This policy covers the PNLCS community forum at https://community.pnlcs.com. The forum is run by Panelica, LLC, a Delaware limited liability company, which decides how your data is used. Contact: [email protected].
PNLCS installations run by hosting companies, and the pnlcs.com website, have their own privacy policies.
What we collect
- When you sign up: your username, email address, password (stored only as a hash) and, if you add it, your name.
- What you post: topics, replies, likes, votes, private messages, uploads, and anything you add to your profile (picture, bio, location, website).
- When you use the forum: your IP address, browser details, the pages and topics you read, how long you read, and your search queries. Some of this is stored with your account and in server logs.
- Email: whether emails we send you were delivered or bounced.
You can read the forum without an account.
Why we use it
- To run the forum: your account, your posts, notifications and the emails you ask for (we rely on our contract with you).
- To keep it safe: stopping spam, abuse and attacks, and enforcing the Terms of Service (our legitimate interest).
- To make posts readable in other languages and to summarise long topics (our legitimate interest in an international community).
- To improve the forum, using statistics about how it’s used (our legitimate interest).
We don’t sell your data, and we don’t use it for advertising.
Who else handles it
- Hetzner Online GmbH: the server that runs the forum, in Finland (EU).
- Cloudflare, Inc.: all traffic to the forum passes through Cloudflare to deliver pages and block attacks. Cloudflare Web Analytics counts visits without cookies.
- Anthropic: new posts may be sent to Anthropic’s Claude model to check them for spam, to translate them into the forum’s other languages and to summarise topics. Anthropic processes them for us and does not use them to train its models.
- Google Fonts: your browser loads the forum’s fonts from Google, which sees your IP address.
- Gravatar (Automattic Inc.): if your email address has a Gravatar picture, we fetch it as your profile picture. To do so, a hash of your email address is sent to Gravatar.
Some of these companies are in the United States. Where data leaves the EU, they rely on the EU–US Data Privacy Framework or on the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses.
What other people see
Your username, profile and posts are public. Private messages are visible only to their participants and, when needed to deal with abuse, to forum moderators. Your email address and IP address are never shown to other members.
Cookies
The forum uses only the cookies it needs to work: one to keep you signed in and one for your session. Cloudflare may set a security cookie when it checks whether a visitor is a bot. There are no advertising or tracking cookies.
How long we keep it
- Account data, for as long as your account exists.
- Accounts that were never activated are deleted after 14 days.
- Posts stay after you leave, unless you ask us to remove or anonymise them (see below).
- Backups are kept for a limited time: the forum’s own daily backups for 7 days, and encrypted backups of the whole server (stored with Hetzner in Finland) for up to 6 months. Data you delete stays in those backups until they expire; backups are used only to recover from a failure, never to bring deleted data back to the live forum.
Your rights
You can ask for a copy of your data, have it corrected, deleted or anonymised, object to how it’s used, or ask us to limit its use. You can download your posts from your profile, and delete your account there while your posts are less than 60 days old. For anything else, email [email protected]. If you’re in the EU or UK and think we haven’t handled your data properly, you can complain to your local data protection authority.
Children
The forum is not meant for anyone under 16, and we don’t knowingly collect their data.
Changes
When we change this policy significantly, we’ll announce it in the Announcements category.
Last updated: 2026-10-25