Your privacy is important to us.
Catchgod will not give, sell, trade or rent your private information to others under any circumstance. We do not supply your private information to others except where we:
We continually strive to maintain the security of your private information both offline and online. The term "information" includes your ‘real’ email address, your IP address and any other supplied registration details which we have identified as private.
It is however important to be aware that when you voluntarily provide personal information in an article reply or in the forums, that information will not be protected by this privacy policy (reasonable requests for deletion will usually be honoured however). For this reason, we strongly discourage the offering of personal details in any post you make.
In the event of legal threats or other threats made against Catchgod or its staff, the person(s) responsible for those threats is deemed to forfeit any rights to privacy in relation to those threats. We reserve the right to retransmit the threat and any associated material to any third party. We also reserve the right to publish the threat and associated material.
In the event we receive an offer of bribery, quid pro quo, or any other form of incentive to influence moderation or editorial decisions, the person(s) responsible for those communications is deemed to forfeit any rights to privacy in relation to those communications. We reserve the right to retransmit the communications and any associated material to any third party. We also reserve the right to publish the communications and associated material.
If you are comfortable providing us with information about yourself, enhanced services, like the customisations available on your user account, become available to you. It is not possible for us to offer them to anonymous users.
All the information we gather is stored by Catchgod in a secure and separate area, protected by firewalls and never shared with anyone, except where it might be required by Australian law (by Court Order or Police Warrant), or to prevent abuse of Catchgod or Catchgod's systems.
We use a feature of your browser called a "cookie" to help implement many critical features of our site. Cookies, by themselves, cannot be used to find out your identity or the identities of any of our users. It can only return information that we already have.
Specifically, per session cookies are required to be able to remain signed in and use the features of Catchgod available to registered users.
Permanent cookies are only required if you select the option for Catchgod to "Remember me on this computer" when logging in.
Catchgod aims to provide you with better services and more compelling reasons to come back and visit our site. The information you provide us with can personalise your experience, and help us provide information you are interested in receiving. We analyse what our users and customers like and don't like about the content, so that we can constantly improve them for your use.
Only Catchgod Full or Senior Moderators and Administrators can see privileged information about users such as IP addresses, etc.
Details on your Account, Preferences and Account Activity of your Account Settings is not visible to other users.
The information on the Identity and What I Use tab page of your Account Settings populates your Catchgod public profile.
Your public profile only shows limited information to non-logged in users and search engines (it does not show contact details to non-logged in users). The contact details in your public profile are only visible by registered members of good standing.
Moderators cannot read your private messages (Catchgod Internal message) unless explicitly reported to them by a participant in the private message thread. This ability is restricted to Senior Moderators.
Administrators can also investigate any private message (without explicit URL) where abuse or improper use of the affected private message system is believed to have occurred.
Note that private messages sent to moderators/staff related to moderation will typically be converted to a moderation team thread, visible to the wider moderator team.
Please note that, like any online publisher, we cannot pre-emptively control your private information being published by another user. If this happens, contact a moderator.
No.
The only times that Catchgod will ever send email to a user is:
We encourage users to keep their Account Email Address up to date in the case they need to reset their password, as Catchgod sends the password reset email to that address.
Yes. For several years now all user passwords are non-reversibly encrypted. Mechanisms are also in place to make it as difficult as possible to 'brute force' user passwords even if an attacker obtained a copy of the database.
We recommend users set their Catchgod password to be a randomly generated, unique password, stored in a password manager and have the password manager automatically fill in the password.
This reduces the risk of password compromise both for your Catchgod account and any other websites you use.
No.
However, there are generally some public contact details for each user listed on the user's info page, if they have chosen to supply them. They can be viewed simply by clicking on a user's name in the forums.
If you suspect that a user is using multiple accounts to try and win an argument, or to spam the forums, please contact a moderator
immediately. The moderator will then check for duplicate or ghost accounts, and help clear the air.Please note that a moderator will not reveal details (such as IP addresses, email addresses, etc) of a user's account to anyone — so don't bother asking.
Penalised Users describes user statuses for users with restricted access, whether due to moderator action or user request.
Any moderation actions will be discussed only with the user that is the subject of those actions.