What Burwinkle is

Burwinkle is a place to tell funny, true stories about the people you work with, anonymously. It's a comedy site about office life, not a review site, a complaint desk, or a place to settle scores.

Rules for posting

By posting you agree to all of these. Stories that break them get removed, and repeat offenders get blocked.

• First names or roles only. "Greg in Ops" is fine. A last name, initials that identify someone, a photo, or a nickname everyone knows is not.
• No contact or personal details. No emails, phone numbers, addresses, social handles, license plates, or anything that could be used to find or reach someone.
• Keep it about work. What happened in a meeting, an email, a Slack thread, the office kitchen. Not someone's family, health, relationships, finances, immigration status, or anything they didn't bring to work.
• Keep it true. Exaggerate for laughs, sure. Don't invent things that didn't happen or claim someone did something illegal, unethical, or dangerous unless it's documented and public.
• No hate, no harassment. Nothing about a protected characteristic (race, religion, gender, sexuality, disability, age, and so on). No threats. No sexual content about coworkers. No posting the same person over and over.
• No confidential material. No trade secrets, customer data, internal documents, or anything under an NDA. Your employer's lawyers read the internet too.
• Adults only. You must be 18 or older to post or vote.

How takedowns work

• Send the request to [email protected] with a link or the story text and a sentence on why it should come down.
• We acknowledge within 2 business days and usually decide within 5.
• If you're the subject of the story, we remove it. You don't have to explain.
• If you're an employer, HR, or counsel, tell us what rule the story breaks or what claim you're making. We remove stories that break the rules above, are legally required to come down, or identify someone beyond a first name.
• If it's a legal notice (defamation claim, court order, subpoena, or a DMCA notice about copied content), send it to the same address with "Legal" in the subject line and your contact details. We may need to ask for more information.
• Removed stories are gone from the feed, the HOF, and company rankings. We keep a minimal internal record of what was removed and why.

We can't tell you who posted a story. We don't know either: there are no accounts, and the only thing we store is a random browser cookie. Where the law requires it and a valid legal process is served, we will provide what we have.

Moderation

Anyone can flag a story with the ⚑ button. Flagged stories go to a moderator, who may remove them without notice. We also remove stories on our own when we see a rule broken. We don't edit stories; we take them down or leave them up.

Privacy

• No accounts, no emails, no names. To keep your votes and stories tied to you, we set one random identifier in a cookie on your browser. Clearing it starts you over.
• We store the stories you post, your votes, any reports you send, and standard server logs (IP address, time, browser) for up to 30 days for security and abuse prevention.
• We don't sell data, run ad tracking, or share anything with employers.
• You can delete your own stories at any time from the Me tab. Deleting a story also deletes its votes.

The fine print

• Stories are written by users, not by Burwinkle. We don't endorse them and don't check them before they go live.
• You own what you write, and you give us a license to show it here and in rankings for as long as it's posted.
• We can change these terms, suspend the site, or block anyone who breaks the rules. Material changes get a notice on the site.
• The site is provided as is. Use it for a laugh, not as a source of truth about anyone.

Questions that aren't takedowns can go to the same address.