Rippling out

Since Freegle began, offer and wanted posts were shown only on the community where they were posted. The idea was to keep things local, with varying rules across Freegle communities on cross-posting and boundary eligibility.

Over time, analysis of how quickly and widely posts were successful showed that this wasn't the most efficient way to get items reused. So in June 2026, the website and app adopted a different way of distributing posts: rippling out. This was announced on Central on 21 June 2026: https://discourse.ilovefreegle.org/t/rippling-out/9808

In short, posts become visible to people gradually, starting with those closest and spreading outwards over time. Broadly, there are outward steps at: 1h, 3h, 6h, 12h, 24h, 48h, 72h, 120h (5 days), and 168h (7 days), which happen between 06:00 and 23:00. A post made late evening does its overnight steps at 6am.

The guide for moderators is below. The guide for Members is at Rippling Out - Members.

For the technical detail of how the algorithm works (and the approaches that were rejected), see [[1]]

Rippling out: a guide for moderators

The one big "please don't"

Don't reject a post just because it looks "out of area". With rippling out, a post that started on a neighbouring community can appear on your community even if the poster lives some distance away (by default it arrives already approved - see below). That's expected and correct: the system is deliberately spreading a post that hasn't been collected locally, so your members get a chance at it.

Only reject it for the usual reasons - spam, breaks the rules, wrong sort of thing, and so on. "They're not from round here" is no longer a reason to reject.

The same applies to replies

If someone replies to a post from outside what you think of as your area, that's the system working as intended. Don't ban or block a member simply because they replied to a post you think is out of their area.

How posters appear in your community

When a post ripples into your community, the poster is automatically joined as a full Member/Approved. That is what lets the post live on your community and lets you moderate it.

It is not a relationship with your community, though, and it does not make the poster yours to write to. They posted somewhere else and may never have heard of you - see Talking to the poster below.

What this means in practice:

• You moderate their post exactly as you would any other: approve it, or take it off your community.
• The poster appears in your member list, but with no Chat button and no standard messages that only write to a member, because there is no conversation for you to start. If they write to you first, that chat works as normal.
• You can still take them off your community or ban them, and that happens as usual. It is done quietly: they never joined you, so a message about it would be as confusing as one about their post.
• Your community's member count may include rippled members.
• The join is recorded as 'Rippled' in the membership log, so you can distinguish it from a manual or organic join if you need to.
• If they later join your community themselves, or move house into your area, the membership becomes an ordinary one and none of the above applies any more.

Talking to the poster

Anything we send a poster about their post comes from the community they posted it on. If a post only reached you by rippling, your moderation of it is silent to them: taking it off your community removes it here and tells them nothing, because it is still live where they put it.

So on a rippled-in post you will not see Blank Reply, or the standard messages whose only job is to write to the poster. Approving it and taking it off your community are still yours to do. This holds however you remove it - the Reject button, a standard message that rejects, or a standard message that deletes.

Posts arriving from other communities

Some posts on your community will have started on another community and rippled into yours. You'll see a small notice on the post making this clear ("This post has rippled in from a neighbouring community").

A post only ripples after it's already been approved on the community where it started, so it's already been vetted - we don't make it sit through a full review again. With default settings, it's approved on your community straight away, appearing among your approved posts with the rippled-in notice, not in your pending list. You can still reject it for the usual reasons (spam, breaks the rules, wrong sort of thing) - see "Rejecting a rippled-in post" below.

(If your instance is configured with a mod-veto window - RIPPLE_RIPPLED_IN_PENDING_HOURS set above zero - a rippled-in post instead waits in your pending list for that many hours, and auto-approves if nobody rejects it first. Either way, "they're not from round here" is never a reason to reject.)

A reach/map view on posts

On posts in your moderation screens there is a "View rippling reach" button (with a map-marker icon) that shows you on a map the area a post is currently visible in. This is useful for checking how far a post has spread or why it turned up on your list.

The blue area is where the post has actually rippled out to, read from the engine rather than modelled from the schedule. That matters because the two can differ: if the reach was frozen (for example the origin copy went back to Pending) a warning above the map says so, and the reach can also be trimmed where members have left a community or capped by the poster's own distance preference. A post that has not rippled out yet says so instead of drawing an area.

A post in a very rural spot may show one to three narrow spurs reaching out further than the main area, towards a nearby town. See "Reaching a town from a very rural spot" below.

Any moderator can open this, not just moderators of the communities the post is on - since rippling is what carries posts beyond their original community, the person wondering how far one travelled is often not a mod of where it started.

A reminder when you edit a shared post

If you edit a post that is on more than one community, you will see a warning:

This edit will apply to the post on all N groups it appears on

(N is the actual number of communities the post is on.) Edit as normal - just be aware your change is seen everywhere the post appears.

Held replies in Chat Review

Sometimes a reply is held because the post has not yet rippled out to where that member is. This now applies to replies made on the website and app as well as by email or TrashNothing - wherever a member replies from outside the post's current reach, the reply is accepted and held rather than turned away. Chat Review shows you it is held because of rippling (not because you chose to hold it).

You do not need to do anything - the reply releases itself. It goes either when the post ripples out far enough to cover that member, or when its own due time comes round, whichever is sooner. If the reach stops growing before either, every reply still waiting is let through rather than stranded.

The due time is worked out from how far the member is past the edge of the post's current reach - not from how far they are from the item: roughly a quarter of an hour plus a few minutes per mile beyond the boundary, capped at three hours. Someone barely outside the line is treated as the near-miss they are, whether the item itself is two miles away or twenty. In practice a held reply now lands in well under an hour on average, and none waits longer than three.

That is a recent change, so older holds you may still be looking at took far longer - before every hold carried a due time, they waited for the reach itself, which averaged over a day with a tail running into weeks. If a member asks why their reply went unanswered for two days in early August 2026 or before, "it was held by rippling" is a real and likely answer.

A hold can also end without the reply ever being delivered: if the item is taken while the reply is held, the reply is dropped and the replier is told the item has gone. The owner never sees it. This is now rare, because the wait is short enough that the item is usually still there, but it is what the third row below means.

Chat Review tells you which of these happened, and how long it took:

• Held: rippling out (with how long it has been waiting) Still waiting. It will go out on its own.
• Held as too far for: (with how long it was held) It did arrive, but only after that delay, because the sender was outside the post's reach when they replied. This is what to look for when someone reports a reply that seemed to be ignored - the delay is on our side, not theirs.
• Never reached the recipient The item was taken by someone else while the reply was held, so the owner never saw it.

That last one matters for tone: neither person did anything wrong, and the replier may be upset with the owner for "ignoring" them. It is worth saying plainly that our system held the message.

The wait exists to give closer people a head start, not to hold anybody back indefinitely - which matters, because most held repliers live somewhere the post would never have reached on its own.

The member who sent it sees their own message marked as "waiting to send"; the owner is not shown it until it is released.

Members' Nearby feed is ordered by relevance, with their own distance preference

The "Nearby" browse feed no longer just shows the newest post first. Posts a member has not seen yet are shown ahead of ones they have already seen, and within each of those two groups, posts are ordered by a relevance score that balances how close a post is, how fresh it is, and how much interest it has already had (views and replies) - the same kind of scoring already used to order the rippling digest email. This changes the order a member's own browse page shows posts in; it does not change what rippling approves, joins, or who a post reaches.

Members also have a distance slider marked "Nearer" and "Further" with no numbers shown, in two places:

• their browse filters, and *(new) their Settings, under a "Feed" section above Email Settings.

It is a personal preference each member sets for themselves - by default it is left at "Further" (no extra limit beyond their normal rippling reach), and moving it towards "Nearer" narrows how far away posts can be.

Post browsing uses realistic travel times to calculate search areas rather than applying rigid mile limits.

Importantly, this preference now applies in three ways:

• What they see when browsing - moving it "Nearer" hides posts from further away.
• The posts we email them (their daily digest and immediate emails) - the same narrowing.
• How far away other people see their own posts (new). Setting it "Nearer" also caps who their own offers and wanteds reach: someone far away won't see the post in their Nearby feed or be emailed about it, even though rippling had carried it that far. Left at "Further" (the default), there is no such cap and the post reaches as far as rippling takes it.

Members who want those to differ can now say so. Under the slider there is a Set separately link, which splits it into two: "Posts I see" and "Who sees my posts". Until they use it the two move together exactly as before, so nothing changes for the great majority. The second slider can go further than the first - a member may reasonably want to browse only their own town while still letting their giveaways travel as far as rippling will carry them.

It still has no effect on the rippling engine itself (what it approves or joins, or how far it carries a post) or on moderation, and their choice is remembered between visits.

The third one only applies when the member moved the slider themselves. This catches people out, so it is worth being clear about:

What they see and are emailed: How far their own posts go

• Member moved the slider: limited by their choice limited by their choice
• Member never touched it: limited by the starting position Freegle works out for them not limited

The starting position is Freegle's reading of the member's area - how spread out freeglers are around their postcode - not something the member has told us about themselves. So we use it to decide what is worth putting in front of them, but not to hold their own offers back. If we did, a member in a busy town would find their posts stopping a few miles out simply because they have a lot of neighbours, which would mean fewer things getting reused and would help nobody.

So if a member asks "why do people further away see my post when I only see nearby ones?", the answer is that they have never set the slider: Freegle narrowed what it shows them, and left their giving alone. If they would rather their posts stayed local too, moving the slider to "Nearer" does exactly that, in both directions.

A practical consequence worth knowing: a rippled-in post is shown to the members of your community who are closest to the poster, whose own distance preference reaches that far, and whom the poster's own distance preference reaches - not necessarily everyone. If a member says a post "isn't showing for them", either their own slider or the poster's slider being set to "Nearer" is a likely reason.

Reaching a town from a very rural spot

Rippling normally grows a post outwards in every direction at once, up to a limit on how far someone could reasonably travel. That works badly for a genuinely remote poster: the circle fills up with empty countryside long before it touches anywhere many people live. Measured on a real case, a post from Hawes in the Yorkshire Dales could be seen by about 430 members at the maximum, while Kendal - the nearest town, and the one people there actually drive to - sat just outside the limit at about 47 minutes.

So for posts whose whole reachable audience is small, the ripple now also looks a little further out for a genuine cluster of members - a town - and extends towards up to three of them as narrow spurs, rather than pushing the whole circle outwards over more empty ground. In that Hawes example, taking in Kendal roughly doubles the number of people who can see the post.

Deliberately clusters, not "the nearest community centre": a community covering two towns has its middle in the fields between them, so aiming there would reach neither.

Members inside one of those spurs are treated exactly as everyone else the post has reached. They see it on Browse and in search, they are told about it in digests, emails and phone notifications, and they can reply. There is no separate category of member who can see a post but is never told about it, or who is told about a post they then cannot reply to.

When a poster leaves your community

If a poster leaves your community (or is removed), their rippled-in post is pulled from your community automatically. The post continues to appear on all other communities where it was approved. The poster isn't re-added to your community, even if the post carries on rippling elsewhere.

Email settings for rippled members

For your awareness, when a poster is auto-joined to a community via rippling, their email settings for that community are set as follows:

• Immediate email - downgraded to daily digest
• Daily digest or no emails - preserved exactly as-is
• Community events and volunteering - copied from their home community settings (no extra emails)

The poster receives one bundled intro email explaining all this, rather than a separate welcome email from each community they've been joined to.

Because rippling moves more members onto the daily digest and joins them to more communities, those digests can gather posts from several communities at once. The daily "What's New" email therefore lists up to around 65 posts, to avoid being clipped by email providers like Gmail. If there are more, it shows the first batch with a link to browse the rest, and the subject line simply says "What's New" instead of a post count.

Repost reminders and chase-ups happen once per item

Freegle reminds a poster shortly before it auto-reposts their item ("Will Repost: ...") and, once reposting is exhausted, chases them up to ask what happened ("What happened to: ..."). Under rippling a single item can be live on several communities at once, but the poster still gets one reminder and one chase-up per cycle - not one per community. Whatever they do in response (mark it taken, withdraw it, or promise it) applies to the item everywhere it has rippled, so one email is enough to settle it.

Behind the scenes the item is still reposted on each community independently, so it stays near the top of every local browse list - that part is invisible to the poster and costs them no extra email.

An auto-repost does not start the ripple again

A repost does not send the item rippling out afresh from its home community. The ripple runs on its own clock, fixed when the item first entered rippling, and a repost neither resets that clock nor puts the item back through the process. An item that has already rippled keeps the reach it earned: the communities it reached still have their copy, and the repost by itself neither adds new ones nor takes any away.

So to answer the obvious question: a reposted item effectively starts rippled. It does not crawl outwards again from scratch each time.

What the repost does do is lift the item back to the top of that community's browse list. Reposting runs per community, on each community's own repost interval, so a rippled item is kept fresh in each place independently. It does not bounce to the top everywhere at once: two communities with different repost settings will repost the same item at different times, and each one's copy is refreshed only when that community's own interval comes round.

The poster's mail is the exception to that. They still get one "Will Repost" reminder and one chase-up per cycle for the item as a whole, not one per community, as above.

An item that has not rippled yet is not shut out by having been reposted: rippling picks up items that have not yet started, and reposting does not disqualify one. Equally, a repost cannot force an item to ripple. If the community has rippling turned off, or the item already has enough separate people replying to it, it stays where it is. An item with plenty of interest already does not need spreading further, so it is left alone.

The spam flag and "seen on many groups"

Rippling joins a poster to multiple communities. This does not trigger the "seen on many groups" spam review flag - ripple-joins are excluded from that count, so a poster whose item has rippled widely won't be incorrectly flagged as a spammer.

Rejecting a rippled-in post

If you reject a post that rippled in from another community, two things happen:

• The poster isn't told. They posted to their own community, and the post is still visible there - a faraway community saying "not for us" isn't something they need to hear about.
• The post stops showing in your community's area, but carries on being visible everywhere else it's been approved. Your rejection simply trims your patch off the map.

A secondary rejection is low-stakes: it quietly removes the post from your area, and nobody is upset. Use it if a post genuinely isn't suitable locally - but not simply because the poster is from out of area.

Rejecting or removing a post on its home community

This is different from a secondary rejection above. When a post is rejected, deleted or withdrawn on the community it was originally posted to (its home community), it's no longer a live offer anywhere, so:

• It's pulled from every community it had rippled into, automatically. You don't have to chase it around neighbouring communities - removing it at home cleans it up everywhere it had spread.
• It stops spreading. Its rippling is halted, so it won't appear on any further communities.

This is exactly what you want when you catch spam or a rule-breaking post on its home community: dealing with it once removes it everywhere, instead of leaving live copies on neighbouring communities it had already reached.

The clean-up happens on the next rippling run (within about a minute), not the instant you click - so a rippled copy may linger very briefly before it disappears.

(Back to Pending now works differently from Delete/Reject: it keeps each community's copy for per-group review and does not re-ripple on re-approval - see Reporting a post below.)

While a post is in that frozen state we stop advertising it: it is not included in daily digests, immediate emails or phone notifications, because it is under review and we should not be pushing something we may be about to reject. It also stays out of the Nearby feed and search. Members who are outside the area it had reached when it froze are still told it has not reached them yet, and a reply from one of them is still held, exactly as it would be on a post that is simply still spreading - freezing changes what we send out, not who the post had actually got to.

The poster is also removed from any community they had been auto-joined to only to carry that post (i.e. where they have no other posts). They keep their home community and any community where they have other activity, and - because this is a tidy-up rather than them choosing to leave - a later post of theirs can still ripple into those communities normally.

Reporting a post

There are two different actions here, on two different sites, and it helps to keep them straight:

• Reporting is a Freegle-site (FD) action - the Report this post link members (and you) use while browsing the Freegle website.
• Approve / Reject / Back to Pending are ModTools (MT) actions - what you do to a post in your moderation queue.

Reporting now has teeth: enough member reports, or a single moderator's report, pull the post back into your Pending queue in ModTools for review, rather than only sending a message to the volunteers.

When members report (on the Freegle site)

A member's report is a review vote. Reports made with Report this post on the Freegle site and the in-app "Does this look OK?" microvolunteering checks count the same way - they are both members saying "something's not right" about a post.

When two different members flag the same post, it is moved back to Pending on every community it is on - its home community and every community it had rippled into. From that point:

• The post is hidden from members and stops rippling any further while it is under review.
• The copies are not deleted - each community keeps its own copy in its Pending queue.
• Each community's moderators decide for themselves whether to approve or reject their own copy. One community's decision does not affect another's.

Two members flagging a post is treated as "worth a look everywhere", not "definitely bad". It simply puts the post in front of every affected community's moderators - you still make the call.

When you (a moderator) report (also on the Freegle site)

When you use Report this post on the Freegle site, the report dialog shows every community the post is on and lets you choose which ones to report it on - with an All communities option to select them all at once.

Be clear about what that choice does, because it is narrower than it looks: clear about what that choice does, because it is narrower than it looks:

• The tick boxes control who gets told. Each community you pick gets a message to its mod team, so the right people see your reasons.
• The pend is always everywhere. Whichever communities you tick, your report moves the post to Pending on every community it is on - its home community and every rippled copy. Your moderator judgement counts on its own, with no quorum needed, and it is not scoped to the communities you picked.
• Scoping the pend to just the reported community was tried and did not work: the other copies stayed live in browse and went out in the next digest, so a post one moderator had judged bad was still circulating everywhere else.
• So a moderator's report has the same reach as Back to Pending in ModTools. Each community's moderators then decide their own copy, and a copy that is fine locally is simply approved again.

If a post is fine for one community but not another, do not use Report to trim it - reject your own community's copy instead (the low-stakes secondary rejection described above). That removes it from your area and leaves every other community's copy live.

Approving or rejecting a reported post (in ModTools)

Once a post is Pending from a report, you handle your community's copy in ModTools exactly as normal:

• Approve puts it back live on your community. Members are not emailed again - it simply reappears; there are no duplicate "new post" notifications, and it does not re-ripple out from scratch.
• Reject removes it from your community only (the usual low-stakes secondary rejection; the poster is not told). Other communities are unaffected.

A post being held (shown as "held by" a moderator) is per community, on that community's own Pending copy, and only applies while the copy is Pending. It is independent: a copy being held on one community has no effect on the same post's copy on any other community. You approve or reject your own community's copy regardless of whether another community has held, approved, or rejected theirs.

Because each community's copy is independent and stays put, a reported post cannot flip-flop: one community approving it will never re-create a copy on a community that has rejected it.

Moving a post back to pending in ModTools

You don't have to go via the Freegle site at all. Moving a post from Approved back to Pending in ModTools - the ordinary moderation action - now does the same thing as a report: it pulls the post to Pending on every community it is on (its home community and every rippled copy), not just yours.

So one moderator catching a problem in ModTools takes the post off the board everywhere for review, instead of leaving live copies stranded on the neighbouring communities you cannot see. As with a report, the copies are kept (not deleted), each community approves or rejects its own, and re-approving brings a copy back without re-notifying members or re-rippling from scratch.

Trash Nothing posts

TrashNothing posts ripple like any other post, with one exception that exists to stop members seeing the same item twice. TrashNothing has historically cross-posted an item to several Freegle communities itself, so one item can exist as more than one Freegle post. While an item exists as several copies, none of them ripples out into new communities - otherwise each copy would carry the same item further on its own account. Once those copies have been merged into a single post, it ripples normally. A TrashNothing item posted to one community ripples straight away, exactly like a member's post.

TrashNothing ingestion is moving to taking a single post per item, which will make this exception rarer and rarer. On your own community, TrashNothing posts behave exactly as they always have, and replies to them follow the same reach rules as everything else.

What to expect from members

Members can now reply to any post they can see, even one that has not yet rippled out to their area. If they do, we hold the reply and deliver it automatically once the post reaches them - so instead of "why can't I reply?", a member might ask why their reply hasn't been answered yet, or notice their message marked "waiting to send". The answer is reassuring:

Your reply has been saved. The post just hasn't quite reached your area yet, so we're holding your message and will pass it to the owner the moment it does - you do not need to do anything.

Worth knowing: on their default Nearby view, a member only ever sees posts that have already reached them, so a held reply usually only happens if they have switched to "All my communities" or otherwise widened their view. What they normally see is delivered straight away.

Members may also ask about the order posts appear in, or about the new distance slider in the filters - see "Members' Nearby feed is ordered by relevance" above for the mechanism.

Members on immediate emails may also notice they get an alert when a post that started on a neighbouring community ripples close enough to reach them. That is expected: they get one immediate alert per such post, the moment it reaches their area - exactly as they would for a post made directly on the community. If they would rather not, they can switch that community to daily digest in Settings.

Some members may also ask why they have been joined to communities they did not sign up for. The answer is that their post has been travelling to reach more people, and the membership is what makes replies and contact work properly. They can leave any of those communities in Settings, which will remove their post from that community.

The two habits to build

• Don't reject a post just for being out of area - that's the system working.
• Don't ban a member just for replying from out of area - same reason.

Everything else about your day-to-day moderation routine stays the same.

Reference: what the 'Rippled' log entry means

Any join created by rippling out is written to the membership log as a Group / Joined entry whose text is Rippled (logs.text = 'Rippled', with no acting user). This is purely for provenance and audit - you do not need to do anything with it. It lets us distinguish ripple-joins from manual or organic joins, and it is used internally to suppress the per-group welcome email (replaced by a single bundled intro) and to exclude these joins from the "seen on many groups" spam check.

Links

• ModTools