Your profile is yours
Onchain Truths
Links in your notifications stay home
Records behind the records
A note on events
Upcoming events
Last week we shared that there was a bug where any signed-in member could read another member's email, phone number, date of birth, and mailing address, and that the database itself would soon refuse to hand those over. We've since completed resolving this issue.
When you join SpiritDAO you fill in a profile. Some of it is meant for the community: your name, photo, bio, what you're working on, what you're looking for, your social links. Some of it is only there so the app can serve you: your email, phone, date of birth, and shipping address for marketplace orders. The app kept those two kinds of information apart on the screen but not underneath.
Now it does. Your private details are readable by one person, which is you. Everyone else, including other members, sees only the public profile. The members page, chat, forum, and profile cards look exactly as they did.
One deliberate exception: when you buy something in the marketplace that ships, the seller needs your address. The app hands it to the people fulfilling that specific order and no one else, and never your email.
SpiritDAO runs on two kinds of records. The blockchain holds the ones that matter most: who created a bounty, whose bid was accepted, how much sits in escrow, who holds which role. The database holds a working copy so pages load quickly and people can collaborate before anything is signed.
This week we went through every place the app acts on that working copy when money or authority is involved, and made it check the chain first.
Bounties. When a pod manager assigns a bounty or releases a payment, the app reads the bounty straight from the blockchain before asking anyone to sign. The bid being accepted must belong to the person being approved. The payment must go to the worker actually assigned on-chain, and it cannot exceed what is still in escrow. If anything does not match, the app stops and says why. The $SELF earned for completed work follows the same rule: credited only for bounties that exist on-chain, to the worker assigned there, approved by someone other than that worker.
Behind the scenes, each person can now change only the parts of a bounty their role actually touches. Bidders edit their own bids until reviewed. Managers approve bids and mark progress. Amounts and on-chain details are set once, then locked.
Events. Registering records only you, never someone else. For paid events, the server confirms your registration on-chain before it records a ticket. Only an event's organizers can check people in, and every check-in records who performed it. Anything a member sends marking themselves paid or checked in is overwritten with the correct values.
Pods. Deleting a pod is permanent, so it has always been meant to require agreement from several of the pod's leaders. That rule now lives in the database itself, not just on the screen. Each leader adds only their own approval, proposals expire after a week, and a pod cannot be removed until enough current leaders have signed off.
Notifications, both in the app and in the daily email digest, often carry a link back to the thing they're about. Those links are now required to point inside the app, enforced at every step: when a notification is created, when the email is built, and when your phone opens a push notification. A notification cannot send you anywhere else.
Members can also only send notifications as themselves. The "system" label is reserved for the app.
The last pass this week went through the working records that aren't money or votes but still shape what people see and trust.
Membership applications can only be filed by the person applying, and only a pod's leaders decide them. Vote counts are worked out from who actually voted.
Treasury history is written by pod leaders as themselves, and once a transaction is confirmed its record can't be edited.
Event badges, bid reviews, and approval records can only be written by the organizers, managers, or approvers they belong to.
Chat moderation belongs to the people who hold moderation in that pod's chat.
Forum access rules, meaning which tokens open which categories, can no longer be changed from the browser at all.
Survey answers are private again. Only the survey's results view shows them, the way it was always meant to.
We also tightened rules that were looser than their names suggested. One set labelled for system use only had actually let any signed-in member read and edit notifications and activity records. System records can now only be written by the system, and your personal settings, meaning notification preferences, online status, reading progress, and reports you file, can only be changed by you.
Tightening access surfaced a few features that had quietly stopped working after the earlier round of changes. Finishing onboarding now correctly records that you've joined. Proposal status on the Vote page loads again. Returning members signing in on a new device are recognised on the first screen.
Please register for an upcoming event in the app. The new registration path is live and correctly refuses anyone who isn't signed in, but the final step needs a real wallet to exercise, and our scripts can't do that part. If it fails, the error will show and we'll fix it.
More generally: if something stops working or looks wrong, tell us in the forum. Several of the fixes in the last three letters started with a member saying "this button does nothing."
We would rather tell you what the app enforces than what we meant it to.
We strongly recommend registering for events within the SpiritDAO app (Events section) at app.spiritdao.org, it's how we gauge attendance and shape the flow of each session. Links to each event may be found in-app.
Town Hall — Mon, Sept. 28th · 8:00 PM EST - A standing community gathering for conversation, questions, and shared presence.
First Contact — Wed, Sept. 30th · 8:00 PM EST - The official starting point for new members — a peer-to-peer orientation into how participation works.
Feedback Loops — Fri, Oct. 2nd · 8:00 PM EST - A live working session where the community helps shape the app. Bring your bugs, your questions, and your ideas.
SpiritDAO is 100% donor-funded. There are no subscriptions, no paywalls, no venture capital. Every community on this platform uses it for free and that's by design. Our runway is small, and every donation directly extends how long we can keep building. If this work matters to you, even a small contribution goes further than you'd think.
→ Donate at spiritdao.org/donate
SpiritDAO is a registered 501(c)(3). Your donation is tax-deductible. (EIN: 99-1308806)
The best way to get in touch is within our community: https://app.spiritdao.org
Or write to Ron Rivers: ron@spiritdao.org
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SpiritDAO is a registered 501(c)(3) EIN #99-1308806.
