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Privacy Policy

Last updated [PLACEHOLDER: date]. The data controller is [PLACEHOLDER: legal entity name, registered address]. Questions about this policy: [PLACEHOLDER: privacy contact address]. [PLACEHOLDER: data protection officer / EU representative, if appointed.]

This covers HardGaming Forums. Your account itself lives on the main website, and the policy published there covers registration, your password and account deletion.

The short version

We store what you post, who posted it, and the minimum needed to keep the forum working and free of abuse. There is no analytics, no advertising and no tracking of any kind, and the forum loads nothing from a third party — no fonts, no scripts, no pixels. An automated test fails the build if that ever stops being true.

What we collect

Your account

Your display name, email address and avatar, and whether you hold a moderator role. These come from the account system shared with the main website; this forum reads them and does not hold your password.

What you post

Threads, replies, reactions, bookmarks, followed threads and reports, each stored with your account id and a timestamp. Edits are kept as revisions, and a post's revision history is visible to anyone reading the thread — see the Community Guidelines.

Images you upload

Stored in our file storage and served through this site rather than from the storage provider directly. JPG, PNG, GIF, WEBP, up to 5MB each. Note that an image file can carry embedded metadata such as camera details or GPS coordinates; strip it before uploading if that matters to you.

Your IP address

Held briefly, in memory or in our cache, to count requests per address for rate limiting — the mechanism that stops one client flooding the forum or guessing at passwords. These counters expire on their own within minutes and are not linked to your account.

Presence

So the sidebar can say how many people are reading, your browser sends a periodic heartbeat. We record an entry — your account id if you are signed in, otherwise a random identifier stored in a cookie — in a set that expires five minutes after your last heartbeat. It is used to produce a count and nothing else.

Which threads you have viewed

A cookie holds the ids of up to the last 100 threads you opened, so that reloading a page does not inflate its view count. It stays in your browser and is not sent anywhere except back to this site.

Error reports

When something breaks, a report is sent to our error-tracking provider containing the error, the page it happened on, and — if you are signed in — your account id and email, so that a fault affecting one person can be traced. Report contents are not used for any other purpose.

Security policy violations

Your browser reports to us when it blocks something on a page for security reasons. The report names the page and the resource that was blocked. This is how we find out that somebody has managed to inject something into a post.

Server logs

Ordinary operational logs of requests and errors. [PLACEHOLDER: log retention period.]

Why we are allowed to hold it

[PLACEHOLDER: lawful bases, if you are subject to the UK GDPR or GDPR.]

  • Contract — your account, your posts, and the parts needed to show them to you.
  • Legitimate interests — rate limiting, moderation records, error reports and security reports, all of which exist to keep the forum available and safe. We have weighed these against your interests and hold each to the minimum that works.
  • Legal obligation — where we must retain something to comply with law.

Who it is shared with

We do not sell your data. It reaches these processors, and nobody else:

  • Our backend and file storage provider, which holds accounts, posts and uploads. [PLACEHOLDER: provider name and hosting region.]
  • Our error-tracking provider, which receives error reports as described above. [PLACEHOLDER: provider name and region.]
  • Our hosting provider. [PLACEHOLDER: name and region.]

We may also disclose information where we are legally required to, or where it is necessary to investigate a serious breach of the Terms of Use.

[PLACEHOLDER: international transfer safeguards, if any provider is outside your region.]

What is public

Your display name, your avatar, everything you post, when you posted it, and your profile page listing it, are visible to anyone — signed in or not, including search engines. Your email address is never shown. Your reports are visible only to you and to moderators, and the person you reported is not told who reported them.

How long it is kept

  • Posts and replies — until deleted, and see the note on persistence in the Terms.
  • Removed content — retained rather than erased, so that a moderation decision can be reviewed or appealed.
  • Moderation records — reports, warnings, suspensions and the actions taken on them are kept, because a decision that cannot be revisited cannot be appealed. Deleting your account does not erase the record that an action was taken.
  • Rate-limit counters — minutes.
  • Presence entries — five minutes after your last heartbeat.
  • Error reports — [PLACEHOLDER: your provider's retention.]

Your rights

Depending on where you live you may have the right to access a copy of your data, correct it, ask for it to be erased, restrict or object to how we use it, and receive it in a portable form. Write to [PLACEHOLDER: privacy contact address].

Deleting your account is handled on the main website, not here. Note that erasure cannot always remove your posts from other members' quoted replies, and that moderation records are retained as described above.

[PLACEHOLDER: your supervisory authority, and how to complain to it.]

Children

The forum is not intended for children under [PLACEHOLDER: minimum age]. If you believe a child has given us personal data, write to the address above and we will remove it.

Changes

We will update the date at the top when this changes, and announce material changes on the forum.

See also the Cookie Notice and the Terms of Use.