This page, and seven new guides
Two things this week. The first is the page you are reading. Until now the only record of what we changed was a commit history nobody outside the team could see, which is a strange way to run something people trust with their personal life. From here on, every release that affects what you see, who can reach you or what we store gets written up in plain language — including the parts that went wrong, because those are usually the more useful half.
What changed
A public changelog
Every release, dated, with what changed and why. Subscribe by RSS if you would rather not check.
Seven new guides
Asking someone out at your parish, converting for marriage, living together before marriage, mental health, name days, Holy Week, and marrying across jurisdictions.
102 guides in total
All free, all public, none of them behind a sign-in wall, and every one carries the date it was last reviewed.
Why bother writing any of this down
Because a dating app knows an uncomfortable amount about you, and the honest response to that is to be legible about what it does. Most apps handle this with a version number and “bug fixes and performance improvements”, which tells you nothing and is meant to.
The bigger reason is that a lot of our releases are decisions rather than features. Capping Discover at fifteen profiles a day, refusing to attach anything to donations, not building a country filter — those are choices with reasons behind them, and the reasons are more interesting than the changes. If you disagree with one, you now have something specific to disagree with.
We are also going to write up the failures. The verification outage that ran for two days, the email templates that sent members links to a developer’s laptop, the button in Discover that kept passing the same person while the counter advanced. Those are in the archive already. An update log with no mistakes in it is a marketing page wearing a disguise.
The seven new guides
The library exists because the honest answer to most Orthodox dating questions is longer than an app can hold, and because the answers that are online tend to be either generic dating advice with a cross on it or a forum argument from 2009. These seven close gaps we kept hitting.
- How to ask someone out at your Orthodox parish — the timing, the wording, and what you owe the community if the answer is no.
- Converting to Orthodoxy for marriage — whether it is actually required for the wedding, and how to tell a real decision from a favour.
- Living together before an Orthodox marriage — the teaching, the evidence, and what to do if you already are.
- Mental health and Orthodox dating — when to disclose a diagnosis, and why treatment is not a failure of faith.
- Orthodox name days and patron saints — how to find someone’s, what to say in each tradition, and what the Serbian Slava actually is.
- Holy Week and Pascha as a couple — the week service by service, and whose parish you spend it in.
- Marrying across Orthodox jurisdictions — whose church, whose priest, whose paperwork, and the decision that matters more than the wedding.
How the library works
Every guide carries the date it was last reviewed, and that date is real rather than refreshed automatically to look current. Where a claim is factual — a canon, a fasting rule, a crime statistic — there is a source link, and we check those links rather than assuming they still work.
Where practice varies by jurisdiction or by parish, the guide says so instead of presenting one diocese’s rule as the mind of the Church. That is the single most common failure in Orthodox writing online and it is the one we are most careful about.
And none of it is gated. No account, no email address, no paywall. If something in there is useful to somebody who will never download this app, that is a perfectly good outcome.
What we are looking at next
We are not going to publish a roadmap with dates on it, because we would miss them. What we will say is where the attention currently is: making the parish directory correctable by the parishes themselves, a public page for the success stories people have started sending, and better answers for members in places where the local Orthodox population is genuinely thin.
If you want something specific, the feedback board is the place. It is public, other members vote on it, and we read all of it. The distance options in the most recent release came from one post there and shipped the same week, which is roughly the response time we would like to keep.
Try it