A short honest list beats a long invented one
Patrol is young, and this page is the inventory rather than the brochure. Everything below is in the product today. The second list is everything that is not — including a few things this page used to claim.
If you are weighing Patrol up for a residents' association, read both lists. The second one is the one that matters at the meeting.
What Patrol does
Placement you control
Your Eircode gives us the town; you tap the map to give us the road. Whatever you tap is rounded to about 100 metres before it is stored, so the database holds a stretch of street rather than a house — and no address is ever collected.
Local alerts within 2km
When a member posts, everyone within about 2km sees it, newest first, with the distance shown. Adjustable up to 5km for rural areas where 2km reaches nobody.
A structured report form
What happened, roughly where, roughly when, how serious. Written to produce a report a neighbour can act on, and to stop one that names or accuses a person.
Email confirmation before posting
You can read your area straight away, but posting requires a confirmed email address. It is what stops a throwaway account making one accusation and disappearing.
Content reporting on every alert
One tap, a reason, and it reaches a person who reads it. Posts that identify or accuse an individual are removed, and so are the accounts that keep making them.
An honest reading of your area
Your dashboard states how many neighbours are actually signed up near you, rather than showing an empty feed and leaving you to conclude the product is dead.
Invitations with attribution
A personal invite link for WhatsApp, SMS, email or copy-paste, so joins from your street are credited to you and you can see whether asking worked.
Installable on your phone
Patrol works in any browser and installs to the home screen on iPhone and Android, where it behaves like an app. There is also an Android app on Google Play.
Self-service account deletion
Delete your account and everything you posted from your own dashboard, without emailing anybody and without being talked out of it.
What Patrol does not do yet
Written out in full, because you will find out eventually and it is better that you find out here.
Photo attachments on reports
The report form is text only today. Photos bring an identification problem with them — a photo of a person is exactly what the house rules forbid — so this needs designing rather than adding.
Blocking or muting a member
Not in the product. Reporting a post reaches us, and abuse toward a member is grounds for removing the account that sent it, but you cannot mute somebody yourself.
Coordinator and admin tools
No approval queue, no pinning, no moderation panel for a residents’ association. Content reports come to Patrol and we act on them.
Lost & found, events, local offers
These appear as tabs in the dashboard marked as coming, and that is all they are. Nothing behind them is built.
Alert analytics or area reports
No trends, no history charts, no monthly summary. There is also almost no data yet to put in one.
An iOS app
There is no iPhone app. iPhone users add the web app to the home screen, which is genuinely close — but it is not the App Store.
Push notifications to your phone
Alerts reach you by email today. Web push exists in the codebase but is not something we will claim as working until it reliably is.
The list gets longer when areas get busier
Most of what is missing is missing because almost no area has enough members to need it yet. Density comes first; the rest follows from it.