What we hold about you

Enough to run the contest and to put your name on what you wrote. Nothing for sale, nothing for advertising, and nothing we would not be happy to show you.

What we hold

• Who you are at Google or Discord. You sign in with one of them, and they hand us an identifier for your account and your email address. We never see and never hold your password.
• Your email address, so we can reach you about your own account and the rounds you are in.
• Your handle and display name. Your handle is public: it goes on every chapter you win and into the printed book.
• What you write — your passages, the chapters they become, and anything you write in an appeal.
• What you vote on and what you flag, and the weight each one carried when you cast it.
• Which stories you have opened, because a vote from somebody who has read the story counts for more than one from somebody who has not.
• A record of decisions — an entry removed, a chapter withheld, an appeal — with who made it and when, so that a decision can be checked later.
• Two cookies, which are how your browser stays signed in. The first carries no name and no information about you, only a token, and even that is stored here scrambled rather than as it was issued. The second says one thing and holds nothing else: that somebody here is signed in, so that a story page knows whether to tell us you have read it instead of asking us about every visitor. There is nothing else in your browser from us.

That is the list. We do not ask for your real name, your age, your address or your phone number, and there is nowhere to type them.

Who else ever sees any of it

Cloudflare runs the site and holds the database, so everything above sits on their computers. They hold it so that the site can run. None of it is sold, and none of it is handed to anybody who is not on this list.

Google or Discord, whichever you sign in with. Signing in happens on their page, so they know you have an account here. After that they are told nothing about what you read, write or vote for.

Stripe would take the money if you ever buy a membership. You would type your card details on Stripe's own page, never on ours, so we would never hold them. We would give Stripe your email address so it could send you a receipt, and Stripe would tell us only that you had paid.

Resend would send our emails. It is a company in the United States, and to send you a message it would be given your email address and the message itself.

Right now neither of those last two is running. Memberships are not on sale yet and the site is not sending email, so no address of yours has gone to Stripe or to Resend, and no payment has been taken. Messages in your browser are switched off too; if we ever switch them on, the message would travel through your browser maker's own delivery service to reach you.

Nobody is watching you read

There are no trackers on this site, no advertising and no analytics that follow you anywhere. Every page you load here comes from here: no fonts, no scripts and no pictures are fetched from another company while you read.

Getting a copy, or getting rid of it all

Download everything we hold about you. Sign in first, and it comes back as one file: your account, every passage and chapter you have written, what you voted for, what you flagged, which stories you have opened and your settings. Nobody else is in it.

You can also have all of it deleted, and the deletion runs in one go rather than being picked out of a database by hand. There is no button for it on the site yet, so write to hello@novarasolutions.com.au from the address you signed in with and say you want your account deleted. Somebody writes back to tell you it is done.

What a deletion leaves behind

Your account goes: your email address, your display name, the link to your Google or Discord account, your votes, your flags, what you have read and what we would have emailed you about. If you had a membership, it is cancelled first, so nothing keeps being charged. A passage of yours still in an open round is withdrawn from it. Signing in again with the same Google or Discord account makes a brand new member, not the old one back.

Your handle stays, because it is printed beside what you wrote. A published chapter stays in its story, still credited to that handle, because the chapters after it were written around it and it is printed in books that already exist. A passage in a round that has already finished stays with that round for the same reason: it is part of what happened there.

Two records stay as well. Any decision an administrator made stays, because a decision nobody can check afterwards is not a decision anybody should trust. And if somebody reported a passage of yours, their report stays, because it is theirs and it is the reason that passage is hidden.

Age

You need to be 16 or over to write here. Reading needs no account at all.

Who to write to

Crowd Forge is run by Novara Solutions. Anything on this page, or anything you want done with what we hold: hello@novarasolutions.com.au.