Introduction

We value your privacy, and as such we will not share your information with any third party without your consent, except as required by law.

The information you store on this site as part of normal usage can contain:

  • User details (name, password)
  • Forum posts
  • Private messages

This privacy policy also covers information sent to us by direct communication (eg email, telephone, Skype).

The following is a basic outline of how this data is stored and used by us.

Passwords

Passwords are stored in our database in an irreversibly encrypted format, so in the event of a security breach your account details will remain safe.  Due to the encryption process, the only way to recover access if you forget your password is to use the password reset option which is presented in the login module.

If a security breach does occur, we will contact you and request that you change your password anyway, as encryption is never perfect and weak passwords can be prone to brute-force attacks (ie automated guessing).

Direct Communication

All communication with us is treated in confidence and no information will be published or forwarded unless you request it or give us permission to do so.  Please note permission may be implied if you send us information such as news, photos or event results.  Anything not for publication should be clearly identified as such.

Cookies

This site makes use of cookies to maintain the state of your login session.  We do not explicitly track usage, nor do we tie it to personally identifying information.

We use third-party systems for gathering usage statistics and presenting advertising, and these also use cookies for tracking. Our statistics for both usage and advertising are presented to us in aggregate form and we cannot determine individual usage patterns from this.

Security

All access to this site is logged by IP address for the purposes of fault-finding and investigation of possibly security breaches.  This data does not contain personally-identifying information and in general it is only looked at when a problem has been detected.  During normal operation, access data is kept for a fixed amount of time then deleted.

If a security breach is detected, we will share information with the relevant authorities as part of the investigative process.

Backups And Development Site

We use a private development server, which is only accessible from our internal network, to keep regular backups.  Each backup is a full copy of the site files and its database and we keep our backups for several months.

Our hosting provider also makes backups on their local systems for the purposes of disaster recovery.

The development server also contains a development site which is occasionally rebuilt from our backup as a full duplicate of the main site.  This not only serves as a test of our backup process, but it also allows us to carry out development work and experiments without any risk of causing problems on the main site.

As such you can now be aware that all data you post onto the site (eg forum posts, private messages) are copied as part of our backups.  We only look at this data when necessary to investigate problems.

Complaints

If we receive a complaint we will access whatever data is necessary in order to investigate it.  If the complaint relates to a criminal matter we will pass the data to the relevant authorities for further investigation.

Forum

The forum is a public area and you should not post anything that you don't want to be made public.

We reserve the right to remove or edit forum posts for any reason.

Please note that the forum records your IP address with each post.  This is displayed to administrators.  While the IP address does not identify you personally, it can be used to find you.