Privacy Statement

I'm writing this up simply as a point of public record.  As I run this site on my own and I'm not interested in selling you anything it should be fairly evident that you can visit here without worrying I'm going to give out your details.  

Your Personal Details

There are three ways I can think of that mean I might end up knowing your e-mail address.

• You e-mail me (obviously!)

• You register in the forums  (You can hide your e-mail address from the public in your forum profile.  I advise people to do this.  If you choose not to hide it don't come complaining to me if you get spammed.)

• You register for the chat room

Under no circumstances will I ever give anybody else your e-mail address or anything  else.  I hate spammers and I believe in peoples' rights to privacy.

This website doesn't have a newsletter and I don't bulk mail people.

If a company or organisation finally decided to do the decent thing(!) and sponsor the site, they would never be able to persuade me to hand over any personal details.

In the unlikely event of me selling the site, users would have ample notice to remove their details before I transferred ownership. (and no, I'm not looking to sell, this site is run as an enjoyable hobby!).

Cookies

None of the code I have written for the site uses cookies.  The forums definitely do use a cookie to help you keep track of which posts you have read.  As far as I know the chat room doesn't use cookies.

This site definitely doesn't use cookies (or anything else) to monitor where you click around once you are here.  Marketers might like that kind of information, personally I dislike it out of principle.

Chat Logs

The chat room logs all normal messages that you send to a textfile and e-mails me that file every night.

I do this for the sole purpose of protecting myself and the users of the chat.  I would only read the logfiles in the case of a complaint. 

If you don't want to be logged, you can choose to whisper, which is completely private.  At some point I will try and add a "Private Room" where you can chat without any logging at all.  This will allow people to chat in private whilst still allowing others to chat safely in the main room.

Yes, I said "safely".  Sadly, chat rooms are attracting the worst kind of publicity in the UK and I would imagine it is the same in other countries.  For this reason, unsupervised minors are not welcome in this site's chatroom.  It is also worth noting that all users of the chat can choose to ignore an irritating or abusive person by clicking the symbol to the right of their name.

Most, if not all Internet chat systems keep logs nowadays, they might not feel obliged to tell you though...

Of course, you only have my word for all of the above.  For all you know, I could be obsessively poring over transcripts of your private conversations every evening.  If this thought bothers you then don't use the chat room!

Web logs, Big Brother and your IP address

This site is run from two Apache servers and standard logging is kept for every access.  Virtually all websites do this, even if their admins aren't aware of it.  Web logs are vital when running a professional webserver. They are also important in the case of legal problems. 

This information is never shared with anyone, I use it to see general statistics for the site, which don't contain any way of identifying individuals.

If you post to the forum as an anonymous user, your IP address will appear.  If you post as a registered user it won't.  So, if you don't want people to be able to deduce where you work or who your ISP is, register before posting!

Hypothetically, the only time I would even contemplate releasing your IP address would be in the case of malicious damage to the site, attempts at hacking or abuse of the chatroom or forums.  Whilst I value peoples' rights to privacy that doesn't extend to idiots that are causing trouble.  I would report such abuses to to the ISP involved and in extreme cases would contact the relevant authorities.

I hope the above is clear and seems reasonable.  If you have any concerns I would be glad to hear from you.