Privacy - Developer Forum

What information do we collect?

We collect information from you when you register on our site and gather data when you participate in the forum by reading, writing, and evaluating the content shared here.

When registering on our site, you may be asked to enter your name and e-mail address. You may, however, visit our site without registering. Your e-mail address will be verified by an email containing a unique link. If that link is visited, we know that you control the e-mail address.

When registered and posting, we record the IP address that the post originated from. We also may retain server logs which include the IP address of every request to our server.

What do we use your information for?

Any of the information we collect from you may be used in one of the following ways:

To personalize your experience — your information helps us to better respond to your individual needs.
To improve our site — we continually strive to improve our site offerings based on the information and feedback we receive from you.
To improve customer service — your information helps us to more effectively respond to your customer service requests and support needs.
To send periodic emails — The email address you provide may be used to send you information, notifications that you request about changes to topics or in response to your user name, respond to inquiries, and/or other requests or questions.

How do we protect your information?

We implement a variety of security measures to maintain the safety of your personal information when you enter, submit, or access your personal information.

What is your data retention policy?

We will make a good faith effort to:

Retain server logs containing the IP address of all requests to this server no more than 90 days.
Retain the IP addresses associated with registered users and their posts no more than 5 years.

Do we use cookies?

Yes. Cookies are small files that a site or its service provider transfers to your computer’s hard drive through your Web browser (if you allow). These cookies enable the site to recognize your browser and, if you have a registered account, associate it with your registered account.

We use cookies to understand and save your preferences for future visits and compile aggregate data about site traffic and site interaction so that we can offer better site experiences and tools in the future. We may contract with third-party service providers to assist us in better understanding our site visitors. These service providers are not permitted to use the information collected on our behalf except to help us conduct and improve our business.

Do we disclose any information to outside parties?

We do not sell, trade, or otherwise transfer to outside parties your personally identifiable information. This does not include trusted third parties who assist us in operating our site, conducting our business, or servicing you, so long as those parties agree to keep this information confidential. We may also release your information when we believe release is appropriate to comply with the law, enforce our site policies, or protect ours or others rights, property, or safety. However, non-personally identifiable visitor information may be provided to other parties for marketing, advertising, or other uses.

Third party links

Occasionally, at our discretion, we may include or offer third party products or services on our site. These third party sites have separate and independent privacy policies. We therefore have no responsibility or liability for the content and activities of these linked sites. Nonetheless, we seek to protect the integrity of our site and welcome any feedback about these sites.

Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act Compliance

Our site, products and services are all directed to people who are at least 13 years old or older. If this server is in the USA, and you are under the age of 13, per the requirements of COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act), do not use this site.

Does this site comply with the EU General Data Protection Regulation?

This site respects privacy rights under Regulation (EU) 2016/679, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Information that GDPR requires this site to give can be found throughout this privacy notice. So can information about specific rights, like access, rectification, erasure, data portability, and objection to automated decision-making.

Does this site comply with the California Consumer Privacy Regulation?

This site respects the rights of California residents under the California Consumer Privacy Regulation. This site does not sell your personal information within the meaning of that regulation. Other information that CCPA requires this site to give can be found throughout this privacy notice. So can information about specific rights, like requesting disclosure about information this site collects and requesting deletion of your data.

Where can I access data about me?

You can see your account data at any time by visiting your account page on the forum. Your account page also lists your posts and other activity on the forum.

Your account activity page also includes a link to download all of your activity in standard comma-separated values format.

How can I change or erase data about me?

You can change your account data at any time by visiting the profile settings page for your account. The settings for a particular forum may also allow you to close your account, on the settings page for your account. Closing your account starts a process of erasing or anonymizing this site’s records of data you provided for your account. Forum administrators can also erase and anonymize accounts.

Depending on the settings for your particular forum, you may also be able to edit, anonymize, or erase your posts. When you edit posts, this site will keep all versions of your posts. Forum administrators can view old versions of posts, and optionally make them visible to other forum visitors.

Does this site make automated decisions based on data about me?

This site may classify posts as spam automatically.

This site uses data about your posts and other activity on many forums to make automated decisions about whether your posts to this site are spam.

If you think a post has been wrongly blocked or removed, contact an administrator of your forum. They can override the decision that a post was spam.

This site uses data about posts and activity to set trust levels automatically.

Depending on how administrators of your forum configure the forum, the forum may use data about your posts and activity to award you badges and calculate a trust level for your account. Your trust level may affect how you can participate in the forum, such as whether you can upload images, as well as give you access to moderation and management powers in the forum. Your trust level therefore reflects forum administrators’ confidence in you, and their willingness to delegate community management functions, like moderation.

If you think your trust level has been set incorrectly, contact an administrator of your forum. They can manually adjust the trust level of your account.

Does this site share data about me with others?

This site shares account data with others as mentioned in the section about account data.

This site shares data about your posts and other forum activity with others as mentioned in the section about forum data.

This site does not sell or give information about you to other companies or services. However, this site does use services from other companies to host this forum at https://devforum.community/. The companies behind those services may collect data about you on their own, for their own purposes. Some of these services may be used to collect information about your online activities across different websites. All of these services are based in the United States, Germany and Finland.

Service	Description
Hetzner Online GmbH	Provides server hosting based in Germany and Finland.
Cloudflare	Provides a content delivery network of servers that host copies of content like images and website files, so that users around the world can download them quickly, from servers close to where they are.
Amazon Web Services	Hosts backups of the forum through Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier.
Apple Push Notification Service	Sends push notifications to users of the Discourse iOS app.
Google Cloud Messaging	Sends push notifications to users of the Discourse Android app.

Other individuals and companies may also reuse data about you that this site publishes, such as your posts to public forums, as most forum content is publicly available.

How can I contact this site about privacy?

You can send questions and complaints to the @admins group using your active forum account.

We do not collect personally identifiable data on users without a forum account. If you wish to view, manage or delete local data about this forum from your personal devices, please refer to the manual of your device’s browser(s).

For complaints under GDPR more generally, European Union users may lodge complaints with their local data protection supervisory authorities.