Privacy

If you only read

Reading this site sets no cookie, stores nothing in your browser and loads no script from another site. Your address reaches our server as it reaches any server and appears in its access log, which is size-capped and overwritten as it fills; it is not written to the database. Page views are counted per topic and per hour as plain totals, with nothing about who viewed them.

If you create an account

An account exists for one thing: commenting on a topic page. We store:

• the username you chose, which is shown beside your comments;
• a scrypt hash of your password — never the password itself;
• for each browser you are logged in on, a SHA-256 hash of its session token and when it was created, last renewed and expires;
• the comments you post, the topic each is on and when you posted it.

We do not ask for or store an email address, a real name, your IP address or your browser. Your address is used only as a short-lived rate-limit counter in memory, which expires within an hour, and it is passed to Cloudflare Turnstile when you register or log in, so it can check that a person is filling in the form.

The one cookie

Logging in sets one cookie, fi_session: HttpOnly, SameSite=Lax, and lasting up to 400 days, renewed when you use it. It holds a random token and nothing else. Logging out deletes the session on our server as well as the cookie.

The captcha

The registration and login pages load Cloudflare Turnstile, the only script from another site this product uses. It runs on those two pages and nowhere else. Cloudflare's own privacy policy covers what it processes.

What comments are used for

Comments are shown on the topic page they were posted on and are available through the public API at /v1/topics/{slug}/comments, with the username and time. They are never an input to any figure this site publishes, and they are not used to profile anyone.

Deleting things

You can delete any of your comments from your account page; a deleted comment is removed, not replaced with a placeholder. You can delete your account from the same page: that deletes the account, every session and every comment you wrote. Moderators can hide a comment that breaks the comment rules; a hidden comment stays visible to you on your account page until you delete it.

Backups

The database is backed up daily, encrypted, and backups are kept for up to about five weeks before they are pruned. A deleted account or comment therefore remains inside those encrypted backups until they age out. We do not restore deleted personal data from a backup except to recover the whole service from a failure.