaction.
Volunteer moderators may remove statements or close topics that break these rules, and may restrict access for repeat abuse. Moderation aims to be light-handed: disagreement is the point of the forum; abuse is not.
Email and WhatsApp updates are opt-in, and every message includes a way to stop them. See the Privacy Policy for exactly what we store — it's very little.
This is community-run software provided as is. We work to keep it accurate and available, but we can't promise either, and results shown here are an informal snapshot of participating residents' views — not an official vote, poll, or government record.
If these terms change, the date above changes with them, and significant changes will be announced on the forum itself.