| About VoyForums Privacy |
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February 13th, 2024
As you may have noticed, VoyForums asks a bit of information about you when you sign up for a forum or create a member account. This information, which you provide, includes basic identifying information such as your name, gender, birthdate, country, zipcode, occupation, challenge questions, etc. We have, as of yet, used this information primarily for account verification (for example, recovery of lost passwords) or so we can know a bit about the members of VoyForums when dealing with them; however, we reserve the right to use it for advertisement placement in the future. For member accounts, this information may be chosen, by the user, to be displayed in a "public profile". Visitors' web-browsers also report standard information which may be retained in logs or other records such as posts and account information. This information includes but is not limited to: IP addresses, referrer URLs, and sometimes proxy forward information. Information provided by you can be edited in the forum admin area, or member login area. In the case that this information is not editable online, such as when a user posts anonymously, the present options available to modify or remove that information primarily include contacting the admin, for instance, to remove your message or make it publically unavailable ("unapprove" it), or to contact VoyForums directly. As times have changed, we are re-evaluating the availability of information like IP addresses being available to admins for controlling access to their forums. This is not an easy task, as managing forums for admins is difficult enough as it is, so it is important to understand that some forums still enable public IP address display, and that admins can see authors' IP addresses. Other information, at this time, that our systems receive from your computer at the time of access (browser, referer URL if any, etc.) are not deliberately made public by our systems nor available to admins, but other information from users should be understood as intended for public display, and you provide explicit consent for this display. Furthermore we do not have control over information we are required to release via court order once released.
Voyager Info-Systems, 311. N. Robertson Blvd. #778, Beverly Hills, CA, 90211 or
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VoyForums policy is to keep information belonging to a forum admin or users private; for instance, information like the e-mail address, zip code, etc. are not made available to the public, although the admin may choose to display information, such as IPs, or the member may choose which information is publicly available.
We ask minimal information, and release this only in cases such as required by law, system/network security, or as intended by the user implicitly for public display. It is our general policy to provide notice of subpoenas, court orders, or other requests or demands for information provided by you or your computers. This notice may be private, or public if means of private notice fail or are unavailable, or the matter requires public attention as determined by Voyager's sole discretion and in good faith.
We do not sell lists of e-mail addresses -- these are collected for purposes like account activity (lost passwords, verification, etc.) and for periodic e-mails related to VoyForums.
User-Accountability and User IP/host information-release:
VoyForums keeps IP/host/proxy information from users visiting and posting messages along with each message itself -- the IP may be displayed in a forum at the forum admin's option. Admins may also select to make name and e-mail addresses you provide in your post public or anonymous. The IP information stored along with your message is retained as long as the message is retained on our system; in low-activity boards, this may be indefinite as most messageboards use a rotation-system to expire old messages. As such, if you desire a post of yours removed, you must request its removal either by the admin of the board itself or by Voyager directly. Additionally, your browser, when it connects to our website, provides a browser version -- this may be stored in our logs for about two years, at present. Finally, as a small service, our backup systems can retain raw message data as full backups of databases and, due to legal needs, and the persistence of boards going back many decades, messages may be retained locally, even if not publicly available, indefinitely. Do not post to the service if you do not agree to the potential for indefinite duration of storage. This also includes the ability that your post may be marked unapproved for public viewing, either because the forum is set to moderation mode, and the post is never approved, or because an admin marks the post unapproved. The lack of public availability of your post does not necessarily imply anything about its retention on the system, nor its potential to be made 'approved' (publicly-viewable).
Additionally, the abuse of our system for anonymous posting of messages has forced us to consider releasing IP/host information of users, at our sole discretion, at the request of complaining users in cases deemed necessary by Voyager. Previously, while our policy has always allowed for this, we had a rule to only release this information upon police or court order. However, the IP information is and has never been considered private, for an admin can at any time set a forum to display such information publically. Our main reason for the possible release of IP/hostname information is to increase on the quality of our system by enforcing user-responsibility and accountability for their own posted content. Please be advised, attempts to hide your IP/host for the purpose of posting content in violation of our User Agreement is considered a violation of this policy. Please understand that VoyForums is a private system and it is a tedious chore for the few of us to maintain, improve, manage, and at the same time support and babysit when our agreement or policy are violated. By performing such activities, you are making our lives more difficult and suppressing our abilities to provide this free service to the public.
Forum, message deletion, and data retention:
Forums and/or messages may be deleted at any time by the forum admin. Please keep in mind that forums have backups created for different reasons; for instance, admins may select the backup option, manual or automated rebuilds back up for recovery purposes, etc. Furthermore, in the past, people have deleted their own forums and requested we restore them, so we enabled a system that retains deleted forums for recovery. Last, but not least, for legal reasons we've had to retain forum data for deleted forums both when working with law enforcement as well as in civil actions, to comply with court orders/subpoenas. We post notice in compliance with U.S. Safe Harbor principles, so authors have the ability to approach the court(s) to defend their privacy, but in some cases a forum or its content are then removed by users or the admin. As such, we usually have to retain a backup when material comes under dispute.
The nature of these forums is usually for persistent messages potentially through many years of time. As such, we do not impose a time-limit on retained data; therefore, we cannot guarantee complete content removal, since the data may be retained in backups going back to the time of content creation. Often this is not the case -- if no backups are made between the time of posting and automated rotation of messages out of a forum, they are removed from the database and may no longer exist. We cannot guarantee the availability of content once it is removed.
Advertiser access and image/content linking:
Because advertisements are loaded from advertisers, visitors' systems connect to their machines and, thus, our advertisers may know what IP address a visitor uses -- this basically means they may know your Internet Provider or hostname. Additionally, VoyForums does not house images posted in content. The images are referred to by the author and visitors' browsers will access that external content.
While we try to block some types of content, like scripts, for user protection, images loaded from external resources are loaded by visitors' browsers and therefore the IP a visitor uses to access the system will likely be seen by those external sites/services. For this reason, and not for VoyForums use alone, we recommend users use tracking protection software which can reduce the availability of their IP, and the ability for others to track and analyze their activities when browsing sites on the web.
The mobile app has been something we've dragged our feet on. As such, it doesn't collect any information or deal with user data at all. We will update this policy when we make advances to it.
If you have any specific questions regarding VoyForums privacy policy, please contact us. We may change this page at any time to reflect our current policy.
VoyForums
More information is covered in our User Agreement.