How to tell it without telling on yourself.

Your identity isn’t the story — what happened is. The details below are the ones that most often turn an anonymous story into an identifiable one. Leave them out, or blur them.

• Your name, your handle, your employer, your school, your team.
• Names of other people, even first names, even people you're angry with.
• Wallet addresses, transaction hashes, account numbers, order IDs, invoice numbers.
• Exact dates. A month and a year is plenty.
• Your city or town. We ask for a broad region for exactly this reason.
• Screenshots described in enough detail to be found and matched.
• Anything so specific that one person reading it would know it was you.

If you wouldn’t want it read aloud in a room that contains one specific person, take it out before you send it.

Someone else’s story isn’t yours to file. You can write about what happened to you — including what someone did to you — but you can’t use BAGFILES to identify, accuse, or expose a person or a company.

• No naming individuals, projects, funds or firms in an accusation.
• No stories that exist mainly to damage a specific named person.
• No private information about anyone, including people who wronged you.

The best files are specific, honest, and finished — they take you somewhere, even if that somewhere is bleak. You don’t need to be a writer. You need to be straight.

• What happened, in order.
• What you expected at the time — not what you know now.
• What it actually cost, including the things that weren't money.
• The detail you'd normally leave out. That's usually the story.
• What you'd do differently. Or that you wouldn't. Both are honest answers.

Funny is welcome. Embarrassing is welcome. Wins are as welcome as losses — some of the hardest stories to tell are the ones that worked.

• Anything identifying, as above.
• Promotion — for a token, a group, a service, a course, a signal channel, or yourself.
• Financial advice, calls, or anything shaped like a recommendation.
• Instructions for fraud, laundering, market manipulation or anything else illegal.
• Hate, harassment, or content sexualising anyone.
• Fiction presented as something that happened. Write elsewhere.
• Stories about a person who could be identified and hasn't chosen to be here.
• Anything suggesting immediate danger to you or someone else — please contact local emergency or crisis services rather than filing it here.

• At least 100 characters — enough to be a story rather than a sentence.
• Up to 20,000 characters. Long is fine. Most of the best files are long.
• We may edit for clarity, grammar, length, formatting or safety.
• We will not add events, opinions, or details you didn't write.
• If an edit would change what the story means, we'd rather not publish it.

You get a submission ID. Nothing publishes automatically — every story waits for a person to read it. You can check the status of yours at any time on the status page.

Submitting is not a guarantee of publication, and we can’t give individual feedback on stories we don’t publish. If your story was turned down, you’re welcome to send a version with the identifying parts removed.

If a published file needs to come down — including if it’s yours and you’ve changed your mind — use the take-down form on the status page. Bring your submission ID or the BF number.

We don’t ask for your name, email, phone number or social account, and there is nowhere in the database to put one. What we do and don’t retain is set out in full in the privacy policy, including the parts we don’t control.

The single biggest risk to your anonymity is not our infrastructure. It is the story itself. Read section 01 again.