What we store, and what we do not.

Members are pseudonymous by design, not by accommodation. You pick a handle at sign-up and that handle is the only identifier ever rendered publicly. There is no field anywhere in this product for a legal name, and you should not put one in the display name either.

Avatars are generated deterministically from your handle rather than uploaded, because a photograph is a de-anonymiser and an optional one gets used.

Your email address, used for sign-in and account notices. It is never rendered on any public surface and is not shared with anyone.

A bcrypt hash of your password. We cannot read your password and neither can anyone who obtains the database.

Salted SHA-256 hashes of the IP addresses your sessions were created from, kept for abuse prevention. These let us correlate activity from the same source without storing the address itself.

Your posts, replies, bookmarks, votes, direct messages, and any reports you file.

For paying members, a Stripe customer and subscription identifier. Card details are handled entirely by Stripe and never reach our servers.

The first time you visit, we ask whether we can count your visit. If you choose Allow analytics, the forum sets two cookies with random ids (one for this visit, one that lasts up to 13 months so we can tell new visits from returning ones) and records the pages you view, how you arrived (the referring site and any campaign tags), how long the page is open, your device type, browser and operating system, and your country and state from our host's network. Your IP address is not stored.

This data is collected and kept by our sister site, Baseline Health & Performance, which has the same owners as the forum. It is never linked to your forum account, handle or email: when you sign up, sign in or pay, we only report that it happened, with no account details. It is never sold, never used for advertising, and nothing is sent to Google, Meta or any other company. It is deleted after 13 months.

Because the guides cover men's health, the pages you read may suggest health interests. That is why we ask first and keep it to ourselves.

If you choose No thanks, haven't chosen, or your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal, we only count a page view with no id: the page, a rough source, device type and country. Nothing ties it to you or to your other visits.

Never recorded: anything you type, your searches, your messages, or the profiles you visit. Search and profile pages are counted only as "a search" or "a profile".

You can change your choice, or delete everything recorded under your browser's id, from Privacy choices at the bottom of every page.

Your posts and replies are visible to members. Your profile shows your handle, bio, and activity, unless you turn activity off in your account settings.

Moderators can see reports filed about content, and internal notes other moderators leave. They cannot read direct messages.

Reports are never revealed to the person reported. This is deliberate: reports that identify their author stop being filed.

Your public moderation record is visible on your profile and in the public log. Transparency runs in both directions, and it is the trade for a community that does not moderate in secret.

Hide your activity from your public profile. Your posts stay in their threads; the profile aggregation stops.

Turn off direct messages entirely.

Keep your profile out of search engines. This is the default; profiles carry a noindex tag unless you opt in.

Turn off email notification. Moderation actions against your account are always shown in-app regardless, so a notification setting can never leave you unaware of one.

Email us from your registered address and we will delete your account, your posts, your replies, your messages and your bookmarks.

Moderation records are retained in anonymised form: the action, the reason, and the rule stay in the public log, with the handle removed. A transparency log that its subject can erase is not one, and that constraint has to apply to us as well as to you.

We do not sell data. We do not run advertising. We do not accept sponsored placement, and vendors cannot buy visibility or moderation outcomes.

There is no third-party analytics or tracking pixel on this site. The optional analytics above are run by our own sister site, not an outside company. Membership fees are the only revenue, which is the entire reason the rest of this page can be short.