Privacy policy
Reading the manual needs no account. What an account stores, and the one analytics tag that runs on every page, are both set out below.
What we collect
Reading this site requires no account. Creating a member account to post in the discussions collects only an email address, a display name, and a password. Passwords are never stored in plain text: we store a PBKDF2-SHA256 derived hash and a random salt, and cannot recover your original password.
Threads and replies you post are stored with your account and display name, and are visible to any visitor. Separately from all of this, and unless you have opted out, an analytics tag records aggregate traffic on every page, including pages you read while signed out.
Analytics
Unless you have opted out — see the box below — the site loads Google Analytics 4 on every page. It is used for one thing: seeing which chapters get read, so editing effort goes where readers actually are. It records the page you viewed, your referrer, your device and browser type, and an approximate location — city or region — that Google derives from your IP address. It sets its own cookies to recognize a returning browser. That data is processed by Google as a third party under their own terms, and Google states that it does not log or store the IP addresses of readers in the EU, the UK, or Switzerland.
We do not send it your email address, display name, or account ID, so analytics data is not tied to your member account. Ad personalization and Google Signals — the features that feed advertising and cross-site profiles — are switched off in the configuration.
If your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, the analytics script is never requested and no measurement is sent — there is nothing to block, because nothing is loaded. Any tracker blocker achieves the same result. Every page, chapter, protocol and source stays fully readable either way; nothing here is gated on analytics running.
This is meant literally: opted out, the site makes no request to Google of any kind. Typefaces are served from this domain rather than Google Fonts specifically so that no request survives the opt-out to disclose your IP address.
Two limits worth stating. The check runs when a page loads, so if you turn the signal on mid-visit it takes effect on your next page rather than instantly. And opting out stops further collection but does not erase analytics cookies already on your device — clear cookies for this site to do that.
Cookies
Two kinds, and no consent banner because neither is used for advertising. A session cookie — httpOnly, so page scripts cannot read it — keeps you signed in for up to 30 days. The analytics cookies described above are written by the Google Analytics script; they are first-party cookies, stored against this domain rather than a Google one, though the identifier they hold is sent to Google with each measurement. The site sets no third-party cookies at all, and nothing here follows you to other sites. Your light or dark theme preference is not a cookie either: it is kept in local storage on your own device and never sent to us.
What we don’t do
We don’t sell or share your email address with third parties, run ad trackers or advertising cookies, sell or transfer analytics data, or use your account data for anything beyond operating the site: authentication, session management, and attributing your posts to your display name.
Data retention and deletion
Account and forum data is retained for as long as your account exists. Analytics data is held by Google under this property’s retention setting, for which 14 months is the longest period available to a site like this one; it cannot be traced back to an individual reader from our side, because we never send an identifier with it. To request deletion of your account and its posts, write to the address on the contact page.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes, the revision date above changes with it, and the change is recorded in the revision log like any other substantive edit to the manual.