Violations

What you see when a violation is logged against your property, how warnings and fines differ, and how to pay or contest one without losing the paper trail.

Who creates them

Violations are logged by an admin, not by residents. From /violations you can see the ones that apply to your property: staff log them, you respond. There’s no “report my neighbor” surface here on purpose; the board does the documenting so it stays consistent.

Each violation carries a category, a description of what was observed, an observation date, an optional photo, and (for warnings) a correction deadline. The category list is admin-configured in Setup.

Warnings vs fines

Two flavors of violation:

Warning. No money attached. The card shows a correction deadline and a time-remaining pill that goes from green (more than a week left) to amber (within a week) to red (overdue). Most violations start as warnings.

Fine. A dollar amount is attached and shown on the card. You may also see a correction deadline depending on how the admin configured it. The fine sits as unpaid until paid or waived.

When a warning becomes a fine

A board can have an uncorrected warning turn into a proposed fine on its own, so nobody has to track deadlines. It is set up under Setup → Violation escalation by someone with the Violations admin permission: what happens when a warning is overdue, a grace period in days after the correction deadline (7 by default), and the amount of the proposed fine. Nothing escalates until a fine amount is set.

Each night, a warning still open (or with a notice sent) past its deadline plus the grace period is picked up once. With a deadline of the 1st and 7 grace days, that is the 9th. What happens next depends on the setting:

Propose a fine for board review (the default) flags the warning on its Manage tab. A board member can change the amount and press Propose fine, or dismiss it, and a dismissed warning never escalates again. Propose the fine automatically turns the warning into a proposed fine straight away. Off means warnings never escalate on their own. Where the community holds no hearings these read Flag a fine for board review, Apply fine and Apply the fine automatically, because the fine is due as soon as it is applied.

Status flow

Four states: open, notice_sent, resolved, dismissed.

open is the default when first logged. notice_sent means staff issued a formal notice and added admin notes (visible on the card). resolved means staff closed it out (also surfaces the admin notes for the final write-up). dismissed means staff retracted the violation, treated as if it didn’t happen.

Paying a fine

If your community has Stripe payments configured AND your violation has an unpaid fine that is not waiting on a hearing, the card shows a Pay button. Clicking sends you to Stripe Checkout for the fine amount; on success Stripe redirects back to /violations and the card flips to “paid.” If a fine is paid twice, for example from two open tabs, the second payment is refunded automatically in full and the board is told.

The comment thread

Each violation has a comment thread the resident and staff can both post to. This is where contesting happens: explain what was actually going on, attach evidence, ask clarifying questions. When you post, admins are notified. When staff posts, you’re notified. Treat the thread as the durable record; staff usually summarize it into the admin notes field when they move the violation to notice_sent or resolved.