CFD-Wiki:Privacy policy
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Summary
If you read CFD-Wiki no more information is collected than what is typically collected in server logs by web sites in general.
If you contribute to CFD-Wiki you are publishing every word you post publicly. If you write something assume that it will be retained forever. This includes articles, user pages and talk pages.
Identification of an author
All contributions to CFD-Wiki are made by logged in users. Hence, your CFD-Wiki name will identify all of your contributions. Your name or pseudonym can be connected to your real identity if the selected name or something you have written in CFD-Wiki identifies who you are. In case of CFD-Wiki vandalism your network IP address might be banned and made publicly available.
Cookies
CFD-Wiki sets a temporary cookie (PHPSESSID) whenever you visit the site. If you do not intend to ever log in, you may deny this cookie, but you cannot log in without it. It will be deleted when you close your browser session.
More cookies may be set when you log in, to avoid typing in your user name (or optionally password) on your next visit. These last up to 30 days. You may clear these cookies after use if you are using a public machine and don't wish to expose your username to future users of the machine. (If so, clear the browser cache as well.)
Server logs
Every time you visit a web page you send a lot of information to the web server. The CFD Online web server maintains access logs with a portion of this information. The information is used to get an overall picture of what pages are popular, what other sites link to which site pages, and what web browsers people are using. It is not the intention of the CFD-Wiki project or CFD Online to use this information to keep track of legitimate users.
The server logs are used to produce the CFD Online site statistics pages. The raw log data is not made public, but it is saved for further statistical analysis and debugging.
Here is a sample of what's logged for one page view:
192.168.225.2 - - [17/Jun/2007:03:42:35 -0600] "GET /Wiki/Main_Page HTTP/1.1" 200 9511 "http://www.cfd-online.com/Wiki/Main_Page" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30)
Log data may be examined by developers in the course of solving technical problems and in tracking down badly-behaved users and automated web robots that disrupt the site. IP addresses of users, derived either from those logs or from records in the database are frequently used to correlate usernames and network addresses of edits in investigating abuse of the wiki, including the suspected use of malicious duplicate accounts, vandalism, harassment of other users, or disruption of the wiki.
Policy on release of server logs and other private information
Server logs and other private information derived from page logs etc. are only released in the following cituations:
- In case of CFD-Wiki vandalism, including things like spam postings, automated registration of spam users, edits that destroy legitimate content, the IP numbers will be blocked and made publicly available.
- Full log data will also be shared with law enforcement officers and companies that have been subject to criminal abuse on CFD-Wiki.
Deletion of content
Removing text from CFD-Wiki does not permanently delete it. In normal articles, anyone can look at a previous version and see what was there. If an article is "deleted", any user with "administrator" access on the wiki, meaning almost anyone trusted not to abuse the deletion capability, can see what was deleted. Information can be permanently deleted by those people with access to the servers, but there is no guarantee this will happen except in response to legal action.
