FWIW, when I signed up, I didn’t use my main email address. I have a yahoo address I use for signing up for random sh!t. Yeah, you do have to give your street address, but in the public profile, I don’t list my house number, only my street. I am not aware of having gotten junk spam or junk regular mail since I signed up several years ago.
I entered a neighbor’s address and an old email address I once used but haven’t touched in ages.
Thanks. I bookmarked that and will look at it when I get a chance.
I still think it’s odd that I wasn’t offered that by the site before having to fill in sign-in information.
Thanks, also. I do have a throwaway address, but I try to avoid associating it with my street address, even with the site itself but not the public profile. (Also, Straight Dope wouldn’t take it; I don’t know why. But I’d been lurking here long enough that I was OK with giving the Dope one of my in-regular-use addresses. It doesn’t seem possible to lurk on Next Door.)
If you have to list street in public profile I’d be easily findable even without number. There are only four houses on the road.
There’s an assumption that because your neighbors have a name and address, they or their relatives couldn’t possibly burgle you while you’ve noted you’re away. I live in a low-crime neighborhood that recently has had a home assault and a murder by people who also lived in the neighborhood. The house a few doors down has ever-circulating short-term renters. The group home has trash middens and constant comings and goings. I have both doctors and therapy clients in the neighborhood, and ethical obligations to constrain my interactions with the latter and their families. Our immediate neighbors know more about us, including our phone numbers and last names. I’d prefer that the neighbor with the Confederate flag and anti-diversity signs in the window not know my last name, and I’d rather not make it easy for him/them to find my house.
I don’t think you’re required to share your real name on Nextdoor
I didn’t. 
I’d hate to join something like that. I’m sure everybody would be bitching about me.
Through the Vatican? Kinky…
That, like being able to withhold house number, probably works better in cities than in rural areas.
Again: there’s only four houses on this road. If the road’s on there, and I post pretty much anything, I’m findable.
My immediate neighbors know my name; most of them have my phone number; some of them have my email. They certainly all know where the house is. I’ve got no problem with that.
But I can’t tell from the nextdoor site what they’d think my “neighborhood” is. This road? This “block”? (Around the “block” is about a five mile walk.) The village associated with my mailing address, which is six miles away? The county, which may well have a smaller population than some areas they’re considering “neighborhoods” in cities?
Really? It displays my area with the neighborhoods marked.
Neighborhoods are user-defined, so whoever is the first to sign up in your area gets to set the boundaries.
I checked the page that was linked, and was only able to find information about what countries they’re active in; nothing about specific areas. Are you sure it’s possible to see that info without joining first?
I did find something about size: 100 to 3000 households. So if somebody’s started one in this area, it might or might not cover a group of people that would make sense to me; it would depend on where they’d drawn the line.
If you see a way to get the info as to whether there’s one here and if so what area it covers without being signed in, I’d find it useful to have that posted.
You can turn off the email notifications in settings. I had to do that because I was getting them constantly.
I love Nextdoor & see it used for this application (people growing their businesses) as well as the following:
-If you ever need to hire someone (babysitter, plumber, etc), it’s a great resource for recommendations
-If you ever need to sell or buy something, also very useful
-If you’re wondering why there are loud sirens, helicopters overhead, etc…there is always someone on my feed with a police scanner willing to tell you what’s up
-It was also very useful during the fires (California) & after the fires, many people hired moving trucks where neighbors would drop off donations that were trucked up the areas of need every week.
-And of course, lost pets, annoying people who wish to rant about politics, etc. But you can block certain users if you want so it’s managable.
All in all, I think it’s a great app to keep abreast of what is going on in your neighborhood
It should work, though I don’t know if it’s region based. Are you in the US? In any event, Nextdoor calls their rules “community guidelines”, so if you search for that via google you should be able to pull them up. Here is what I did, first hit:
Bone, that gets me the rules page, posted on this thread earlier. What’s on that page is a fair amount of language amounting, pretty much, to ‘don’t be a jerk’. There are links also. None of them says anything about locations; but if I go to the ‘about’ link, there is a line for “where is Nextdoor available”. But all that clicking on that gets me is:
Are you looking at the site while signed in to it? Because I’m really not seeing anything that tells me whether there’s a group in my area or not; and, if so, what area it covers.
(Yes, I am in the USA. I’m in rural New York State.)
In the US, the way it works is there is a group in every area. If not, the first person in that area to sign up creates the area.
In rural New York, I’m pretty sure there would be a group there. I randomly picked an address in a small city in NY, Carthage, and there is a group there. When you enter your address, it will tell you if there is a group, and recent thread titles and number of replies for that specific geographic area.
I mean, if you are concerned, pick someone else’s address and a throw away email to see what happens.
I joined Nextdoor a few years ago and I’ve found the majority of the posts seem to fall into a few categories:
Warnings about “suspicious” activity. I haven’t seen any of the “I saw a [minority] in the neighborhood” posts like others have mentioned in my group, there are a lot along the lines of “OMG a car drove down the street kind of slowly” or “OMG a guy in a hoodie rang my doorbell while I was at work.”
Not in My Backyard. An actual post from last week went something like “We have to stop Verizon from building a new cell tower in our town. I heard those things cause cancer.” And in what I would consider a subset of this category, there’s a vocal group who complains about homeless people and wants to make them go away. Not actually help them or provide them with shelter, they just want to make them go somewhere else so they can be someone else’s problem.
Lost / found pets.
Seeking recommendations for services, or advertising their services
Buying and selling items.
The last three categories are quite useful, and I did fine a great petsitter through NextDoor. But the first two get kind of tiresome.
Does it want more information besides address and email?
Once you input an email and a physical address, the “submit” button becomes active and you can see if your neighborhood is on there.
Ah. Thanks.
There are ignoramuses in every neighborhood. You can’t blame Nextdoor for that. I sure found it handy when I had an unexpected week in the hospital and needed to get my pets fed and watered.
Just today I got an invitation to Nextdoor for a neighborhood I’m not in, from a person I don’t know, at my work email.