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This page lists privacy issues concerning this site.
The wiki uses a cookie that doesn’t identify individual users. The cookie is used to remember your preferences from one visit to the next. If you examine the cookie, you need to split it along the URL-encoded 0x1e byte (%251e). A typical user’s cookie might contain username AlexSchroeder, for example. This says which username you’d like to use when editing a page.
Nothing requires usernames to be unique. You can pick any valid page name. If you do provide a username, we’re going to store it in various places:
Information on this site is available via the HTML pages, RSS, and Gopher.
Offline backups of the data exist on the private laptop of Alex Schroeder and his backup disks. The data is encrypted and access is limited to Alex Schroeder and his wife. The data will be overwritten at irregular intervals.
In order to prevent leeching, the wiki also keeps of the IP numbers that have visited the site in the last twenty seconds. The `visitors.log` file lists IP numbers and timestamps as follows:
text 127.0.0.1 1390729057 1390728798 1390728798 1390728798 1390728797 1390670644 1390670381 1390670381 1390670380 1390670380
This is updated whenever somebody visits the site. This information is not public.
The wiki also tracks IP numbers whenever a page is edited. The idea is that we want to ban certain people from editing the site via Banned Hosts.
After four days the IP number will be removed from our wiki log files by the maintenance job.
Recent changes records IP number of authors. If you check Recent Changes, you’ll see that we’re translating IP numbers of anonymous edits into a colour code. We’re using a hash function to turn the IP number into an 32bit number, convert it to octal, take the first four digits and show one of eight colours for each one.
The web server itself also keeps access log and error logs. These go back four days. They contain IP numbers and the URLs they requested. These log files are not public. These are used to help find configuration errors, missing redirects and the like.
As you can see on WikiSpam, we log all the blocked edits that ran afoul of our banning rules. These log files contain IP numbers. These logs also go back four days.