How can we help?

Yes, and it is free. 680 North is an invite-only guide to the corridor, so the towns, the listings and the calendar sit behind a member sign-in. There is no paid tier for readers and there never will be.

An account also means your saved places travel with you between your phone and your laptop.

Check the spam folder first, then search your mail for 680 North rather than the subject line.

The most common cause is a typo in the address at sign-up. If nothing turns up within about ten minutes, send us a ticket with the address you used and we will look it up by hand.

Sign in, open Your account, and use the photo panel at the top. Square images look best, since anything you upload is cropped to a circle.

Your handle is the name on your public member page, the part after /member/. You can change it, within reason. A handle you release is held for a while rather than freed straight away, so nobody can take a name and impersonate the person who had it.

Send a ticket from the address on the account and say you want it closed. We remove the account and the personal data attached to it.

Anything you contributed that other people rely on, such as a correction to a business listing, stays on the site without your name on it.

Open your listing and use Claim this listing. We verify that you are connected to the business before handing over the keys, which usually means a call to the number already published for it or an email at the business domain.

Most claims are settled within two business days.

Send it to us and we will add it. Name, address, phone, website and which town it belongs to is enough to start.

Listings are assembled from public records and checked rather than guessed at, so it may take a few days to appear.

Edit your hours, your description and your photos, respond to reviews in your own voice, and post your own events to the calendar if you run them.

No. Being listed and claiming your listing are both free.

Advertising and promotion are separate paid products, and neither is required to appear.

No. This one is worth stating plainly, because most local directories work the other way.

Money never moves the organic order on 680 North. Paid placement is always labelled as paid and sits in its own space. A business that buys advertising does not thereby rank above one that did not.

Tell us and we will fix it, claimed or not. Wrong hours and a disconnected phone number are the two we most want to hear about, because they are the ones that send a customer to a locked door.

Sign in, pick your town, open Marketplace and choose the section. Posts carry an expiry date so the board stays current.

Through a relay. Their message reaches your email without either of you seeing the other address until you choose to reply.

There is no member-to-member messaging on 680 North, deliberately. It keeps the classifieds a place to arrange a sale rather than an inbox to maintain.

Never. 680 North is not a party to any transaction between members, and does not hold, route or refund anyone money.

Arrange payment directly, meet somewhere public, and treat a deal that only works if you pay first the way you would anywhere else.

Yes. 680 North is made by people who live along the corridor. Apply through Become a Content Creator and tell us your town and what you would want to cover.

Yes, and photographers get the same billing as writers. Apply the same way.

The photographer upload tool is still being built, so for now applications are open and the tool follows.

The credit is attached to the photograph itself rather than to the article, so it travels with the image everywhere it is used. A placeholder is never credited to anybody.

If you have claimed the venue or business it belongs to, post it yourself. Otherwise send it to us with the date, time, address and cost.

No. Recurring events are held as one record with a repeat pattern, so a weekly farmers market or a monthly open mic is entered once.

Tell us. Dates sourced from elsewhere sometimes move after we read them, and a wrong time on our calendar is worse than no listing.

680 North is being built town by town and opens when the corridor is filled in enough to be worth your time. Sign up now and you are in on the first day.

No. See the Privacy Policy for the full account of what is collected and why.

No. The only unsolicited email 680 North sends is the one introducing you to the site when you sign up. Everything after that is either something you asked for or a reply to something you sent us.

Fifteen along Interstate 680 and Highway 24, from Martinez at the north end down to Livermore: Martinez, Pacheco, Concord, Clayton, Pleasant Hill, Lafayette, Moraga, Orinda, Walnut Creek, Alamo, Danville, San Ramon, Dublin, Pleasanton, Livermore.