Summary

If you only read the World War II Zone Forums website, there is no more information collected about you than is normally collected by web sites in general in their server logs.

If you contribute to the World War II Zone Forums, you are publishing every word you post publicly. If you write something, assume that it will be kept forever.


Publishing on the site and public data

Simply visiting the web site does not expose your identity publicly (but see "Private logging" below).

When you post in a forum or blog or any page in the site, you are publishing a document. This is a public act, and you are identified publicly as its author.

Identification of an author

When you post in a forum or blog or any page in the site, you must be logged in. You will be identified by your user name. This may be your real name if you so choose, or you may choose to publish under a pseudonym, whatever user name you selected when you created your account.


Cookies

The site will set a temporary session cookie (PHPSESSID) whenever you visit the site. If you do not intend to ever log in, you may deny this cookie, but you cannot log in without it. It will be deleted when you close your browser session.

More cookies may be set when you log in, to avoid typing in your user name (or optionally password) on your next visit. These last up to 30 days. You may clear these cookies after use if you are using a public machine and don't wish to expose your username to future users of the machine. (If so, clear the browser cache as well.)


Passwords

Many aspects of the World War II Zone Forums community interactions depend on the reputation and respect that is built up through a history of valued contributions. User passwords are the only guarantee of the integrity of a user's edit history. All users are encouraged to select strong passwords and to never share them. No one shall knowingly expose the password of another user to public release either directly or indirectly.


Private logging

Every time you visit a web page, you send a lot of information to the web server. Most web servers routinely maintain access logs with a portion of this information, which can be used to get an overall picture of what pages are popular, what other sites link to this one, and what web browsers people are using. It is not the intention of the World War II Zone Forums to use this information to keep track of legitimate users.

The raw log data is not made public, and is normally discarded after about one week.

Here's a sample of what's logged for one page view:

109.17.142.107 - - [27/Jun/2011:21:21:44 -0400]
"GET /forums/index.php?/topic/20775-youtube-embedding-now-supports-their-new-links/ HTTP/1.1" 200 18382
"http://worldwartwozone.com/forums/"
"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:5.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/5.0"

Log data may be examined by developers in the course of solving technical problems, in tracking down badly-behaved web spiders that overwhelm the site, or very rarely to correlate usernames and network addresses of posts in investigating abuse of the site.


Policy on release of data derived from page logs

It is the policy of World War II Zone Forums that personally identifiable data collected in the server logs will not be released by the developers who have access to it, except as follows:

• In response to a valid subpoena or other compulsory request from law enforcement
• With permission of the affected user
• To Jim Ohlstein, his legal counsel, or his designee, when necessary for investigation of abuse complaints.
• Where the information pertains to page views generated by a spider or bot and its dissemination is necessary to illustrate or resolve technical issues.
• Where the user has been vandalizing articles or persistently behaving in a disruptive way, data may be released to assist in the targeting of IP blocks, or to assist in the formulation of a complaint to relevant Internet Service Providers
• Where it is reasonably necessary to protect the rights, property or safety of the World War II Zone Forums, its users, or the public.

World War II Zone Forums policy does not permit public distribution of such information under any circumstances, except as described above.


Sharing information with third parties

Except where otherwise specified, all text added to World War II Zone Forums is available for reuse under the terms of Creative Commons License (Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0).

World War II Zone Forums will not sell or share private information, such as email addresses, with third parties, unless you agree to release this information, or it is required by law to release the information.


Security of information

The World War II Zone Forums makes no guarantee against unauthorized access to any information you provide. This information will be available to all administrators with access to the server(s).


E-mail

You must provide your e-mail address when you register. Other logged-in users will be able to send email to you through the site (unless you disable this in your preferences). Your address will not be revealed to them unless you respond, or possibly if the email bounces. The email address may be used by the World War II Zone Forums to communicate with users on a wider scale.

You will need to have access the email address that you used at the time of registration in order to reset your password if you forget it. However, you may contact the World War II Zone Forums administrator to enter a new mail address in your profile.


User data

Data on users, such as the times at which they posted and the number of posts they have made are publicly available on the site .


Removal of user accounts

Once created, user accounts can not be removed. It may be possible for the administrator to change the username on an account, but you will need to request this yourself. The World War II Zone Forums does not guarantee that a name will be changed on request.

Specific user information may or may not be deleted at the discretion of the administrator.


Deletion of content

Deleting posts from World War II Zone Forums does not really delete them. If a post is "deleted", the administrator and site staff can see what was deleted. Only the administrator can permanently delete information from the World War II Zone Forums and there is no guarantee this will happen except in response to legal action.


Credit

This policy was adapted from the Privacy Policy of Wikipedia.

1. World War II Zone Forums
2. → Pages
3. → Privacy Policy