The Charter — Letters from Cairns Locals

Letters from Cairns Locals is a place where love for Cairns is brought and shared.
In form, it is an unofficial class newsletter — anyone may come and go.
It is written for no advertiser and no ranking, but as a gift to whoever comes next.
What appears here are letters, not reviews. No scores, no contests — each piece stands only on its writer's name and experience.

Travellers are not the only ones who write. When someone proud of their own shop or craft says "this is what my place is about", that is the same honest love as someone describing a waterfall — and this paper welcomes it.
What this charter shuts out is not business. It is influence bought with money.

Only one currency works here — love: for a place, for a craft, for someone else.
A letter written with love crosses the language barrier on the wings of translation. Passion breaks the language barrier. That is what this paper believes.

Every piece here is a record of one person's experience (a visit note — a letter), not a rating of a shop or place.
Scores, stars and rankings — any machine that turns reactions into a hierarchy — will never be introduced.

Hearts and check-ins are applause and footprints, passed from one person to another — not a rating device. They coexist with this rule only so long as their numbers are never aggregated into "better or worse", and never move ordering or exposure (Article 4).

And letters have manners: you may write about a bad experience — but take the trouble to find the words.
The rule here is not "don't say it" but "choose how you say it". Hurling raw feelings is not a letter. Refusing to choose a considerate telling is laziness toward the reader and toward this place.

Decisions to publish, withhold or correct are never bent by the editor's personal relationships or interests.
Even when a hard letter arrives about a friend's shop, it is not removed for any reason outside the procedure in Article 9.

(One exception is all it takes to become "the place where complaining gets things deleted" — and honest words lose their worth. This article is also the editor's shield: "the charter says so.")

Advertising, promotion, featured slots and exposure are for sale to no one, at any price — including the editor's own ventures.
Instead, shop owners may write a welcome letter — a letter from the shop, signed openly — telling the love of their craft in their own voice.

Welcome letters may be written only by shops that have commissioned their signboard stamp from the village artist. If you fish in someone's pond, pay the honest entry fee — but the fee buys entry and nothing else. Not one dollar moves treatment, ordering or exposure, and publication remains by the editor's invitation and approval. The stamp fee goes to the artist (the paper takes nothing).

One more thing that isn't advertising: a factual credit for whoever builds the paper's own machinery (the artisan who makes the stamps, for instance). Just a name and what they do — the same standard as the editor's own factual self-introduction in Article 11. No sales pitch, no direct contact details, no portfolio boasting — this is gratitude for a contribution, not bought exposure (no money changes hands here; the stamp fee itself already went to the artist under Article 7).

The line between selling and pride: buying editorial treatment or exposure is advertising. Signing your name, commissioning your signboard, and writing in your own words is a letter.

Ordering, freshness and prominence never move with activity, likes or money.
The only thing that floats is "letters you haven't opened yet" — personal, and impossible to compete over.

(The moment "the top" becomes a prize, the reason to write shifts from giving to being seen — and the inflating begins.)

This paper is not all seriousness. Play is welcome — but we choose the kind:

• Play we do: collecting, growing, discovering — collecting stamps, growing your companion creature, finding letters you haven't opened. All personal, none comparable
• Competition only as festival — time-boxed events are welcome if, when they end, nothing remains but the memento. We hold sports day. We never post the grades.
• Play we don't do: standing competition and urgency — leaderboards, pecking orders, "only X hours left"
• Festival prizes go no further than adornments and honours (never exposure, ordering or influence)
• Limited editions work like commemorative stamps — seasonal designs may be limited, but missing one costs zero function. What's sold is "we spent this season together", never the fear of missing out
• Things unlock by growing, not by being stripped away — we never build the experience of losing what you could do yesterday

• Conversations stay inside the membership (the one-way mirror). Nothing leaks out
• No aggregation of anyone else's footsteps (your own records, gathered for you, are yours)
• The right to write under a pen name is protected. Real names and faces are never required — or hinted at

(The greatest risk in a small expat community is prying and pecking order. We prevent it with structure — warnings alone never work.)

• What you can buy: your own adornments and tools (stamp avatars, envelope designs, a personal phrasebook)
• What you cannot buy: influence of any kind (advertising, ordering, exposure, editorial judgement, a louder voice)
• Free forever — the emotional core: writing, reading, chatting, translation, creature avatars
• No tips, no donations, no supporter tiers (no "but I paid you" debts — every purchase completes the moment it's made)
• No site currency, no stored balance (pay per item only)
• Stamp (portrait avatar) revenue goes 100% to the artist. The paper takes nothing

* Adornments and tools go on sale from September 2026. Everything is free until then.

• Personal avatars form a gradient of disclosure that you control: free creature → creature-blend → portrait with companion → photograph. Your companion creature stays with you at every step
• Photographs are never raw uploads — the artisan works them into a stamp. No faces of other real people or characters
• Logos and trade names belong to welcome-letter (shop) accounts only — never mixed into personal avatars

(Maximum self-expression, minimum pressure to be identified. How much face to show is always your own dial.)

• Received via Contact → the editor verifies the facts → decides correct, partially remove, or keep → the process is recorded
• The standard is Article 1's manners: "it's negative" is never grounds for removal. The grounds are "the words weren't chosen with care" — raw venting, personal attacks, identifying individuals. Factual errors get corrected. Inconvenient honesty, carefully worded, stays
• Hard letters about real businesses publish immediately as ever (no pre-publication screening). This procedure handles what falls outside the manners
• Legal claims are recorded first, and acted on with professional advice where needed

• When editorship changes hands or becomes shared, the new editor takes office as an operator of this charter — not its rewriter
• Amendments require: a published proposal → notice where members can see it → agreement of the current editor(s)
• Articles 1 and 3, and Article 7's "what you cannot buy", are beyond amendment (wanting to change them means it's already a different site)

(Operating rules doesn't burn you out. Deciding them, endlessly, does.)

• The editor places no links or calls-to-action for their own ventures on this site — a factual self-introduction on the About page is the limit
• The editor "recommends" no shop of their own or of friends. If they write, they write as one member, with a signed letter

(An editor who becomes the first exception hands the next editor a permission slip. Article 3 crumbles from there.)