A small journal should collect little information.

Newsletter information

Cross & Collect uses Buttondown to manage and deliver email subscriptions. When you subscribe, your email address and ordinary technical information associated with the signup are transmitted to Buttondown and processed under its privacy policy. Cross & Collect uses subscriber information only to administer and deliver the journal. It is not sold by Cross & Collect or used to create advertising profiles.

Consent and removal

Subscribing requires affirmative consent. Every journal email includes an unsubscribe link. You may also ask to be removed by writing to admin@crossandcollect.org.

Site operation

The hosting service may process ordinary technical information needed to deliver the site securely. Cross & Collect does not use third-party advertising trackers on its publication pages. Buttondown may process delivery and engagement information needed to operate the newsletter, subject to its privacy policy and the journal’s account settings.

Aggregate measurement

The journal records daily aggregate page counts, article-card clicks by placement, and broad internal-search outcomes in its own database. For published articles, it also counts when a page display reaches 50% or 90% of the article body and 30, 60, 120, or 300 seconds of foreground activity. Time pauses while the page is hidden or unfocused and after 60 seconds without interaction. An estimated engaged view combines 60 seconds of activity with reaching half the article body. These signals cannot establish that someone read, understood, or completed an essay.

Arrival information is reduced in the browser to a broad category, a domain from a fixed allowlist, and one of the campaign codes weekly-letter, essay-share, or reading-paths. Unknown external domains are grouped as other, and missing referrers remain direct or unknown. Full referrer URLs, URL queries, fragments, and unrecognized campaign values are not sent by this measurement code. The server validates the bounded fields again before adding them to daily counters.

This measurement uses no analytics cookies, visitor identifiers, session replay, or cross-page reader histories. The metrics database stores no IP addresses, user agents, raw search queries, keystrokes, or detailed interaction histories. A user agent and an authenticated editor identity may be checked transiently to exclude common bots and signed-in editors, without storing either in the metrics. Forthcoming articles and non-production preview hosts are excluded from enhanced measurements. Unrecognized automation, repeat visits, and unsigned editorial activity may still affect the counts, while blockers or failed measurement requests may cause undercounting.

Daily aggregate counters have no automatic expiry and remain in the journal's database unless the publisher deletes them. Earlier page counts are retained separately because they cannot be reconstructed as engagement or referral data. You may opt out for a tab by adding ?metrics=off to a journal URL; ?metrics=on clears that choice. When tab storage is available, only this opt-out flag is stored for the tab, not a reader identifier. If storage is unavailable, the opt-out lasts for the current page document and may need to be set again after a full navigation.

Editorial correspondence

Messages sent to the journal are used to respond to the sender and conduct editorial correspondence. Please do not send confidential pastoral, medical, legal, or operational information through the publication email address.