Introduction

If you wish to use this forum, we require a small amount of personal data from you. This page describes what information is needed, and what we do with that data. In addition, this forum uses cookies. We explain what they do below.

For visitors

If you are just browsing this website as a guest, or are a registered user here but not logged in at the time, then no personal information is collected.

For forum members

When you sign up to the forum, you have to provide an email address and decide on a user name and password. All of these are essential for being a forum member.

• The email address must be a valid and functional mailbox that accepts emails from the forum (time-limited "disposable" email accounts are not permitted). You can manage the emails you receive from us via your user control panel. Your email address will only be visible to Administrators.
• Your user name is how you will be identified by others on the forum, and is required whenever you log in.
• Your password is encrypted before being stored in the database, so can not be retrieved by Administrators - if you forget your password, we will have to reset it to a generic password for you (and you will have to change it straight away to something else that is memorable to you). Do not reveal your password to anyone - not even forum staff.

You might chose to volunteer addition information to help support your membership application, such as your collection interests and your approximate location. For the benefit of you and the forum owner, please do not provide "sensitive information", such as a precise address. If you fail to make any posts within 12 months of joining, your account might get deleted - in which case, all of this information is also deleted. Otherwise, it is stored indefinitely, but you can edit or delete this information at any time during your membership.

Your date of birth is optional, and if you enter it, you can decide whether and how it is displayed to other users. For the purposes of this forum, it is recommended that you regard your date of birth as "sensitive information" and withhold it. We do not have a formal minimum age for using this forum, but if you are a minor, it is strongly recommended that you have a parent or guardian monitor your account (and inform us of this fact).

Your IP address at the time of registration is stored, and might be examined as part of the assessment of your membership application. In addition, a record of your last known IP address is maintained. Also, whenever you make a post, your current IP address is stored with that post. These IP addresses are only visible to Administrators and Moderators, and are used to protect against misuse of the forum.

Your forum posts are stored forever unless a member of the forum team deletes them (during routine maintenance, or if they violate our rules). We generally don't accept requests to delete posts because doing so can leave threads in a confused state.

Your personal messages are stored until you decide to delete them. The recipients of your sent messages may have retained a copy of them; these persist until and if these people choose to delete them. Personal messages are deleted when a member's account is deleted, but this a rare occurrence, as user accounts are normally changed to "No longer a member" status when a member wishes to leave the forum so that they can rejoin at a future time if desired - the exception being user accounts belonging to people who did not make any posts in the 12 month period after joining.

Cookies

This website uses cookies to provide essential functionality - without cookies, you would be unable to log in and use the website. Cookies are small text documents stored on your computer; the cookies set by this forum can only be used by this website and pose no security risk. No personal information is stored within them.

Cookies are set on your computer when you visit this forum, even if you are not registered and logged in. Cookies on this forum also track the specific topics registered members have read.

To clear all cookies set by this forum, you can click here.

All cookies used on this forum are Essential Cookies, and as such, consent is not explicitly required to place them on your computer (unlike other types of cookies, including cookies used for advertising and performance measurement). You can learn more about the various cookies that might be placed by the forum software in the MyBB documentation.

Third parties

We do not make use of third-party services like Google Analytics, so no third-party cookies will be placed on your device when you visit this forum.