Met someone here? There’s finally a place to tell us.
People have been emailing us photos from their betrothals and weddings for months, and until this week the only thing we could do was reply and say congratulations. Now there’s a real page for it. You send the story and the photos in one go, you choose exactly how your names appear, and nothing goes anywhere until you have read the words we plan to publish and said yes.
What changed
One form, story and photos together
Up to six photos travel with the story in a single submission, so nothing gets orphaned if you close the tab halfway through.
You choose the name on it
Full names, first names, initials or fully anonymous. Whatever you pick is stored on the submission, not remembered as a vague understanding.
Approval before publication, always
We write nothing up without sending it back to you first, and you can withdraw at any point by replying to the receipt.
Why consent is the actual feature
Publishing how two people met is not like publishing a product review. It names a marriage, it usually names a parish, and once it’s on the internet it stays findable by employers, families and everyone at coffee hour. We did not want to run that on a verbal “sure, go ahead”.
So permission is stored as data. The form records whether you agree to publication at all, and separately how you want to be named, and the server refuses a submission that is missing the first one. That’s deliberate. If the page is ever redesigned by someone who wasn’t in this conversation, the rule survives in the code rather than in somebody’s memory.
Three promises are printed on the page, in the receipt email and in the FAQ, and all three are true in the build: nothing is published until you approve the wording, you choose the name, and you can pull out by replying to the email.
What happens to your photos
Photos are uploaded into a private bucket that has no public read access at all. Nobody browsing the site can reach them, and there is no guessable URL, because the folder name is a fresh random identifier rather than anything derived from your email or your name.
Your browser also shrinks each photo before it leaves your phone. A 3,000 by 4,000 pixel camera file goes out at a fraction of its original size with its orientation preserved, which is the difference between a submission that completes on hotel Wi-Fi and one that times out. If that resizing fails for any reason, the original is sent instead rather than nothing at all.
When a story is reviewed, the reviewer sees the photos through short-lived signed links that expire on their own. There is no permanent public address to leak.
What we’re actually looking for
Not a testimonial. We don’t want “Orthodate changed my life”, because nobody talks like that and nobody believes it. We want the specific bit: the prompt you answered that made them message you, the first date that nearly didn’t happen, the drive to a parish neither of you had been to before.
The form asks where you are now, because it matters whether this is a third date or a tenth anniversary. Dating, engaged, married and good friends are all real outcomes, and the last one counts more than people expect. A church this spread out runs on friendships as much as on marriages.
- How you actually found each other on the app, in your own words.
- The first date, including the parts that went badly.
- Anything a stranger reading it could steal and use on their own next date.
- Where you are now: dating, engaged, married, or good friends.
And if you’re deleting your account because it worked
We changed one more thing in the same week. When somebody closes their Orthodate account and tells us it’s because they met someone here, the goodbye email no longer offers them a “start again” link. Obviously.
Instead it asks for the story. It’s the one moment where the question makes sense, and it turns out to be the single best time to ask it.
Try it