Privacy

What we keep

• Your account: your username, display name, email address, bio and the date you joined. Your password is stored only as a one-way scramble (a hash), so nobody, including us, can read it.
• What you post: worlds, stories, chapters, comments, characters, pictures, genres and tags.
• Your ratings, so you can change them later. Only a story’s average is ever shown.
• Reports you send, including who sent them.
• Which worlds you’ve joined or asked to join.
• Technical details: your IP address is noted with each post for one day, to enforce the hourly limits, then deleted. Each sign-in also records your IP address and browser type until it ends (at most 30 days), so a stolen sign-in can be spotted.

Who sees what

• Your email address is never shown to anyone. It’s used to confirm your account, reset your password and send the notices below.
• Your profile (at /u/your-username) shows your display name, username, join date, bio, and the worlds and stories you’ve posted that the visitor is allowed to see.
• Your posts are seen by whoever can read the world they’re in: everyone, for a public world; members only, for a request-access or private world.
• Founders see who has asked to join their world and reports about posts in it, but never who sent a report. Only the site admin sees who sent a report.
• Pictures are stored at long, hard-to-guess web addresses. A picture in a private world is hidden on Worldboard, but anyone who has its exact address could open it, so don’t upload anything that must stay secret.

Cookies and your browser

Worldboard uses two cookies, both only for the site itself:

• a sign-in cookie, which keeps you signed in
• a cookie remembering whether you chose light or dark mode

Your browser also remembers which chapter you reached in each story, so it can offer to continue; that stays on your device. Visits are counted with Vercel Web Analytics, which uses no cookies and doesn’t identify you. There are no advertising or tracking cookies.

Emails

We email you to confirm your address, to reset your password, and about your worlds and memberships: for example when you’re let into a world, when people are waiting to join yours, or when a post in your world is reported. There are no newsletters or marketing emails.

Who else handles it

Worldboard runs on a few services that store or carry data for us, only so the site can work: Vercel (hosting, pictures and visit counts), Neon (the database) and Resend (sending email). Their servers may be outside your country, including in the United States. We don’t sell your data or share it for advertising.

Your choices

• Change your display name and bio on your account page.
• Remove any world, story, chapter, comment or character you posted, at any time.
• Delete your account on your account page. Your account and email address are deleted at once. Posts you didn’t remove stay on the site under your name and can no longer be edited, so remove anything you want gone first.
• Ask for a copy of what we hold about you, or for it to be corrected or deleted, by replying to any email from Worldboard.

Deleted things can remain in the database’s short-term backups for a little while before they’re gone for good.

Children

Worldboard isn’t for children under 13, and they may not make an account. If we learn an account belongs to someone under 13, we delete it.

Changes

If what we keep or who handles it changes, this page changes too, with a new date at the top. See also the rules and the questions and answers.