- by PetsFindly
- 2 min read
On this page
Publishing an animal should not mean publishing your phone number. On PetsFindly it does not, and the mechanism is worth understanding before you list.
What a public page contains
What a signed-out visitor can see is defined in one place in our codebase, and it is deliberately short: the animal, the breed, the intent, the place, the photographs. Your email address and your phone number are not in that definition. There is no request that returns them to a stranger.
Conversation before contact
The normal path is a message. A seeker writes to you through the site, in a thread tied to the listing, and you answer or you do not. The other side does not learn how to reach you off the platform by writing to you.
Phone verification stands in front of that door on both sides. Somebody who has not passed it cannot start a conversation, which is the cheapest filter we have against a message nobody meant to send.
Direct Connect, and what it costs
The one route to your email address and phone number is a credit called Direct Connect. A member who wants them spends one, and the reveal happens - we will not tell you it waits for your approval, because it does not.
What the credit buys is narrow and it is recorded. One spend covers one lister, once: coming back to the same person later costs nothing more, and the ledger entry naming who spent what on whom does not go away. Nobody browses contact details in bulk, and nobody reaches you without having paid to.
The locked inbox
On a free account you can see that somebody wrote to you and who they are, but not read the message until you upgrade. That is the paywall, and we would rather describe it than have you discover it. What is never locked is a reply to a conversation you started yourself: the answer to your own question is always readable.
