Terms of Use & Privacy Policy
Acceptance of the current Terms of Use and Privacy Policy is required before you may use any feature of this site, including signing in, browsing the community, posting, commenting, or contacting support. Please read each document below in full and tick every required box to continue.
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1. Definitions
"Service" means the website operated under needmoretruth.com and any related sub-domains, applications, and features. "User", "you", or "your" means any natural person who accesses or uses the Service. "Operator", "we", "us", or "our" means the natural person who operates the Service alone. The Operator charges no fee for the Service and carries no advertising on it. "Member" means a User who has authenticated through a supported OAuth identity provider; "Guest" means a User who has not. "Guest Mode" means the convenience feature that lets a Member submit Content under the same processing rules as a Guest (defined in Section 7). "Content" means any text, link, file, image, code, or other material submitted to the Service. "Public surface" means any place in the Service where other Users can see what you submit, such as the community boards, Truter, and comments. "Direct message" means a private message exchanged only between Members (Section 28); "Archive" means the separate-address storage feature described in Section 29. Direct messages and the Archive are not public surfaces. "Privacy Policy" means the document published at /privacy and incorporated into these Terms by reference. "Account" means an authenticated identity created when you sign in via a supported OAuth identity provider.
2. Acceptance and binding effect
These Terms become binding on you when you first access or use the Service, or when you click any control marked as acceptance of these Terms, whichever occurs first. Where the Service requires an explicit click-through acceptance — including the consent gate that precedes sign-in, browsing the community section, posting, commenting, reporting content, or contacting support — that click constitutes a binding electronic acceptance of these Terms and the Privacy Policy as of the version stated on the consent gate. If you do not accept, you may continue to read the home page, Terms of Use, and Privacy Policy, but you may not use any other feature of the Service.
3. Eligibility
You represent and warrant that (a) you are at least sixteen (16) years of age and otherwise of the legal age required to enter into a binding agreement under the laws of the jurisdiction in which you reside, (b) you are competent to enter into a binding agreement, and (c) you are not barred from receiving the Service under any law applicable to you, including export-control, sanctions, age, and professional-conduct rules. If you access the Service on behalf of an organisation, you represent and warrant that you have authority to bind that organisation to these Terms. The minimum age of sixteen is an operator policy set to align with the default age of consent for information-society services under EU/EEA GDPR Article 8; it sits above the fourteen-year floor permitted for personal-data processing under the Republic of Korea Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA), and where your local law sets a different age of digital consent that applies to you, the higher of that age or sixteen governs your eligibility. Authentication is delegated exclusively to third-party OAuth providers (GitHub), which apply their own age-verification policies; the Operator does not perform independent age verification and relies on these providers and on your own representation to enforce minimum-age requirements. The Operator does not knowingly permit the Service to be used by anyone below the applicable minimum age and does not seek verifiable parental consent to enrol younger children, because the Service is not directed to children below that age. If you believe that a person below the minimum age has nevertheless accessed the Service, please contact the Operator at [email protected] or through the in-Service Bug & Operations Reports channel and the Operator will close that account and delete the data without undue delay. A notice required of providers of interactive computer services in the United States: parental control protections — such as computer hardware, software, or filtering services — are commercially available and may assist you in limiting access to material that is harmful to minors. Protections of that kind include the controls built into the platforms you are most likely already using — Apple Screen Time, Google Family Link and Microsoft Family Safety, none of which costs extra — as well as products sold separately. The United States Federal Trade Commission publishes consumer information about protecting children online at https://consumer.ftc.gov; that is guidance, not a directory of approved products, and the Operator does not describe it as one. Naming any of these is not a recommendation by the Operator; it is the identification that the notice requires.
4. Accounts and authentication
Authentication is provided exclusively through third-party OAuth identity providers, currently GitHub. The Service does not collect, store, or process passwords. Only profile fields exposed by the identity provider — such as provider account ID, login name, public display name, avatar URL, and (where exposed) email address — are stored. You are solely responsible for the security of the third-party account you use to sign in and for all activity that occurs under your Account on the Service. When multiple Members would share the same display name, the later-joining Member receives a visible short suffix of letters and digits (for example, "name#A3F9K2") shown in a distinct typographic style so that it cannot be confused with the characters of the chosen name itself. The Operator may suspend or terminate your Account where you breach these Terms or where required by law, by giving you reasonable prior notice through the in-Service inbox or, where you have provided one, your sign-in email address. Notice may be omitted only where (i) you are causing material harm to the Service, other Users, or third parties, (ii) you have fundamentally breached these Terms, (iii) immediate action is required by law or to prevent a security incident, or (iv) prior notice would be impossible or impracticable. Termination without cause, where permitted by law for a free non-commercial service, will also be subject to reasonable prior notice except in the circumstances listed above.
5. User-submitted Content
You retain all ownership rights you may have in Content that you submit to the Service. The licence in this Section applies only to Content you post on a public surface. It does not apply to direct messages (Section 28) or to anything you place in the Archive (Section 29). By posting Content on a public surface, you grant the Operator a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, display, transmit, distribute, and cache that Content, for the sole purpose of operating, providing, and securing the Service. The Operator may alter how your Content is presented only in the ways listed here, and this list is closed: (a) formatting so it fits the page; (b) machine translation; (c) excerpting for a list or a preview; (d) hiding it or marking it with a notice as a result of moderation; (f) hiding the author's display name on a board whose settings turn author names off for everyone on that board, which is a display setting and not anonymity, and which is disclosed on that board before you post there; and (e) replacing the author's display name with an erased marker — but only where you ask for it, where you delete your account, where the law requires it, or where the display name itself is unlawful or infringes someone else's rights. No other modification, and no creation of derivative or adapted works, is included in this licence. The Operator does not itself use your Content to train or fine-tune artificial-intelligence models, and does not give or sell it to any third party for that purpose. That is a statement about what the Operator does, and it is not the whole picture: what you post on a public surface is readable by anyone, including the crawlers described in the next paragraph, and the Operator lets those crawlers in. Read the two together. Content on a public surface is, however, in a place anyone can read. The Operator's `robots.txt` permits the crawlers operated by artificial-intelligence companies to read public surfaces, so content you post publicly may end up in such a company's training data. The Operator has no control over what they actually do with it. Direct messages and the Archive are not public surfaces and are not reachable by those crawlers. When Content is deleted, the Service stops serving it at its address and the address returns not-found, so a crawler that comes back finds nothing there. Beyond that the Operator cannot reach into anyone else's copy. Two things can still be done and they are not the same, so here is which is which. The address returning not-found is itself the signal those crawlers use to drop a page, and that happens by itself on every deletion, with nothing asked of you. Submitting the address to the removal channels those companies publish is a step the Operator takes by hand, and there is nothing in the Service that tells it a page was deleted, so it has to be asked for: write to the contact in Section 2 naming the addresses, and the Operator submits them and tells you what came of it. If your account is already gone, say where to answer, because there is no longer an account to answer to. That is the limit of what the Operator can do: it has no control over what those companies then do. This licence does not authorise use of your Content for commercial purposes unrelated to the Service, for advertising, or for resale to third parties. This licence is sublicensable solely to subprocessors that operate the Service on the Operator's behalf (for example, hosting and backup providers). This licence is not transferable on its own. It passes only as part of an assignment permitted by Section 25, together with the thirty days' notice that Section requires. If you delete your account within that period, this licence does not pass. This licence ends when the Content is deleted from the Service, except that residual copies in backups, caches, and audit records remain until those copies fall out of their ordinary rotation. The Operator has no obligation to host, monitor, edit, or retain any specific Content.
6. Content rules
You must not submit Content that: (a) is unlawful or that promotes, facilitates, or encourages unlawful activity, including the sale of controlled substances, weapons, or unauthorised intrusion or denial-of-service tools; (b) infringes any patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright, right of publicity, or other right of any person; (c) is defamatory, harassing, hateful, threatening, or invasive of another's privacy; (d) is sexually explicit, sexually exploitative of any person, or depicts a minor in a sexual context; (e) depicts, glorifies, or encourages self-harm, suicide, or eating disorders; (f) plans, threatens, or encourages violence against any identified person or group; (g) contains malware, viruses, or any code intended to damage or disable any system; (h) is designed to harvest personal data or to phish credentials; or (i) violates any third party's intellectual-property or privacy rights. The Operator applies automated content filtering to the more serious categories above; as described in Section 10, the strictness of this filtering may be configured separately for each board, and matched Content may be refused, hidden pending the Operator's review, or flagged for review. The Operator may remove, hide, edit, refuse, or restrict access to any Content at the Operator's sole discretion, with or without notice. The Operator is not a publisher of User-submitted Content and does not endorse or warrant any User-submitted material.
7. Guest Mode for Members
A Member may, at the moment of submitting Content, toggle "submit as Guest". When this toggle is on, the Service processes the submission exactly as if it had originated from a logged-out Guest on the same connection: no link to your Account is stored, the public display name shown is the same daily Guest identifier that a logged-out visitor from your connection would receive, the Guest cooldown applies in place of the Member cooldown, and self-deletion requires the deletion password that you set at the time of submission. This is a convenience feature only. Because logging out and submitting as a Guest already produces an indistinguishable result, the toggle simply removes the need to log out and back in. Any attempt to manipulate the visible discourse by alternating between Member and Guest Mode — including operating multiple effective identities to inflate or suppress engagement signals — is your responsibility under Section 9; the absence of a database link does not absolve you of accountability under these Terms or under applicable law.
8. Reporting Content
Any visitor may report a post or comment that they believe violates these Terms via the in-Service report function attached to the Content. That form asks for a reason; for an explanation of why the content is said to be unlawful (required where the reason given is that it is unlawful or infringes copyright); for your name and an address to reach you at (both offered, neither required); and for your confirmation that what you have written is accurate and complete to the best of your knowledge. Reporting Content as unlawful or as infringing copyright is open to anyone — including a visitor who is under an access restriction, and one who has not accepted these Terms. Telling the Operator that something is unlawful is not part of the agreement between you and the Operator, so that route is not closed by the agreement. The rate limit, the flood guard and the human-verification challenge apply to everyone alike. Reports on the other grounds are about these house rules rather than about the law, and the ordinary conditions of use apply to them. A Member is sent a notice in the Service confirming receipt, and another when the Operator has decided; if you are not signed in and left an address, the Operator answers there by hand. Either notice tells you how to take it further: write to the contact in Section 31 and the Operator looks again, and nothing in this stops you going to a court or to an out-of-court dispute body. A high volume of reports against a single piece of Content raises the Operator's review priority but does not, on its own, hide or remove the Content; only the Operator's own review may do so. Coordinated or bad-faith reporting intended to suppress lawful Content is itself a violation of these Terms and may result in enforcement action against the reporting User or connection. Copyright owners and other rights holders may submit takedown requests through the Bug & Operations Reports channel; valid requests will be processed within a reasonable time. A notice should identify the work, the address of the material on the Service, and how to reach you. The Operator also adopts and applies this repeat-infringer policy: where a User or a connection point is the subject of repeated notices that the Operator finds well-founded, the Operator terminates that Account, and blocks that connection point from writing, in appropriate circumstances. What counts as repeated is judged case by case, and a pattern of three well-founded notices will ordinarily be enough. A User whose Account is terminated on this ground is told why and may appeal once under Section 10. A notice is kept with the outcome the Operator recorded for it, so that a pattern across notices can be seen. Two different things sit in that record and they are not kept for the same time. What identifies the person who sent the notice — the name and the address they left — belongs to that person: it is deleted as soon as the Operator has answered them, and Section 10 of the Privacy Policy sets the outside date. What the Operator decided about the reported account is the Operator's own record of its own act. It stays for the period in Section 10 of the Privacy Policy, because it is the only thing the repeat-infringer policy above can run on, and the only thing that lets a terminated account be shown the pattern held against it. Erasing the person who complained does not erase a finding about somebody else, and the Operator keeps nothing about the complainant beyond what is stated here. If your material was removed on a copyright notice and you believe that was a mistake, or that you are entitled to use the material, you may send a counter-notice to the contact in Section 31. Give your name and an address to reach you at; identify the material and where it was on the Service; state, under penalty of perjury, that you have a good-faith belief the material was removed as a result of mistake or misidentification; and state that you consent to the jurisdiction of a court where you live, or, if you are outside the United States, of a court where the Operator may be found, and that you will accept service of process from the person who sent the notice. The Operator forwards the counter-notice to that person and restores the material not less than ten and not more than fourteen business days later, unless the Operator is first told that they have gone to court to restrain you. This is the route United States copyright law provides, and the Operator applies it to anyone who asks, wherever they are.
9. Prohibited conduct
You must not, and you must not attempt to, and you must not permit any third party to: (a) circumvent, bypass, or interfere with rate limits, anti-spam controls, content fingerprinting, authentication, the human-verification challenge, or access controls of the Service; (b) probe, scan, or test the vulnerability of the Service or any related system, network, or infrastructure, except as expressly authorised in writing by the Operator; (c) submit automated traffic, scraping, crawling, or bulk requests to the Service, except as expressly authorised; (d) impersonate any person or misrepresent your affiliation; (e) interfere with any other User's use or enjoyment of the Service; (f) collect, store, transfer, or disclose personal data of other Users or visitors of the Service without their lawful consent; (g) reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble any portion of the Service except as permitted by mandatory law; (h) use the Service in any manner that could overload, damage, or impair its operation; (i) operate multiple identities — whether through separate Accounts, alternation between Member and Guest Mode, or other means — to evade access restrictions, inflate engagement signals, or otherwise manipulate the visible discourse; or (j) use Guest Mode or any other feature of the Service to engage in any of the foregoing. Because the Operator processes only the minimum data necessary for safe operation, the Operator may, in some cases, be technically unable to identify the natural person responsible for a violation after the fact. This limitation is an intentional consequence of the data-minimisation design and does not transfer responsibility for your acts from you to the Operator. The Operator will cooperate in good faith with valid lawful requests from competent authorities, within the technical scope of the data actually retained at the time of the request, and will preserve the data it is required to preserve under applicable law.
10. Moderation and enforcement
The Service applies a combination of automated controls (rate limiting per daily IP hash and per Account, request deduplication, automated content filtering for the categories listed in Section 6, the strictness of which the Operator may configure separately for each board and which may refuse a submission, hide it pending review, or flag it for review, and a third-party human-verification challenge for write actions provided by Cloudflare Turnstile) and human review by the Operator. The Operator may apply the following enforcement actions, in any combination and at the Operator's sole discretion: warning, Content hiding, Content deletion, replacing the author's display name with an erased marker in connection with specific Content (only in the cases set out in Section 5(e)), an access restriction keyed to the current day's IP hash ("IP ban") which auto-expires when the daily IP-hashing salt rotates (see Section 12 and the Privacy Policy), an Account-level write timeout for a stated duration, and Account suspension or termination, including permanently. All administrator actions are recorded in an internal audit log used only for moderation review. Affected Users may submit one appeal per restriction through the in-Service form on the access-restriction notice page. One per restriction means one from you: signed in, it is counted against your Account; not signed in, it is counted against the connection you are writing from, for that particular restriction. Somebody else on the same line using the form does not spend yours. The form covers all three kinds of restriction — a block on the connection, an Account restriction, and a pause on posting. This one-appeal limit is without prejudice to any mandatory legal right of review you may have under applicable law (such as the right to obtain human review of a significant automated decision under EU/EEA GDPR Article 22, the safeguards for significant decisions based on automated processing under Articles 22A to 22C of the UK GDPR, equivalent rights under the Republic of Korea Personal Information Protection Act, or analogous protections in other jurisdictions). The Operator answers every appeal and gives the reason for the action. Where it answers depends on what it can reach: if you are signed in, the answer arrives as a notice in the Service, and that notice carries both halves — the outcome, which is that the restriction stands, is shortened, or is lifted, and the Operator's reason in its own words. If you are not, the only thing the appeal form holds is an address you chose to leave on it — the form asks for one and does not require it — and without one there is nothing to answer to, because the day's connection value is not something the Operator can turn back into a person. If you want an answer and did not leave an address, write to the contact in Section 31. Where saying everything would show someone how to evade the filters, the Operator says which rule was applied and what the action was, and withholds only the detail that would do that — it does not withhold the reason itself. The one-appeal limit set out above, and the discretion to withhold filter-evasion detail also set out above, apply only to actions a person decided. They do not apply to actions taken automatically without human review — in particular the block, keyed to the current day's IP hash, that stops writing until UTC midnight. For those there is no limit on how many times you may ask. The form on the notice page itself takes one note per restriction — it is a note, not the whole route — and the other two routes carry no limit at all: the in-Service Bug & Operations Reports channel and the email address in Section 31. The three things you may ask for are separate and you may ask for each of them: you may object or ask for an explanation at any time, the Operator answers within thirty days, and a person looks at the decision again. How to do so is set out in Section 12 of the Privacy Policy.
11. Content deletion and moderation authority
The Operator retains full authority to delete, hide, or modify any Content at any time, including for reasons of safety, legal compliance, or community standards. Moderation decisions are final as between the User and the Operator, subject only to mandatory legal rights of appeal or review that the User may have under applicable law. Members may delete their own posts and comments at any time from the Service interface. Deletion is permanent and irreversible; the Operator cannot recover deleted Content. Guests, and Members using Guest Mode, must set a deletion password at the time of submission. This password is the sole means of self-deletion and is stored as a one-way cryptographic hash that the Operator cannot reverse. If the password is forgotten, self-deletion is permanently impossible. The Operator does not provide any recovery mechanism for deletion passwords; this absence of recovery is an intentional consequence of the data-minimisation design described in the Privacy Policy, and the responsibility for retaining the password rests with the User. The Operator cannot verify the identity of a User who submitted as a Guest or in Guest Mode. Deletion requests submitted via the Bug & Operations Reports channel will be processed only if the Content violates these Terms or applicable law, as determined solely by the Operator, except where mandatory law (such as the GDPR right to erasure or the PIPA right of deletion) requires deletion regardless of these Terms. Requests to delete Content that does not violate these Terms and is not subject to a mandatory deletion right will be declined. Do not include personal data (real names, addresses, telephone numbers, national identification numbers, financial information, or other sensitive data) in Content submitted as a Guest or in Guest Mode. Such information cannot be guaranteed to be deleted if the deletion password is lost. The Operator is not liable for personal information voluntarily and unnecessarily included in User-submitted Content.
12. Access restrictions
The Operator may restrict access to the Service through the following tiered measures, applied in combination as needed: (a) an "IP ban" keyed to the current day's IP hash, which automatically expires at most twenty-four (24) hours after the most recent rotation of the daily IP-hashing salt; (b) an Account-level write timeout preventing a Member from posting, commenting, or otherwise writing for a stated duration; and (c) Account suspension or termination, which may be permanent. The first measure is short by design: because the Service stores no raw IP address and the daily salt is unrecoverable after rotation, an "IP ban" cannot meaningfully bind any address beyond the current day. This is an intentional consequence of the data-minimisation design described in the Privacy Policy, and the Operator acknowledges that determined attackers will rotate their network paths and so cannot in practice be excluded by IP-level restriction alone. A User affected by an IP ban will see a notice page explaining the approximate time until automatic expiry; that page contains a one-shot form that allows the User to send the Operator a written account of the situation. Because most IP bans expire automatically before they could be reviewed, that form exists to inform future moderation rather than to lift the current restriction. Account-level measures, by contrast, are not affected by salt rotation and may be permanent.
13. Intellectual property
All software, source code, design, branding, logos, layouts, graphics, original written content (other than User-submitted Content), and other materials forming part of the Service are owned by the Operator or licensed to the Operator and are protected by copyright, trademark, and other applicable intellectual-property laws. Subject to these Terms, the Operator grants you a limited, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable licence to access and use the Service for personal, non-commercial purposes. No other rights are granted by implication, estoppel, or otherwise. Trademarks, logos, and service marks displayed on the Service may not be used without the prior written consent of the Operator or, where applicable, the relevant third-party rights holder. For the avoidance of doubt, this Section 13 does not apply to the Soundtrack (the NMB background music), which is governed solely by Section 27 and its separate access terms; the Operator makes no claim of authorship of the Soundtrack and presents NMB as its source only. The copyright status of the Soundtrack is uncertain and unsettled; nothing here is an admission that no rights exist, nor a waiver, transfer, or licence of any such right, and the Operator does not waive and expressly reserves any rights — including any rights it may have under unfair-competition law — that do or may subsist in the Soundtrack, now or in future. The access terms in Section 27 prevail over the licence in this Section as to the Soundtrack.
14. Third-party services
The Service relies on third-party providers including but not limited to GitHub (authentication), Cloudflare (DNS, edge, TLS termination, tunnelling between the public internet and the origin server, and the Turnstile human-verification challenge presented for write actions), and the operating system, runtime, and database software running on the origin server. The Operator does not control these providers and is not responsible for their availability, policies, performance, or actions. Your interactions with these providers are governed by the providers' own terms of service and privacy policies.
15. Privacy
Your use of the Service is also governed by the Privacy Policy, which is incorporated into these Terms by reference. Reading the Privacy Policy is required before granting consent. Capitalised terms used in the Privacy Policy and not otherwise defined there have the meanings given to them in these Terms.
16. Disclaimer of warranties
The Service is provided as it is. The Operator does not promise that it will always be available, that it will run without interruption, or that it will be free of errors. One person runs the Service and charges nothing for it, and the Operator guarantees no particular level of availability, response time, or durability of stored data. The Operator does not check Content submitted by Users before it appears, and does not promise that any Content is accurate, current, or reliable. To the extent permitted by applicable law, the Operator disclaims the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. Nothing in these Terms affects any statutory guarantee or warranty that cannot be excluded or limited under mandatory consumer-protection law in your country of residence. That includes the conformity rights users have in the EU and the UK for digital content and digital services: this Section does not exclude or narrow them. This Section states what the Operator does not promise; it does not lower a standard the law sets.
17. Limitation of liability
To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, the Operator is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for loss of profits, revenue, business, data, goodwill, or other intangible losses, arising out of or in connection with your use of, or inability to use, the Service. This applies regardless of the legal theory on which a claim is based and regardless of whether the Operator knew such damages were possible. The Service is provided free of charge, so there is no liability cap measured by what you paid. The Operator's liability is limited to the extent permitted by applicable law. Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits the Operator's liability for: (a) death or personal injury caused by the Operator's negligence; (b) the Operator's gross negligence or wilful misconduct; (c) fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation; or (d) any other liability that applicable law does not permit to be excluded or limited, including mandatory consumer-protection liability under the laws of your country of residence. Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion or limitation of certain warranties or damages; in those jurisdictions the Operator's liability is limited to the greatest extent permitted by law.
18. Indemnification
If you breach these Terms, break the law, or infringe someone else's rights, and the Operator incurs a claim, loss, or cost (including reasonable legal fees) as a result, you will cover it to that extent. This Section applies only where you acted intentionally or negligently, and does not apply to any part caused by the Operator's own acts or omissions. Merely using the Service, or merely having submitted Content, does not trigger this Section. This Section applies only to the extent permitted by applicable law, and does not apply to the extent that a mandatory consumer-protection law of your country of residence limits or prohibits such an obligation.
19. Suspension and termination
The Operator may suspend or terminate your access to the Service in accordance with Section 4 (Accounts and authentication) and Section 10 (Moderation and enforcement). Where the Operator terminates or suspends your account, you will be told why and given a chance to appeal. That holds however clear the breach looks: a clear case is the easiest one to state a reason for, and being sure is not a ground for saying nothing. Where you see it: while an account restriction is in force, every page other than the access-restriction page itself carries a notice at the top with a link to that page, and the Operator also sends a notice into your in-Service notice list setting out the reason. The access-restriction page states the reason recorded against the account, how long the restriction runs — or that it has no end date — that it applies to the Service as a whole, and it carries the appeal form. If you cannot sign in at all the route does not close: write to the contact in Section 31 and say which account it is. Before giving out the reason recorded against an account, the Operator satisfies itself that it is writing to the person who holds it, by asking for something only that person would have — the address the account signs in with, or a message sent from the account itself. Where that cannot be satisfied the Operator says so and tells you only that a restriction exists, because telling a stranger why somebody else was restricted would be a disclosure about that other person. You may stop using the Service at any time, and you can delete your own account from the Account area of the settings page. Deleting an account cannot be undone. If the Operator decides to shut the Service down entirely, notice is posted in the Service at least thirty (30) days beforehand, and during that period you can obtain a copy of the data tied to your account. What that copy contains, and what it leaves out, is set out in Section 11 of the Privacy Policy. Archive deposits are drop-only and are not part of it (Section 29); you can ask for them to be deleted by the route that Section gives. This does not apply where the Operator must stop immediately for reasons outside the Operator's control — such as the hosting provider ceasing service, a legal order, or a disaster — in which case the Operator will give notice as soon as it can. Upon termination, all rights granted to you under these Terms cease immediately. Sections of these Terms which by their nature are intended to survive termination — including ownership, indemnification, disclaimers of warranties, limitation of liability, governing law, and dispute resolution — will so survive. The survival of those Sections does not exclude or limit any right that cannot be excluded or limited under mandatory consumer-protection law in your country of residence, which continues to apply after termination to the same extent as before. The handling and deletion of your Account data and Content following termination are governed by Section 11 (Content deletion and moderation authority), by the Data retention section of the Privacy Policy, and by your rights under applicable data-protection law.
20. Changes to these Terms
The Operator may amend, modify, or replace these Terms at any time. The current version is identified by the version label and the "last updated" date displayed at the top of this page. When the version changes, you will be required to re-accept the updated Terms before using any feature that requires acceptance. Continued use of the Service after acceptance of an updated version constitutes acceptance of that version.
21. Governing law
These Terms and any dispute or claim arising out of or in connection with them (including non-contractual disputes or claims) are governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the Republic of Korea, without regard to its conflict-of-laws provisions. Where a mandatory consumer-protection law of your country of residence grants you stronger rights or protection, that mandatory law will apply to that extent.
22. Dispute resolution
The parties will first attempt in good faith to resolve any dispute arising out of or in connection with these Terms by informal contact through the Support channel, and the parties are encouraged to allow up to sixty (60) days for that informal resolution. This informal step is voluntary: it is not a precondition to, and does not delay or limit, either party's right to bring proceedings before a competent court at any time. Any dispute may be brought before the competent courts of the Republic of Korea, whose jurisdiction is non-exclusive: nothing in this section prevents you from bringing proceedings in the courts of your country of residence where mandatory consumer-protection rules of that jurisdiction grant you such a right, nothing in this section requires you to wait before exercising any mandatory right to bring proceedings before a competent court, and nothing in this section limits any mandatory right you may have to refer the dispute to a competent supervisory authority (such as a data-protection regulator).
23. Severability and entire agreement
If any provision of these Terms is held to be invalid, illegal, or unenforceable by a court of competent jurisdiction, that provision is severed from these Terms and the remaining provisions continue in full force and effect. The Operator does not ask for an invalid provision to be read down into a valid one: doing so would empty out the rule that made it invalid in order to protect you. Whatever that provision covered is governed instead by the default rules of the applicable law. Where Korean law governs, Article 16 of the Republic of Korea Act on the Regulation of Terms and Conditions adds a limit to that: if what is left cannot achieve the purpose of the agreement, or is unfairly disadvantageous to one party, the agreement is void. Section 21 makes Korean law the governing law, so that limit reaches everyone; this Section does not carve anybody out of it. European law is not its opposite either. Article 6(1) of Council Directive 93/13/EEC keeps the rest of the contract binding only “if it is capable of continuing in existence without the unfair terms”, which is the same proviso in different words. Where the mandatory consumer law of your country of residence gives you a different outcome in the case at hand, that law applies to you to that extent — Section 21 provides for it, and Article 6(2) of the same Directive requires it where you are in the Union and the agreement has a close connection with it. This Section does not decide in advance which of two mandatory rules is better for you; that is decided in the case. These Terms, the Privacy Policy, and any additional document published within the Service together form the agreement between you and the Operator regarding the Service, and supersede all prior or contemporaneous agreements, communications, and understandings, whether written or oral, on the same subject matter. How those documents relate to one another is governed by Section 30 (Order of precedence).
24. Languages and controlling version
These Terms are originally drafted in the English language and the Operator may publish translations (including a Korean translation) for the convenience of readers. Each language version is intended to express the same substantive rights and obligations and is binding on a User who has accepted the Terms in that language. Where the English version and a translation set out genuinely different obligations and therefore conflict, the English version prevails. Where wording in either language is merely capable of more than one reading, the English version does not prevail and the wording is read in the way most favourable to the User. The same rule applies to the Privacy Policy. Nothing in this section limits any mandatory consumer-protection law of your country of residence that requires the Operator to communicate with you, or to enforce certain provisions, in your local language; in such cases, that mandatory law continues to apply notwithstanding this section.
25. No waiver; assignment
Failure or delay by the Operator in enforcing any provision of these Terms is not a waiver of the right to enforce that provision later or to enforce any other provision. Neither party may assign or transfer its rights or obligations under these Terms without the other's prior consent. The one exception is that the Operator may assign these Terms, without your consent, to a person who will continue to provide the Service in substantially the same form — but only on at least thirty (30) days' notice. Where the Operator holds an email address for you — Section 4 of the Privacy Policy states that the identity provider's address is stored where the provider exposes one — that notice is sent to you individually at that address by the Operator, because Article 27(1) of the Republic of Korea Personal Information Protection Act and Article 29(1) of its Enforcement Decree require a written or equivalent means and put that duty on the Operator rather than on the software. The Service itself has no mailer; the Operator sends it by hand, which is workable because an assignment happens once. Where the Operator holds no address for you, and so cannot reach you individually without fault of its own, Article 29(2) of the same Enforcement Decree provides for what it does instead: the items are posted on the website for thirty days or more. That is what happens here — the notice is posted in the Service for the whole thirty-day period, and it is posted for everyone, not only for those the Operator cannot otherwise reach. The notice states, as Article 27(1) of the Republic of Korea Personal Information Protection Act requires, that personal data is being transferred; the name, address, telephone number and other contact details of the person receiving it; and what you can do and how, if you do not want the transfer — which is to delete your account before the thirty days end. It also states how to obtain a copy of your data. That copy has the same scope as in Section 19. Any attempted assignment in violation of this section is void.
26. Game multiplayer
NMB's multiplayer (3-4 player co-op) mode is optional. Connections are made directly between participants' devices (peer-to-peer): one user's device acts as the host and runs the session, and the other participants connect to that host. The Operator runs only a lightweight signaling server that brokers the initial connection; once connected, gameplay and chat travel directly between participants and do not pass through the Operator, so the Operator does not host, relay, see, or store them. Because connections are peer-to-peer, a participant's IP address may be visible to other participants in the same session, especially the host. A relay (TURN) may sometimes mask it, but this is not guaranteed. Optional real-time chat travels over the peer-to-peer connection and is relayed by the host (another user), not by the Operator. The Operator does not receive, see, or store chat and therefore cannot moderate it, and there is no profanity or content filter. Chat is sanitized by the software only for control characters and length and is not stored on any server. A room is reached only via its invite link and code; there is no public room listing. A new room defaults to "Approval" mode, in which the host approves each joiner individually; if the host switches the room to "Open" mode, anyone holding the link and code, including people you do not know, joins immediately and can play and chat with you. In Open mode, or in a room whose code has been shared, you may therefore encounter strangers. The host may approve joiners, disable chat, or remove (kick) participants; you may report abuse to the Operator; and the Operator may review reports and take action, including suspending the multiplayer connection service. The Service is not advertised as moderated or safe. Consistent with the minimum age in Section 3, multiplayer and chat are for users sixteen (16) or older; age is self-declared and not verified.
27. Game soundtrack and music
NMB includes background music (the "Soundtrack"). The Soundtrack is provided under its own separate terms of access, which are served together with the game and are the controlling terms for any use of the music; this Section is a short summary and does not replace them. You may use the Soundtrack in your own videos, livestreams, broadcasts, and similar content, including monetized content — where you are paid for your own content and the music merely rides along inside it — provided you clearly and visibly credit the source as Music: NMB — needmoretruth.com, and do not claim or imply any authorship or origin credit for the music (including presenting it as your own work, or as your remix, edit, cover, or version, or as coming from any source other than NMB, whether for yourself or any other artist). You may not, without separate written permission: make money from the music itself, or place it behind a paywall, paid tier, or membership; sell or otherwise commercialize the music; re-upload or redistribute the audio on its own; put it into another game, app, or product; use it in an advertisement or other work a brand commissions or controls (sponsored videos that you control are generally fine; advertisements or brand-commissioned work need permission first); use it to train, fine-tune, or evaluate any AI or machine-learning model, or for automated data mining; register, claim, or monetize it in any content-identification or rights-management system such as Content ID; or create remixes, covers, mashups, or other derivative audio from it. You also may not use it in content that is unlawful or that the full terms specifically prohibit (a narrow floor covering, for example, content that sexualizes a minor, promotes terrorism, violent extremism, or hatred, harasses or doxxes a person, or is fraudulent or deceptive). These are examples only; further conditions apply under the full terms in LICENSE.txt, which control. The Operator attributes the Soundtrack as source only, makes no claim of authorship, and gives no warranty of title. The copyright status of the Soundtrack is uncertain and unsettled; the Operator does not waive and expressly reserves any rights — including any rights it may have under unfair-competition law (in Korea, the Unfair Competition Prevention and Trade Secret Protection Act) — that do or may subsist in it, now or in future, and nothing in this Section is a waiver, transfer, or licence of any such right. Those access terms apply as a condition of using the music regardless of how copyright may or may not subsist in it. For the avoidance of doubt, the Soundtrack is excluded from the ownership and copyright statement in Section 13, and this Section governs its use. The full, current terms are available at https://needmoretruth.com/games/nmb/audio/LICENSE.txt, and we will provide the current text on request at the contact address below.
28. Direct messages
Members can exchange direct messages that pass only between the two of them. A direct message is not a public surface and is not shown to other users. It is not, however, sealed from the Operator: as set out below, the Operator is technically able to read it. Direct messages are stored on the server unencrypted. This is not end-to-end encryption, so the Operator, who can reach the server's data, is technically able to read them. The Service has no report button attached to a direct message. If you receive a message you believe is unlawful, tell the Operator through the in-Service Bug & Operations Reports channel with enough detail to find it — who sent it and roughly when. That channel is the notice route for direct messages and for the Archive, it is open to Members and to anyone else, and the Operator tells the person who sent the notice what it decided and why. The Operator reads the body of a direct message only where a lawful warrant or court order requires it. When fixing a fault in the Service the Operator works from the outside of a message — identifiers, timestamps, size — not its body. There is no administrator screen for this, so neither kind of access happens through a control the Service enforces — the Operator would be working directly against the database. That is stated rather than glossed, because it decides what the following promise is worth: it is an undertaking the Operator gives, not a lock the machine holds. The Operator undertakes that on any access to the body of a direct message it records the access, its time, its scope and its ground in the audit log, and tells both people in that conversation afterwards, unless the law forbids telling them. Building a sanctioned read path that produces that record automatically is on the Operator's list, and until it exists this paragraph is what stands. The licence in Section 5 does not apply to direct messages. A message you have sent cannot be edited. You can choose in settings who may message you (everyone, people you follow, or no one), and blocking someone stops new messages from that person. You can hide a conversation from your own list, but hiding it does not remove it from the other person's list, and it reappears for you if a new message arrives. Deleting your account also deletes the conversations your account was part of and the messages inside them, including messages the other person wrote.
29. Archive
The Archive is a feature that opens at a separate address which is not linked from anywhere else in the Service. A code obtained from the Operator is required to enter. The Archive is drop-only. Whoever deposits something cannot retrieve it or see a list of it afterwards. A reply can be read only where the Operator has opened a pickup inbox for that purpose. What you deposit is encrypted to the Operator's public key before it is stored. The matching private key is held by this Service's server, so the Operator is able to open what you deposit. This Section does not promise end-to-end encryption. Executable files are refused, and a file's type is determined from the file itself rather than from its declared name. There is an upper limit on the size of a single deposit. The licence in Section 5 does not apply to anything deposited in the Archive. The Operator does not publish deposits and does not place them on any public surface of the Service. If you want something you deposited removed, tell the Operator through the contact point in Section 31. The Archive stores no identity for a depositor, so the Operator cannot recognise you from an account; what it can do is find the deposit from what you tell it. Give the file name, the approximate time you left it, or anything else that identifies it, and the Operator will act on that. If what you provide is not enough to identify a deposit, the Operator says so and says what else would help; it does not refuse the request in advance. The same route is open to someone who is not the depositor. If you believe material about you was left here by someone else, tell the Operator through the same contact point, describing the material and roughly when it may have been left. You do not have to prove you are the depositor to use this route, because you are not. What the Operator does with it is bounded, and the bounds are stated because this route could otherwise be used to reach into other people's deposits. It opens a deposit only so far as is needed to check the claim; it deletes only what actually relates to the person who asked; and it needs enough to identify the material — a bare claim over a wide period is answered by asking for more, not by opening everything in that period. It tells you what it found. How long a deposit is kept: until the Operator has dealt with what was left and no longer needs it. A deposit has no account behind it, so no fixed period can be attached to it in advance; instead the Operator reviews the Archive at least once every twelve months and deletes everything that is no longer needed at that review. Deleting a deposit removes it from the live Service at once. Copies inside backups go on the schedule in Section 10 of the Privacy Policy — up to about three months on the origin disk, ninety-one days for the off-site copy — and the off-site storage refuses deletion of anything younger than ninety days, so an earlier removal there is not possible even on request. What happens to that copy in the meantime is set out in Section 10 of the Privacy Policy: it is opened for nothing but a restore and a restore check, and if a restore ever happens the Operator re-applies, before the service comes back, the deletions it holds outside the database, and posts a notice in the Service that a restore has happened so that anything not carried by the copy can be asked for again. You must not deposit material that breaks the law or infringes anyone else's rights. The Operator may delete such material and may revoke the code.
30. Order of precedence
More than one document can apply to your use of the Service: these Terms, the Privacy Policy, additional terms that apply to a particular channel, and the Code of Conduct that applies to channel moderators. Where they conflict, they apply in this order: (a) mandatory law of your country of residence; (b) for anything about the handling of personal data, the Privacy Policy; (c) these Terms; (d) channel-level additional terms and the Code of Conduct. A document that has not been published does not bind you. Channel-level additional terms are shown in full, in the place where they apply, before you write in that channel; a condition that was not shown has no effect. The Code of Conduct is published permanently for anyone to read. Channel-level additional terms may only add, never subtract. They may add rules that apply in that channel, or give you more than these Terms give you. They may not widen the Operator's licence, extend retention, narrow your rights of deletion or access, or reduce the Operator's liability further. A provision that does so has no effect to that extent. Where two or more of these documents say different things about the same matter, whichever is more favourable to you applies, regardless of the order above. For the handling of personal data, whichever is more favourable to the data subject applies.
31. Contact
The Operator provides the Service from the Republic of Korea (대한민국). Questions or notices about these Terms can be sent by email to [email protected], or through the in-Service Support channel, or through the in-Service Bug & Operations Reports channel for technical or operational concerns. The in-Service forms are the preferred channels because they let your request be tracked and handled fairly; the email address above is provided as a direct alternative and as the contact point of the Operator for the purposes of applicable data-protection law. One person runs the Service; it charges no fee and carries no advertising. Consistent with the data-minimisation design of the Service, the Operator does not publish a personal legal name or postal address; the country of establishment and the contact email above are the Operator's disclosed identifying and contact details.
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1. Summary
The Service processes personal data to the extent needed to run a community board and to keep abuse out. What is stored is listed category by category in Section 4, and that list is the most important part of this Policy. The Service does not store raw IP addresses, does not sell personal data, does not display third-party advertising, and does not store passwords. Account data is sourced from your sign-in provider (GitHub). IP-based anti-spam keys are not stored as conventional salted hashes but as one-way HMAC values computed with a daily-rotating random salt that is irrecoverably discarded at the end of each UTC day, so that the Operator cannot — even with full database access — derive yesterday's IP-based identifiers from today's. You can delete your account yourself from the Account area of the settings page, and you may also request deletion through the in-Service Bug & Operations Reports channel. Note that posts and comments you already published are not deleted: the author name is replaced with an erased marker and the link to your account is cut.
2. Data controller
The Operator is the data controller (the "personal information controller" under the Republic of Korea Personal Information Protection Act) for the personal data processed in connection with the Service. The Operator provides the Service from the Republic of Korea (대한민국). One person runs the Service; it charges no fee and carries no advertising. Consistent with the data-minimisation design of the Service, the Operator does not publish a personal legal name, postal address, or business-registration number, and discloses instead the country of establishment together with the contact email below. Under the Korean Personal Information Protection Act, the person responsible for personal-data protection is the Operator personally: Article 31(2) provides that where no such person has been designated, the controller's representative or owner holds the role. Article 30(1)(6) of the same Act asks a privacy notice to carry either the name of that person, or the name of the department that handles personal-data work and complaints together with its telephone number and other contact details. Neither limb is met by what is published here. The Operator does not publish a personal legal name; there is no department, because one person runs the Service; and no telephone number is published. What is published instead is one email address that reaches the Operator personally — [email protected] — alongside the in-Service Support and Bug & Operations Reports channels. The Operator does not claim that this satisfies Article 30(1)(6). It is what one person running a free service can offer without publishing a home address or a personal telephone number, and every request sent there is read and answered by the Operator personally. You can contact the Operator about this Policy or to exercise your rights at that address, or through the in-Service Support or Bug & Operations Reports channels. No separate Data Protection Officer within the meaning of GDPR Article 37 has been appointed, because none of the three cases in which that Article requires one applies here (a public authority, large-scale regular and systematic monitoring, or large-scale processing of special categories). The Operator handles every data-subject request personally. The Operator has not appointed a representative in the European Union or the United Kingdom under Article 27 of the EU/UK GDPR. Article 27(2)(a) lifts that obligation where the processing is occasional, does not include large-scale processing of special categories of data or of criminal-conviction data, and is unlikely to result in a risk to people's rights and freedoms — all three at once. The Operator does not claim that exemption, and equally does not concede that Article 3(2) is engaged; that question turns on whether the Service targets people in the Union, and the Service is offered in Korean and English from Korea to whoever finds it, with no marketing, no currency, no shipping and no country targeting. What is certain is the plain fact: no representative has been appointed, because one person runs the Service without charging for it and cannot carry the cost. If a supervisory authority takes a different view, the Operator will deal with it directly at the address above. No legal representative under Article 13 of the EU Digital Services Act has been appointed either. That Regulation requires two separate points of contact and both of them are the email address above. Article 11 requires one for Member States' authorities, the Commission and the Board. Article 12 requires one for users of the Service, who may equally use the in-Service Support or Bug & Operations Reports channels, so that reaching the Operator never depends on an automated tool alone. As Article 11(3) requires, the language that may be used with these points of contact is English; Korean may also be used. EU/EEA and UK data subjects retain every right described in this Policy and may at any time contact the Operator directly at the email above and lodge a complaint with their local supervisory authority (Section 11).
3. Lawful basis for processing
The Service processes personal data on the following lawful bases under applicable law (including, where relevant, EU/EEA GDPR Article 6, UK GDPR, the Korean Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA), the California Consumer Privacy Act and California Privacy Rights Act (CCPA/CPRA), and equivalent regimes elsewhere): (a) performance of the User-Operator agreement constituted by the Terms of Use; (b) the Operator's legitimate interest in preventing abuse, fraud, and security incidents, in operating the Service safely, and in understanding overall usage of, and maintaining and improving, the Service (including through the aggregate, cookie-less analytics described in Section 7); (c) compliance with applicable legal obligations to which the Operator is subject; and (d) the User's explicit consent obtained via the consent gate before any processing for which consent is the appropriate legal basis. Which basis carries which category of Section 4: account details and what you post, direct messages, saved posts, lists, hidden words and channel-level consents rest on (a), performance of the agreement. Abuse-prevention values (IP-derived hashes, rate limits, automatic blocks), the audit log, channel-level blocks and their reason notes, reading history, and channel-moderator roles and evaluations rest on (b), legitimate interests. Archive deposits rest on (b) alone: a deposit can be left without an account, so there is no agreement to perform, and the interest is the plain one of receiving material somebody chose to send the Operator. That is the hardest balance on this page, because a deposit is a whole file the Operator can open, it may name people who never sent anything, and the depositor is not identified — so the limits the Operator accepts are part of the balance and not a courtesy. It opens a deposit only so far as is needed to answer a specific question put to it, keeps no listing and no index of what is inside, publishes nothing, deletes a deposit when the depositor or a person named in it asks (Section 29 of the Terms), and deletes what is left at the twelve-month review. With those limits the interest is a narrow one that does not override the rights of the people concerned; without them it would not be, and the Operator would have to stop taking deposits rather than widen it. The remaining categories of Section 4 are these. The viewer cookie, the Guest label on a submission, sanction records, ban appeals, notification records and post-move requests rest on (b) — keeping the board usable, being able to show what was done, and answering the person who wrote in. The name and address somebody leaves on a content report or a ban appeal rest on (b) as well, and the interest is stated exactly: being able to answer them, which is what Article 16(4) and (5) of the EU Digital Services Act require of a notice mechanism. Blocks and follows between members rest on (a): they are features you asked for as a Member, and without them the feature does not work. A Guest has no account and no agreement to perform, so the deletion password a Guest sets on their own post rests on (b), and the interest is the Guest's own — being able to take back what you wrote without an account. The record of which versions of the Terms and this Policy you accepted rests on (a): it is the record of the agreement itself, which is what makes it possible to say which text binds you and which text the Operator must honour. Anything the law requires to be kept rests on (c). Some personal data does not come from you. That is true of a person placed in a list another member made, a moderator who has been evaluated, a person named in a channel-level block record, and a person named inside a file someone deposited in the Archive. The basis is (b), legitimate interests, and the source is the other user who created that material. Who that user is, is decided item by item on the same balance as access in Section 11 — where it is withheld you are told that it was withheld and why. What the Operator does about telling those people is stated here rather than left open. For a person named inside a deposit the Operator holds no identity at all and cannot reach them. For the other three, telling the person would defeat the thing itself: telling somebody that another member put them in a private list turns the list into a message aimed at them, which is exactly the harm the design avoids, and the same is true of a channel-level block note. The Operator therefore relies on Article 14(5)(b) of the GDPR for all four, and the measure that provision requires in its place is this: this Policy is public, it names the four groups, the categories held about each are set out in Section 4, the retention is in Section 10, and every right in Section 11 — including erasure and objection — is open to them on the same terms as to anybody else, through the contact routes in Section 11. Where the basis is (b), the interest is named here rather than left as a label. Abuse-prevention values, rate limits and automatic blocks: keeping the board usable and keeping spam and repeated abuse off it. The audit log: being able to reconstruct what an administrator or a moderator did, which is what makes a moderation action contestable at all. Channel-level blocks and their reason notes: letting a channel moderator apply that channel's rules consistently and show why. Reading history: showing you what is new since you last looked, which is the only thing it is used for. Channel-moderator roles and evaluations of moderators: knowing who holds a role, and letting members say how it is being used. In every case the interest is the Service working as a board at all, and it is weighed against your rights each time you object — see the objection paragraph in Section 11. What you must provide, and what happens if you do not. An account cannot be created without the profile the identity provider returns and the tokens that keep you signed in; that is the whole of what is required, and without it there is no account. Everything else in Section 4 comes from using a feature you chose to use. Declining any of those features costs you nothing but the feature itself: you can read the whole public site with no account at all, and you can post as a Guest.
4. Categories of personal data we store
(a) Account profile data received from your sign-in provider: provider name (GitHub), provider account ID, login name, public display name, optional short display-name suffix of letters and digits, avatar URL, and email address where exposed by the provider. The OAuth access and refresh tokens issued by the sign-in provider are also stored so that your signed-in session can be maintained; they are not used for any purpose other than authentication. (b) Content you submit: post titles and bodies, comment bodies, reactions, content reports, support tickets, and bug & operations reports. A content report also carries what the report form asks for and you choose to give — a name and an email address, both optional — kept for one purpose only, so the Operator can confirm receipt and tell you what was decided. The Operator deletes the address the moment it has answered, and in any event when the report is cleared out (Section 10). Nothing forces you to give either: leave both blank and the report is still filed, and there is then nowhere to answer. (c) For Guest submissions and Member submissions made in Guest Mode only, an HMAC-SHA256 value of the request IP computed with the current day's random salt — used as a cooldown, deduplication, ban, and audit key. The salt is rotated at the end of each UTC day and the previous salt is irrecoverably discarded, so the value cannot be linked across day boundaries even with full database access. Member submissions do not have an IP-derived value stored against them at all; the Account identifier already serves the moderation purpose. (d) Raw IP addresses are not stored. (e) An opaque random viewer identifier cookie used to count unique post views. (f) The publicly displayed Guest identifier shown as "Guest #CODE"; the code is the first ten base-36 digits of the HMAC value in (c) and is therefore tied to the current day only. The Operator cannot reverse the code into an IP and cannot link a code observed on one day to a code observed on another day. (g) Audit-log entries describing automated and manual moderation actions, including the actor, the target, and — for entries that relate to a Guest action, to a Member action carried out in Guest Mode, or to an IP-level access restriction — the current day's IP HMAC. Audit entries that relate to a Member action made under the Member's Account do not include an IP HMAC; the Member identifier is sufficient for moderation review. (h) A record of your acceptance of the current Terms of Use and Privacy Policy versions, stored against your Account if you are signed in or in a first-party browser cookie if you are not. (i) For Guest submissions and Member submissions made in Guest Mode, a one-way bcrypt hash of the deletion password set at write time. The original password is never stored; the hash cannot be reversed. This data is deleted when the associated submission is deleted. (j) For Member sanctions, an internal record of any active access restriction (Account-level write timeout, suspension, or termination) including its stated reason and duration. (k) Ban-appeal submissions: when a User submits a ban-appeal form, the following are stored so the Operator can answer — the body of that submission; a contact address, if you choose to give one, which is optional and is the only way to answer somebody who is not signed in; the Account identifier, if you are signed in; and the day-scoped IP value described in (c), which is what ties the appeal to the restriction it is about. The contact address is deleted the moment the Operator answers, and the appeal itself is cleared out afterwards (Section 10). (l) In-app notification records: where a Member-visible notification is generated (for example, when a post on which the Member has commented is removed, when the Operator replies to a Member's bug or operations report, or when a restriction is placed on the Member's content or account), the notice is stored so the Member can read it. Marking a notice read does not delete it — a restriction notice is the only copy the Member has of why, so clearing the list must not destroy it. A notice is kept until the Member deletes it, until the Member's Account is deleted, and in any event no longer than three years from the day it was written (Section 10). (m) Software version-history entries (update log): the Operator records internal notes about software updates in a log visible only to the Operator. These entries do not contain personal data and are retained for as long as the Operator considers them useful. (n) Relationship data set by a Member: the block and follow relationships a Member creates between their Account and other Members' Accounts, stored so that the Service can apply the Member's blocking and following choices. (u) Direct messages: the text of messages exchanged only between Members, who sent each one and when, and, per conversation and per person, the time each last read it and the time each hid it from their own list. Message text is stored unencrypted, so the Operator, who can reach the server's data, is technically able to read it. The Service has no feature for reporting a direct message and no administrator screen for reading one. The Operator reads the text of a direct message only where a lawful warrant or court order requires it; when fixing a fault, only envelope values such as identifiers, times and sizes are looked at, not the text. Section 28 of the Terms of Use states the same rule and the audit and notification duties that go with it. (v) Archive deposits: files and notes submitted through the code-gated feature that opens at a separate address. A deposit is encrypted to the Operator's public key before storage; the matching private key is held by this Service's server, so the Operator is able to open it. The file name, size, and time of deposit are stored with it. (w) A Member's reading history: a pair of Member identifier and post identifier, kept so that repeated views by the same Member count once. (x) The list of posts a Member has saved. Saving is not visible to anyone else and is not counted anywhere. (y) Lists a Member has created: the list name, whether it is private, and the identifiers of the Members placed in it. Members placed in a list are not told. (z) Words a Member has chosen to hide. (aa) Channel-level consent records: where additional terms apply to a particular channel, the fact that the User agreed in that channel and when. (bb) Channel-level block records: the fact that a User's writing was blocked in a particular channel, when, and any internal reason note left by the Operator or a channel moderator. Reason notes are not published. (cc) Channel-moderator records: the fact that a Member holds or held a channel-moderator role and for how long, and evaluations Members have left about a channel moderator. (dd) Post-move requests: the fact that a Member proposed moving their own post to another channel, or answered such a proposal, and when.
5. Categories of personal data we do NOT store
The Service does not store: raw IP addresses; passwords; payment information; precise geolocation data; advertising identifiers; biometric data; government-issued identifiers; or, among the items the Operator asks you for, any category designated "sensitive" or "special category" under applicable law. What you type yourself is another matter: nothing stops you from putting anything into your own words, and direct messages and the Archive are where that is most likely. The Operator does not ask for such material, does not classify it, and does not decide anything on the basis of it — but does not pretend it is absent once stored. You are safer not putting it there. Where such material is stored, this Policy does not claim your consent for it. Anything you post on a public surface you have manifestly made public yourself, which is the condition in GDPR Article 9(2)(e). For a direct message or an Archive deposit there is no condition to point to, and this Policy does not invent one. Nobody asked you for consent, and a choice made after reading two sections of the Terms is not the explicit consent Article 9(2)(a) requires; Article 9(2)(f) covers the making of a legal claim, not the storing that happens long before any claim exists. Korean law is narrower still: Article 23(1) of the Personal Information Protection Act admits two gateways only — separate consent, obtained apart from consent to ordinary personal data, or a provision of law that requires or permits the processing — and neither is present here. So the Operator does not treat any of this as permission, and does not describe it as a lawful exception. What it does instead is hold back. It does not ask for such material. No screen in the Service shows the Operator a direct message; reading one would mean working on the database by hand, which the Operator does only under a warrant or a court order (Section 28 of the Terms). It does not classify or index such material, does not use it to decide anything, and deletes an Archive deposit when you ask. Where such material is about somebody other than the person who wrote it, the Operator does not seek it, deletes it when it becomes aware of it, and Section 29 of the Terms gives anyone the route to ask for that. A conversation is stored only while both accounts exist — deleting either account deletes the whole conversation, both sides' messages with it. Posts are treated the opposite way (Section 11), and the difference is how many people are involved: a conversation has exactly two, each of whom already holds all of it, while a public thread has an open-ended set of people whose own writing would come down with yours. The Service does not perform behavioural profiling for advertising purposes. The live database retains no IP-derived value beyond the current UTC day. A backup is a point-in-time copy, so the values that existed when it was taken remain inside it until that bundle rotates out (Section 10).
6. Daily salt rotation and the data-minimisation design
Anti-spam, deduplication, ban, and audit keys derived from a User's request IP are computed using HMAC-SHA256 with a random 256-bit salt stored in an in-memory cache. At the end of each UTC day, the previous day's salt is discarded and replaced with a new random salt. Once a salt is discarded, neither the Operator nor any third party can recover it; the corresponding HMAC values become permanently unlinkable to the IP addresses that produced them and to any HMAC values produced under any other salt. This design is intentional. It means that: (a) an IP-level access restriction ("IP ban") cannot meaningfully bind beyond the current UTC day; (b) the Operator cannot, on request from a User, identify or recover that User's past Guest submissions across day boundaries, because no link exists in the database; and (c) the Operator cannot, on request from law enforcement or any other third party, provide a User's IP address or a value derivable from it, because the Service neither stores raw IP addresses nor retains the salt necessary to recompute prior-day HMAC values. The intent of this design is to comply with the minimisation principles of the Korean Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA) and the EU/EEA GDPR by limiting the Operator's ability to know more than is necessary for the safe operation of the Service. The trade-off is that determined attackers who rotate their network paths cannot be excluded by IP-level restriction alone; the Operator accepts that trade-off and relies on Account-level measures, narrow automated filtering, and the third-party human-verification challenge to maintain Service integrity.
7. Cookies and similar technologies
The Service uses a small number of strictly first-party cookies, all set as HttpOnly where technically possible: an authentication session cookie when you are signed in; a locale cookie remembering your language choice; an opaque viewer cookie (nmt_vid) used to count unique post views; a consent cookie (nmt_consent) recording your acceptance of the current Terms of Use and Privacy Policy versions; a functional cookie (nmt_mode), with a one-year lifetime, that records whether you have switched on the optional 'NMT mode' visual theme; a functional cookie (nmt_palette), with a one-year lifetime, that stores the ten-character code of a personal colour palette you have chosen for NMT mode, if you have saved one; and, only if you reach the Service through a known misspelling of its domain, a functional cookie (nmt_typo_hint) with a thirty-day lifetime that records that a one-time informational banner about the correct address should be shown; and a functional cookie (nmt_snapshot_mode) with a seven-day lifetime that records whether you have switched on 'snapshot mode' (an option that replaces displayed public posts with uniform example content — you can switch it on and off yourself, and no identifying information about your use of it is sent to the Operator). In addition, two strictly first-party consent-record cookies — distinct from the display-preference cookies above and, like the nmt_consent cookie, holding only a consent marker rather than any identifying value — may be set, each HttpOnly and Secure: a cookie (nmt_iceberg_consent) with a one-year lifetime that, once you accept the content notice shown on the optional in-depth information page at /needmoretruth (reached from the About page), records that acceptance so the notice is not shown to you again; and, where a community board you view requires acceptance of its own additional board-specific terms and you are not signed in, a cookie whose name is the prefix nmt_mt_ followed by that board's identifier, recording your acceptance of those board terms so you are not asked again (a signed-in Member's acceptance is recorded against the Member's Account rather than in a cookie). These two are strictly necessary functional cookies and involve no non-essential tracking. The nmt_mode, nmt_palette, nmt_typo_hint and nmt_snapshot_mode cookies carry only a non-identifying display preference and are intentionally not HttpOnly because they are read by a client-side script. Your light/dark-mode preference is not stored in a cookie at all; it is kept in your browser's local storage (localStorage) by the theme library and is never transmitted to the Operator. The Cloudflare Turnstile human-verification challenge displayed during write actions may set short-lived cookies on the cloudflare.com or challenges.cloudflare.com domains under Cloudflare's own privacy policy; those cookies are strictly necessary to complete the security challenge and are not under the Operator's control. The Service does not use any third-party advertising, marketing, or cross-site tracking cookies, and presents no consent banner because it sets no non-essential cookie that would require one. In addition to cookies, your browser also stores short-lived entries in session storage (sessionStorage) for two client-side conveniences: preserving the contents of a compose form across language switches (cleared after five minutes or when the tab closes), and recording that the one-time first-login welcome banner has been shown in the current session. Both are confined to your browser, are never transmitted to the Operator, and are emptied automatically when you close the tab. The Service uses a feature called 'Web Analytics' provided by Cloudflare, the company that operates the network gateway through which the Service is connected to the public internet. According to Cloudflare's official documentation, this feature does not use any client-side state — it sets no cookie and writes nothing to your browser's local or session storage — and it does not 'fingerprint' individual visitors by their IP address, User-Agent string, or any other signal for the purpose of producing analytics. It is therefore an aggregate, privacy-first statistics tool, and because it stores or accesses no information on your device it does not require a cookie-consent banner under EU/EEA ePrivacy rules. When you visit a page of the Service, Cloudflare, at its gateway layer (commonly called the 'edge'), inserts a small measurement JavaScript file (served from the static.cloudflareinsights.com domain) into the response it sends back to your browser. Your browser then runs that script, which sends aggregate, non-identifying information — the address of the page you visited, the approximate amount of time you spent there, the broad family of your browser and operating system, and a coarse geographic location at the country level (for example, 'Republic of Korea' or 'Japan', not a city or district) — to Cloudflare's own systems (cloudflareinsights.com). The Operator only views the aggregate statistics that Cloudflare compiles from the above information (for example, the total page-view count for today, or the most-viewed pages), uses them solely to understand overall usage of the Service, and never uses them for advertising, profiling, or any attempt to identify an individual. The Service does not separately collect or retain any information that would identify any individual visitor in connection with this feature, and neither the Operator nor Cloudflare sells this data. To the extent that any information processed in connection with this feature constitutes personal data, the Operator relies on its legitimate interest (EU/EEA GDPR Article 6(1)(f)) in understanding overall usage of, and in maintaining and improving, the Service — an interest balanced against your rights and limited to aggregate, non-identifying statistics. Information that Cloudflare collects and processes in connection with this feature is governed by Cloudflare's own privacy policy (https://www.cloudflare.com/privacypolicy/).
8. Third-party processors and recipients
The following third-party providers may process technical metadata or personal data in connection with the Service and act as their own controllers and/or processors under their respective privacy policies: GitHub (authentication); Cloudflare (DNS, edge, TLS termination, tunnelling between the public internet and the origin server, the Turnstile human-verification challenge, and the object storage that holds the off-site copy of the database backups). Of these, backup storage is work the Operator entrusts to a provider. For that part the Operator is responsible for choosing and supervising the provider and answers to you for what the provider does; What is entrusted is set by the Operator, not by the provider: one copy of the database backup a day, kept for the period stated in Section 10, for restoring the Service and for testing that a restore works, and for nothing else. The provider's data-processing addendum records the safeguards that apply to that instruction; it does not define the instruction. Authentication (GitHub), by contrast, is a relationship you have with that provider directly, and it acts as its own controller for its part. The Operator does not determine how that part is handled, so please consult that provider's own policy. Some personal data is also seen by other Users. A channel moderator or deputy moderator sees how many reports are open in the channel they moderate — a number, not the reports themselves and not who made them — and can see, hide, unhide and pin content there, including content that is hidden from everyone else in that channel. They also see the title, an excerpt and the stated reason of any request to move a post into their channel. They cannot open a report or learn who reported anybody. Moderators are unpaid volunteers who are ordinary Members. Their legal position is stated rather than left open: they are persons acting under the Operator's authority within the meaning of Article 29 of the GDPR, and 개인정보취급자 under Article 28 of the Republic of Korea Personal Information Protection Act. They are not separate controllers and not processors — the Operator remains the controller for everything they touch, and answers for it. They act on the Operator's instruction and are bound by the Code of Conduct published at /conduct; Section 7 of that Code obliges them to use what they see only for the role, not to disclose it or pass it on, and that obligation continues after the role ends. The Operator can withdraw the role at any time. What a moderator can reach is limited to the channel they moderate: no moderator can read direct messages, open Archive deposits, or see the audit log.
9. International data transfers
The origin server is operated in the Republic of Korea. The Cloudflare network and the OAuth identity providers (GitHub) operate globally, so using the Service from outside Korea will involve the transfer of technical metadata and account data to or through other jurisdictions, including the United States. By using the Service from outside Korea you acknowledge that your personal data may be processed in jurisdictions whose data-protection regimes may differ from your own. For transfers of personal data out of the EU/EEA or the United Kingdom, the relevant providers act as the exporting parties and rely on their own transfer mechanisms — principally the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses (and the UK Addendum) and, where applicable, an adequacy decision or the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework; details are set out in each provider's own privacy documentation (GitHub and Cloudflare). In addition, the Operator keeps a copy of the database backups off-site. That is storage of personal data abroad, so the details are published here as Article 28-8(1)3 of the Korean Personal Information Protection Act requires. What is transferred: everything listed in Section 4 of this Policy, as it stood when the copy was taken. Where, when and how: once a day, uploaded over an encrypted connection to Cloudflare's object storage. Which country: the storage region is set to Asia-Pacific, but a region setting is a placement request rather than a guarantee, and the provider's binding jurisdiction restrictions cover only the European Union, the United States and the US federal FedRAMP environment — there is no Asia-Pacific or Korean option to choose. The consequence is stated plainly rather than papered over: the Operator does not know, and has no means of determining, which country any given copy is held in. Cloudflare, Inc. decides that. What the Operator can state is that the copy may be held outside the Republic of Korea, that it is uploaded over an encrypted connection, and that the recipient is bound by the contract described below wherever it holds the copy. It does not state more than that, and in particular it does not represent that it has assessed the law of the country of destination, because it does not know which country that is. This is a limitation of the arrangement, and the Operator treats it as one to remove rather than one to live with; until it is removed, the paragraph below sets out what you can do about it. Who receives it: Cloudflare, Inc., 101 Townsend St., San Francisco, CA 94107, United States. Its data protection officer is reachable at [email protected], questions about safeguards at [email protected], and rights requests at [email protected]; its transfer documentation is published at https://www.cloudflare.com/trust-hub/gdpr/. Purpose: restoring the service if the origin server is lost, and checking that such a restore actually works. Retention: an off-site copy is deleted ninety-one (91) days after it is written. That is enforced by a lifecycle rule on the storage itself, not by a script the Operator has to remember to run. How to refuse: this copy is a backup of the whole service and cannot be made with one user left out, so there is no setting that excludes you from it. That is a limit of the mechanism, not a refusal of your right. You may object to this processing at any time on grounds relating to your particular situation, by writing to the contact in Section 2; the Operator will either stop the processing you object to or explain the compelling legitimate grounds for continuing, and will answer within one month. Where the Republic of Korea Personal Information Protection Act applies, an objection of this kind is a demand to suspend processing under Article 37 of that Act, and the answer has two halves because the copies do. For everything made from now on the Operator suspends without delay: your data stops going into any copy taken after the demand. For copies already written it cannot suspend, because a backup is a point-in-time copy and one person cannot be lifted out of it. As to those the Operator declines, on the ground in Article 37(2)(4) of that Act — that suspension would make it impossible to perform the agreement to provide the Service — and tells you that ground and how to contest it within ten days, as Article 37(4) and its Enforcement Decree require. If you tell the Operator you are ending that agreement, which means deleting your Account, the ground falls away and only the first half is left. Refusing has no other consequence. Deleting your Account is worth stating exactly, because it does not reach everything: your account data and your direct messages leave the live database, so they are in no copy taken after that; posts and comments you leave behind stay up, and a sanction record stays for the period in Section 10, and both keep appearing in later copies until they too are deleted — Section 11 explains why posts are treated that way and gives you the route to have them deleted. Data already inside a copy is deleted when that copy reaches ninety-one (91) days off-site, or when its bundle rotates out on the origin disk. To the extent data of users in the EU/EEA or the UK is included: no adequacy decision is relied on for this transfer, and the Operator does not claim that one covers it. The recipient is a United States entity, and the safeguard relied on is the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses (GDPR Article 46(2)(c)), which form part of that provider's data-processing addendum. Because the country of destination is not determinable, the Operator has not completed the assessment that Clause 14(b) of those Clauses calls for, and says so here instead of warranting an assessment it has not made. If you are in the EU/EEA or the UK and you do not want your data in this transfer while that is the position, you may say so to the contact in Section 2, and the Operator will act on it the only way the mechanism allows — by deleting your account, which keeps your account data and your direct messages out of every copy taken after that. It does not reach posts and comments you leave behind; Section 11 gives the route for those. A copy of the Standard Contractual Clauses that apply to this transfer can be obtained by writing to the contact in Section 2; the Operator will send the version in force, with commercial terms that are not part of the safeguards removed. The provider also publishes its own data-processing addendum, which contains those Clauses, at https://www.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-customer-dpa/. The Operator does not itself export personal data to any further third party beyond these providers.
10. Data retention
Account profile data is retained while your Account is active. You can delete your own Account from the Account area of the settings page, and you may also request deletion through the email contact, the Support channel, or the Bug & Operations Reports channel. By either route the Operator deletes your Account profile data, except for fields that the Operator must retain to satisfy a legal obligation or to resolve an open dispute. Posts and comments are retained until they are deleted by the User, by the Operator, or under any periodic retention policy that may be in force. IP-derived HMAC values stored against Guest submissions and audit entries become unlinkable at most twenty-four (24) hours after creation through salt rotation and are not separately deleted; older values become indistinguishable random strings. Database backups are made daily and kept on the same physical disk as the origin server — not a separate disk. Retention runs in three tiers: the newest thirty bundles, one per week for twelve weeks, and one per month for three months. The longest-lived bundle is therefore about three months. A backup is a point-in-time copy, so one person's data cannot be picked out of it. What you ask to have deleted stays inside a bundle until that bundle is deleted. To shorten that window, the monthly tier was cut from twenty-four months to three on 22 August 2026. During that window the copy is used for nothing but restoring and restore-checking, and if the service is ever restored from a backup, the Operator re-applies the deletion requests it holds outside the database and posts a notice in the Service that a restore has happened, so that a deletion made inside the Service after the copy was taken can be made again. There are three kinds of copy and they are not deleted by the same mechanism, so each is stated separately. (a) The dated bundles on the origin disk: deleted by the three-tier rotation above, longest-lived about three months. (b) The off-site copy: once a day the newest bundle is copied to the object storage named in Section 8, and each such copy is deleted ninety-one (91) days after it is written, by a lifecycle rule on the storage itself. The storage also refuses deletion of anything younger than ninety days — that refusal is a lock the Operator set, to stop an attacker who reaches the account from wiping the backups, and it cannot be waived for one object. So when you ask for erasure and a copy of your data is inside an off-site object younger than ninety days, the Operator cannot delete it there. There is no legal exception to claim for that, and this Policy does not claim one. Article 17 of the GDPR gives no ground for keeping a copy because deleting it is inconvenient, and Article 36(2) of the Korean Personal Information Protection Act requires deletion without delay and has no equivalent of putting data beyond use. So what follows is a shortfall stated plainly, not a right being asserted: for as long as the lock stands, that copy is read for nothing but a disaster restore and a restore check, it is never used to look anybody up, and if a restore ever happens the Operator re-applies, before the service comes back, every deletion it still holds — those asked for by message, which it keeps outside the database. A deletion you made yourself inside the Service after that copy was taken has its only record inside the same database, so it cannot survive the copy; the Operator posts a notice in the Service when a restore has happened so that you can make it again. That is stated rather than promised away. The outside date is ninety-one days from the day the copy was written. The lock is there to stop somebody who reaches the storage account from wiping the backups; the Operator has weighed that against the delay and left the lock in place, and the delay described here is what that choice costs you. (c) Safety copies taken by hand immediately before a database migration: these are full copies, they are kept outside the rotation on purpose so that a failed migration can be undone, and they are deleted thirty (30) days after they are taken. Thirty is the window the purpose asks for: a migration that went wrong shows itself within days, and after that the ordinary rotation is the way back. How many exist at any moment depends on how recently the database was changed; this Policy does not print a count, because a count in a document goes stale the next time a change is made. Backups are used for two things only: restoring the service after a failure, and periodically checking that a backup really does restore. That check runs by restoring into a test database separate from the service, and the restored copy is discarded when the check finishes. In neither case does the Operator read a backup to look up an individual. Audit-log entries (other than the IP-HMAC component, which becomes unlinkable on the next salt rotation) and ban or sanction records are retained only for as long as necessary for security review and dispute resolution and in any event no longer than three (3) years from the date of the entry, unless a specific legal obligation or an unresolved dispute requires longer retention. One case runs the other way: where a restriction is permanent, the record of it is kept for as long as the restriction stands, because the record is the only thing that makes the restriction knowable and contestable. It is deleted when the restriction is lifted. Consent records (your accepted Terms/Privacy versions and the acceptance timestamp) are retained for as long as your Account exists, and after deletion for the limited period during which the Operator may need to evidence that consent was given, after which they are deleted. Retention for the categories newly stated in Section 4: direct messages, saved posts, lists, hidden words, channel-level consents and reading history are kept while your account exists and go when you delete it. Archive deposits are kept until the Operator has dealt with what was left and no longer needs it. Because a deposit has no account behind it, no fixed period can be attached to it in advance, so the criterion is stated instead: the Operator reviews the Archive at least once every twelve months and deletes everything that is no longer needed at that review. A deposit is also deleted at the depositor's request, and on a request by someone whose personal data is inside it (Terms Section 29). Channel-level block records and their reason notes are deleted when the block is lifted or when the account is deleted. Records of a channel-moderator role and evaluations of a moderator survive the end of the role but go when the account is deleted. Post-move requests are kept for one year after the request is settled. A content report is kept while it is open and for ninety days after it is decided; the name and address a reporter left are deleted the moment the Operator has answered, and at the latest with the report itself. A ban appeal is kept for ninety days after it is answered; the contact address on it is deleted the moment the answer is sent. A notification is kept until you delete it or your Account is deleted, and in any event no more than three years from the day it was written. These periods are not left to memory: a job runs once a day and deletes what has passed them. Before 22 August 2026 the periods were written here and nothing enforced them. How data is destroyed: personal data whose retention period has passed, or whose purpose has ended, is destroyed without delay. Electronic records are deleted by means that leave them unrecoverable, and copies inside backups disappear on the rotation described above. There is at present no item that a Korean statute requires the Operator to keep for longer, so no such item is kept separately and none is listed. That follows from what the Service is: it takes no payment, so none of the record-keeping duties that attach to electronic commerce arise. Should that ever change, this paragraph will name the statute, the items kept under it, and the period. Where an item is kept because a dispute is open, that is not a statutory preservation duty but the legitimate interest in Section 3, and it ends when the dispute does.
11. Your rights, and a legal representative's
Subject to the law that applies in your jurisdiction, you may have the right to: access your personal data; correct inaccurate or incomplete data; request erasure (the "right to be forgotten"); restrict or object to processing; receive a portable copy of your data in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format; withdraw consent (where processing is based on consent), without affecting the lawfulness of processing carried out before withdrawal; and lodge a complaint with the supervisory authority in your country of residence. You can delete your account yourself, from the Account area of the settings page. Deleting it removes your account details and sign-in link, your direct messages, support tickets, reports and bug reports, ban appeals, reactions and follows, saved posts and lists, hidden words, and your reading history. Posts and comments you already published stay, with the author name replaced by an erased marker and the link to your account cut — removing a whole conversation would take other people's replies down with it. If you want your posts gone too, delete them before you delete the account. If you did not, that is not the end of it: write to the address in Section 2 naming the posts — the address of each, or enough of the text to find it — and the Operator will delete them. This works after the account is gone, because the request identifies the posts rather than the account. Before deleting anything the Operator satisfies itself that the request comes from the person who wrote the posts: a route that took anybody's word would be a way of deleting other people's writing. How that is done is worth stating exactly. Once the account is gone, no link between you and the post is left in the database, so there is nothing to compare you against — the check is therefore against the post itself: whether you know its address, and whether you can describe its content as specifically as the person who wrote it. Writing the addresses down before you delete the account is the surest way. Where the match does not hold, the Operator tells you what it could not verify and does not delete. Be aware of what that does to a thread: deleting a post deletes the comments underneath it as well, and every Member who commented is notified that the post they wrote under is gone. A Guest who commented has no account to notify, so they are not told. That is why account deletion does not do it for you — it would take other people's writing down with it, without their asking. To exercise any of these rights, contact the Operator through any of the contact options described in this Policy — the email address in the Contact section, the in-Service Support channel, or the in-Service Bug & Operations Reports channel. The Operator will respond within the time limits required by applicable data-protection law and, in any event, without undue delay — under the EU/EEA GDPR this is normally within one month of receipt of the request, extendable where the law permits for complex or numerous requests — and at no charge for routine requests; manifestly unfounded or excessive requests may be refused or charged a reasonable fee in accordance with applicable law. Two different things are described here and they are not the same right. The first is the portable copy: ask for it and you receive, in a machine-readable form, what is tied to your account. It is generated automatically, and what it leaves out is this: messages the other person wrote in a conversation; a moderator's reason note on a channel-level block; sign-in and session tokens; the audit log; the record of a channel-moderator role you held and the evaluations other Members left about you in it; requests to move a post; account-level write timeouts; and the Operator's own working marks on your material — whether a post is hidden and why, whether an automatic filter flagged it, whether it was pinned or featured, and the counters the Service uses to sort things. The first two were written by someone else, the tokens are themselves the means of opening your account, and the working marks are the Operator's record of what it did, which access reaches (below) even though the automatic bundle does not carry it. This list is not kept by hand: a test compares it against the database column by column and fails when a column is neither in the bundle nor named here. The rest are omissions of the automatic bundle, not limits on your rights — ask for access, described next, and they are gone through by hand and given to you. The second is access. Access is not the automatic bundle and is not limited by what the bundle happens to contain. Ask for access and the Operator goes through what is held about you by hand, including the two items above, and gives you everything except the parts whose disclosure would harm someone else's rights — and it decides that item by item, not as a class. Where a part is withheld you are told which part and why, and how to contest that. Under the Republic of Korea Personal Information Protection Act this is handled within ten days of the request; the grounds on which access may be restricted are only those listed in Article 35(4) of that Act, and if the Operator restricts or refuses access it tells you the ground and how to contest it at the same time. You may contest it through the email address in Section 2 or the in-Service Bug & Operations Reports channel, and the Operator looks at it again and tells you the outcome. You may also apply to the Personal Information Dispute Mediation Committee (privacy.go.kr, 1833-6972) or the Personal Information Infringement Report Centre (privacy.kisa.or.kr, 118). Objecting, separately. Where the Operator relies on legitimate interests — the categories are named in Section 3 — you have a distinct right to object at any time on grounds relating to your particular situation, and this is set out on its own here because it is easy to lose in a list. To object, write to the contact in Section 2 and say what you object to and why. The Operator will either stop that processing or explain the compelling legitimate grounds for continuing, and will answer within one month. Where the Republic of Korea Personal Information Protection Act applies, the same objection is a demand to suspend processing under Article 37 of that Act: the Operator suspends without delay, tells you the outcome within ten days of receiving the demand, and may decline only on one of the four grounds listed in Article 37(2) — telling you the ground and how to contest it. Objecting costs you nothing and carries no disadvantage. A legal representative. The legal representative of a child under the age of fourteen may exercise the rights above on that child's behalf under Article 38(2) of the Republic of Korea Personal Information Protection Act. Write to the address in Section 2 with the child's display name and something that shows you are the legal representative; once the Operator has established that, the request is handled within the same time limits as any other.
12. Automated decision-making
The Service applies automated controls for anti-spam and abuse-prevention purposes: rate limiting per daily IP HMAC and per Account, request deduplication, automated content filtering for the categories listed in Section 6 of the Terms of Use (the "severe-content filter"), the strictness of which the Operator configures separately for each board, and a Cloudflare Turnstile human-verification challenge for write actions. Depending on the board's configured strictness, the severe-content filter may refuse a submission, hide it pending human review by the Operator, or flag it for review while leaving it visible; in addition, where behaviour is judged abusive — for example the same text posted repeatedly in a short period — writing from that connection point is blocked until UTC midnight that day, without human review, which blocks every write during that period rather than merely one attempt, and does not block reading. Who this reaches: the block is keyed to that day's connection point, not to an account, so anyone else writing from the same line or the same network is blocked for the rest of that day as well, whether or not they did anything. If that has happened to you, say so through the form on the block notice page and the Operator will look at it. The Operator's own view is that these controls do not produce legal effects on you and do not significantly affect you in any other way comparable to a legal effect. That is the Operator's view and not a finding — whether an automatic block that stops every write from a shared line for the rest of the day is a significant effect is for a supervisory authority to decide, not for the party that set the block. The rights below are given in full either way, so nothing turns on the question for you. The filter also has to be described honestly: it reads what you typed, exactly as you typed it, so if there is health, political or comparable material in your words it passes through the filter with the rest. That reading has one purpose — deciding whether the text falls into one of the categories in Section 6 of the Terms — and nothing is extracted, tagged or kept separately afterwards. If you believe an automated action against you was incorrect, you may request human review by the Operator through the in-Service Bug & Operations Reports channel. For those decisions made without human review there are three separate things you may ask for, and you may ask for any of them: you may object to the decision; you may ask for an explanation of the criteria used and of how the decision was reached; and you may set out your own account of the circumstances, with any further information about yourself, and ask the Operator to review whether that changes the outcome. The Operator tells you what it decided on that review and why. How: when access is blocked, the notice page states the block and how much longer it has to run, and carries a form for telling the Operator. That form takes one submission per restriction per person; if you are not signed in and somebody else on the same connection has already used it for the same block, use the email address in Section 2 instead. While signed in you can also use the in-Service Bug & Operations Reports channel, or the email address in Section 2 of this Policy. The Operator answers within thirty days of receipt and a person looks at the decision again. That is a different deadline from the one month in Section 11 and the ten days in Section 9 because a different provision sets each; where more than one reaches you, the Operator works to the shorter. An automatic block lifts at UTC midnight on its own, so in most cases it will be gone before the review finishes. The review still happens, and it is not a formality: it decides whether the block was right, whether the same thing will happen to you again, and what the Operator's own record says about it. That thirty-day limit is the one set by Article 44-3(5) of the Enforcement Decree of the Republic of Korea Personal Information Protection Act; it may be extended twice, by up to thirty days each time, and only after telling you why. Objecting or asking for an explanation carries no disadvantage of any kind. This right applies regardless of the limit on the number of appeals set out in Section 10 of the Terms.
13. No sale or share for advertising purposes
The Operator does not sell, rent, or hand over personal data to third parties for money or other valuable consideration, and does not provide personal data for cross-context behavioural advertising. The Service carries no advertising and no advertising identifiers. The Operator does not collect or process sensitive personal data to infer characteristics, and does not use personal data for profiling that produces legal effects or similarly significant effects. What the Service stores is listed in Section 4 and who receives it is listed in Section 8. The sources are you and your sign-in provider, and the purposes are operating, securing, and providing the Service and preventing abuse. The rights set out in Section 11 — access, correction, deletion, restriction of processing, and a portable copy — are offered to every User on the same terms, wherever they live. One thing sits outside that: material placed in the Archive (Terms Section 29) is not tied to an account, so it is not part of the copy of your account data, and requests about it go to the contact point below. The Operator has limited means of establishing that a requester is the person who deposited the material, and cannot act where that is not established. The Operator does not treat you differently according to whether you exercise them.
14. Minors
The Service is not directed to children, and the Operator does not knowingly collect personal data from anyone below the minimum age of sixteen (16) set out in the Terms of Use. That sixteen-year threshold is an operator policy aligned with the default age of consent for information-society services under the EU/EEA GDPR; it is higher than the fourteen-year floor permitted for personal-data processing under the Republic of Korea Personal Information Protection Act, and where your local law sets a different age of digital consent the higher of that age or sixteen applies. The Operator does not seek verifiable parental consent to enrol younger children, because the Service is not directed to them. If you believe that a person below the applicable minimum age has provided personal data to the Service, please contact the Operator at [email protected] or through the in-Service Bug & Operations Reports channel and the data will be deleted without undue delay.
15. Security
The Operator implements reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect personal data, including: TLS termination at the network edge with no public origin port; IP-derived anti-spam values computed under a daily-rotating random salt that is held only in volatile memory and irrecoverably discarded at the end of each UTC day (see Section 6), so that a database compromise alone cannot recover prior-day IP-based identifiers; in the rare event that the in-memory salt store is unavailable, a random value created when that server started is used instead; that value also lives only in memory and is never written down, so values produced during such a period likewise cannot be turned back into an IP address from the database alone; least-privilege database access by the application; daily database backups, kept on the same physical disk as the origin server and rotated on the schedule set out in Section 10, with an off-site copy taken once a day; audit logging of all administrative actions; and server-side operational logs (performance and error logs) that record response times and software errors — these logs contain no personal data (no IP addresses, no user content) and are stored only on the origin server with rotation at 10 MB / 5 MB respectively. Raw IP addresses are not stored, so a database compromise cannot expose IP addresses of Users. No internet-facing system can be guaranteed perfectly secure. In the event of a personal-data breach affecting your data, the Operator will notify affected Users and any required supervisory authorities within the time limits applicable in the relevant jurisdiction.
16. Changes to this Policy
This Privacy Policy may be updated at any time. The current version is identified by the version label and the "last updated" date displayed at the top of this page. When the version changes, you will be required to re-accept the updated Policy before using any feature that requires acceptance.
17. Multiplayer connection (signaling) data
When you use multiplayer, the Operator's signaling server processes connection events in order to establish the peer-to-peer connection between participants. The data processed is the source IP address and port and the assigned peer IDs. The purpose is limited to establishing the peer connection you request and to preventing abuse. The lawful basis is not consent but legitimate interests (GDPR Art. 6(1)(f)) and service provision under Korea's Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA). This data is minimized, held only transiently in memory for as long as needed for connection setup and abuse prevention and not written to durable logs; any data derived for abuse prevention is purged on a daily rotation at UTC midnight. The Operator does not use it for profiling or advertising. After the connection is established, gameplay and chat travel directly between participants and do not pass through the Operator, so the Operator does not receive or store them.
18. Contact
Privacy questions and data-subject requests can be sent by email to [email protected], or through the in-Service Support channel, or through the in-Service Bug & Operations Reports channel. The in-Service forms are the preferred channels because they let your request be tracked and handled fairly; the email address above is the direct alternative and is the contact point of the Operator (the data controller) for the purposes of applicable data-protection law. The Operator provides the Service from the Republic of Korea (대한민국). You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the data-protection supervisory authority of your country of residence (for example, in the Republic of Korea, the Personal Information Protection Commission; in the EU/EEA, your national supervisory authority; in the United Kingdom, the Information Commissioner's Office).
If you choose Not now, you can keep reading public pages such as the home, Terms of Use, and Privacy Policy, but every interactive feature — including the sign-in and community navigation — remains gated until you accept.
Separately from this: where the Operator relies on its legitimate interests, you may object at any time on grounds relating to your particular situation, and it costs you nothing. The Privacy Policy sets that right out in full in its own block at the top and again in Section 11.