A community organised around cigars

Publish a journal entry and it doesn't just sit in your own history — it becomes a review on that cigar's page, where anyone researching the same cigar can find it.

A review attached to a cigar stays put, next to every other review of that same cigar, so what people said about it accumulates in the one place somebody researching that cigar will actually look — however long after it was written.

Reviews are not read-only either: a review can be liked, and it carries its own comments, so a question about what somebody tasted gets answered under the review that raised it.

The feed is the other half. A post is a photo and a caption, and it can carry the cigar it is about, the drink alongside it, where you were — a lounge from the directory or a place in your own words — and the journal entry behind it, if there is one.

Posts are liked and commented on, comments can be replied to, a comment can carry its own photo, and comments can be liked in turn.

Typing # in a comment turns a cigar, a drink, a lounge or one of your own entries into a chip that links to it, so a conversation points at real things rather than describing them. Typing @ and a member's username tells them you did.

Logging a cigar can post it for you, so the feed reflects what people are actually smoking rather than only what they remembered to write up.

Alongside posts the feed carries what is happening anyway: entries people published, what they have added to their humidors, badges earned, members who have just joined. Two switches over it — everyone, or only the people you follow.

Beyond reviews, there's a forum built around threads and replies — a place to ask a question, work through a problem, or start a conversation that isn't tied to a specific cigar.

Threads sit in categories, carry photos, and can attach the cigar or the journal entry they are about. A thread can also be a poll, when the answer you want is a count rather than an argument.

Threads and replies are voted up or down, and each thread shows its replies and how many people have read it. Anything out of order can be flagged for a moderator. Threads and replies instead of an infinite scroll means a conversation stays findable — you can return to a thread days later and pick it back up, rather than losing it the moment it scrolls out of view.

You can follow other members and see their public activity — reviews, posts, comments. The point isn't follower counts or personalities; it's finding people whose ratings actually track with yours.

Someone who rates the same cigars the way you do is a better source of recommendations than someone with a big following. Following here is a way to build a shortlist of palates worth listening to, not an audience to perform for.

Groups give a smaller circle — the people you actually smoke with — a shared message board of their own, separate from the public forum and the public review pages. Messages can carry a photo or point at a cigar.

That's useful for the conversations that don't belong in front of everyone: planning a get-together, comparing notes within a regular group, or just talking without it becoming public content.

A group has a name, a description and a picture, and is public or private. Private ones are joined with an invite code the group hands out; public ones can be found from the group directory. Whoever made it is its admin.

Following someone puts their public activity in front of you, and the people surface is where you find members worth following in the first place.

When somebody comments on your post, replies to you, mentions you, tags one of your entries, likes a post, replies in your thread, starts a thread, follows you, messages you or you earn something, there is a notification for it — and a switch for each one, so you keep the ones you want and turn off the rest, by email, by push, or not at all. Anything you would rather say to one person goes in a direct message instead of the feed.

And if someone is the problem, block them. Blocked members are listed in one place and can be unblocked from it.

Activity earns XP — logging an entry, publishing it as a review, logging a brand you have not tried before, rating a pairing you have not recorded before — and the leaderboard ranks members on it. Two races run side by side: this month, which resets on the first, and all time, which never does. So a member who joined last week can win the month without having to out-log somebody who has been here two years.

The board can be narrowed to the people you follow, which turns a global ranking into a standing among people you actually know. It can also be pointed at any of the five Vaults or at your global total across all of them, since XP is kept per Vault as well as overall.

Your own standing sits above the table rather than making you hunt for your row, along with how far ahead the place above you is.

On top of the standing leaderboard, a Vault can run a competition over a fixed window — one at a time, with its start, its end and its full rules published before it opens.

There are two shapes. An XP race is what it sounds like: the most XP earned inside the window, scored by rules stated up front. A bingo card is the other — a five-by-five grid of squares to complete, each one a real thing to do rather than a number to grind: smoke a cigar with a particular wrapper, log a pairing, try a brand you have not tried. The centre square is free.

Standings update as the window runs, and finished competitions are kept in a Hall of Champions, so a win is a permanent part of a member's record rather than a banner that disappears when the month turns over.

Every journal entry has its own privacy setting, and entries start public — they become a review on that cigar's page. Switch one to private and it stops being a review: your note, your photo and your name are not shown to anyone. An account setting flips which way new entries start, if you would rather publish deliberately than by default.

The rating itself is the exception, and deliberately so. A private entry's score still counts toward that cigar's community average and toward the pairing aggregates, with nothing identifying attached. That is what keeps those numbers honest — they come from everyone who smoked the cigar, not only from the people who chose to write publicly about it.