For forum owners and clubs

Write to partners@carbanter.com at any time: to ask a question, to set terms for your site, or to ask us to switch your site off.

How Banter works with your community

• Your member signs in on your own page. Banter shows your site's own sign-in page inside the app, with its address in view. The member signs in there, under your terms. Banter never sees, stores or sends their password, and their session stays on their phone. Banter never creates accounts or accepts your rules on a member's behalf.
• One member, reading at a human pace. Banter reads your site only for the signed-in member's own reading, from their own phone, when they open or refresh their feed or open a thread; never in the background. Requests go one at a time, two or three per refresh. A community is read again after 15 minutes, never sooner than 2 minutes, and after a refusal not for 30 minutes unless the member asks. Banter's server never contacts your site on a member's behalf.
• No crawling and no bulk copying. Banter reads the newest threads your site lists, and the threads a member opens. It does not crawl your site, collect your archive, or copy content in bulk.
• No content on Banter's server. What a member reads from your site is kept on their phone only. Banter's server stores no threads, posts or pictures from your site.
• No training on your content. Banter does not use your content to train any model, and does not sell or license it to anyone.
• Every post links back. Every thread shown in Banter carries your site's name and a link to the original on your site. Pictures are loaded only from your own site.
• Your rules and moderation apply. Members post under their own accounts on your site, under your rules, and your moderators keep full control. Nothing is posted without the member's own confirmation for each reply. Banter offers reply drafts only on communities whose rules allow posts written with such help.
• Your blocks are respected. If your site refuses a request, asks for a security check or asks to slow down, Banter stops reading it for that member and shows them your own page. Banter never solves, bypasses or disguises anything. Your site sees the phone's ordinary web engine, unchanged.
• You can switch Banter off. On request, we switch your site off from our server. It then receives no automated requests from Banter in any version of the app, including test versions, from the next time members' apps start. No app update is needed.

Summaries

When a member asks for a short summary of a thread ("Catch me up"), and only after they have agreed to it in the app, the text of that thread is sent from their phone through Banter's server to Anthropic, the AI service that writes the summary. Banter's server does not keep the text, and the summary is labelled "Summary by Banter". If you prefer that threads on your site are not summarized, tell us and we will turn summaries off for your site, from our server, while members keep reading as before.

Clubs and event organizers

Banter shows club events to members who own what you serve, whether cars, motorcycles, RVs, boats or aircraft, read from the calendar your site already publishes. A member's phone checks a calendar no more than every six hours. Banter shows only each event's title, date, time and place, with your name and a link to your own event page for details and registration. It does not copy your event descriptions or pictures. Clubs that ask for permission first are not shown until they give it.

If you would like your club's events in Banter, or would like them removed, write to us with the address of your calendar.

Publications and video channels

Banter shows headlines from the reader feeds some publications publish, for every kind it holds: the headline, the publication's name, the time and a link to the article on your site. Articles are never copied or summarized. Banter also shows the titles of new videos from some channels, read from the public feed YouTube publishes for every channel, with the channel's name, YouTube's own preview picture and a link that opens the video on YouTube; nothing plays or is stored inside Banter. To be added or removed, write to us.

Organizers of the big gatherings

For the large public events of each kind (bike weeks, rallies, fly-ins, boat and RV shows), Banter lists the title, the dates and the place as published on your own page, with your name and a link to it, and reads nothing else from your site. If a date is wrong, or you would rather not be listed, write to us and it is changed or removed in the next version of the app.

What you can ask of us

• Switch your site off in Banter, completely or for summaries only.
• Agree written terms for how Banter may show and link to your community.
• Record whether your rules allow posts written with help from software, so that Banter offers reply drafts only where you allow them.
• Correct how your community is named or described in Banter, or on the community connections page.
• Talk about a closer partnership, such as an official connection to your site or tools for your club.

Please include your name, your role, the sites you operate and what you would like. We reply from partners@carbanter.com.