Privacy

Who runs this service

This is a free community service provided by Rocket Science Computing Corporation Ltd, company number 17513143, registered in England & Wales. You keep the copyright in what you post. Under our terms you license it to us to run the service, and to the public for reuse; see your posts and their licence.

Your email address

We don't store your email address. We keep only a one-way fingerprint of it, made with a secret key, which lets us recognise you when you type your address to sign in. Nobody can see your address on this service: not other members, moderators or board admins, and not the people who run it, because the database doesn't contain it.

When you ask for a sign-in or confirmation link, our server uses the address you typed to send that one email, and then discards it. The email passes through our email provider, Purelymail, which keeps its own delivery records. We don't send anything else, because we have no address to send it to.

What else we store

• What you choose to make public: your username, avatar, posts, attachments and votes. Anyone who can see a board can see these, and your username and avatar are the same on every board you join.
• Your passkeys: we hold a public key and the name you gave it. Your fingerprint, face or device PIN never leaves your device.
• Your activity and settings: the boards you've joined and your role on them, which topics you track, how far you've read each thread, and your appearance choices.
• Your agreement to the terms: which version of the terms you accepted and when, and whether you chose to put your earlier posts under them. Each post also records the version of the terms it was posted under.
• Moderation records: reports, bans and the moderators' action log. Moderators can hide a member's posts from others, or block posting from a connection, sometimes without notifying them.

Avatars and photos are re-encoded when uploaded, which removes the location, camera details and any other metadata stored in them. Other attachments, such as PDFs and documents, are stored as you uploaded them, so check those before attaching them.

Technical records

Our web server logs each request, including your IP address, and keeps those logs for up to 14 days to run and protect the service. To count thread views once per person, we keep a scrambled code made from your IP address and browser details for visitors, or your account for members, for about two days.

To deal with abuse, we also store a scrambled code made from your IP address with each post you make, and delete it after 30 days. If a moderator blocks posting from a connection, that code is kept until the block ends. Moderators never see IP addresses.

Sign-in links expire after 30 minutes. We delete our records of them after a week.

We back up the service every night and keep each backup for up to four weeks. Anything you delete stays in those backups until they expire.

Your posts and their licence

When you post, you license it to the public: text, images and other content under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0, and code under the MIT License. Anyone may copy and reuse it, crediting your username and linking to the post. These licences can't be withdrawn, so if you delete a post we remove it here, but copies people made under the licence may remain elsewhere, outside our control.

So that this credit keeps working, deleting your account replaces your username with a pseudonym such as user12345 rather than removing your name from your posts. The licences cover copyright only. They don't reduce your data protection rights: you can still ask us to remove personal information about you from this service.

Cookies

We don't use advertising or analytics cookies, or any other tracking, so there's no cookie banner to accept.

session

Keeps forms secure and, if you sign in, keeps you signed in. Lasts until you close your browser, or 30 days once you've signed in. Each board and the accounts site set their own.

appearance

Remembers your text size and colours for a year. Set only if you save these choices without being signed in.

Other websites

Our pages load nothing from other companies unless you ask them to. Fonts and scripts come from this service.

Event maps are pictures our server makes from OpenStreetMap and stores, so viewing one doesn't contact OpenStreetMap. If you open the full map, your browser goes to openstreetmap.org, which then sees your IP address. When someone searches for an event's location, our server sends what they typed to OpenStreetMap's search, without saying who asked.

Some boards let you publish a thread on their own website as well. This happens only if you tick the box on that thread. Your title, post and username then appear publicly on that site, under its own privacy terms. If you untick it, or the thread is removed, we take it down from there.

When a post contains a link, our server visits that page to build a preview and takes a screenshot of it. The other site sees our server, not you. It only sees you if you follow the link.

Your choices and rights

You can change or remove your avatar and passkeys on your account page, edit your own posts, and delete your account. Deleting it removes your sign-in details, passkeys and avatar, and replaces your username with a pseudonym on every board. Your posts stay, credited to that pseudonym, unless you also choose to erase them: that replaces the text of your posts and thread titles, removes your attachments, and takes them off any club website. You can also ask for a copy of your data, or ask us to correct or delete it. If you're in the UK, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.