What we collect
Reading the site needs no account. If you create one, we store what it needs, listed in its own section below. One form on this site sends something to us without an account — the suggestion box — and it too has its own section. Everything else is the ordinary record of a web request, plus what the analytics and advertising tags collect.
- Request data: your IP address, browser and device type, the page you asked for and the page you came from. This is what any web server receives, and it is what our host processes to deliver the page and to block abuse.
- Guide views: opening a guide increments its public view counter. Our API briefly remembers the requesting IP — about fifteen minutes — so a reload is not counted twice, and then forgets it. The counter itself is a number per guide, with nothing attached to it.
- Analytics and advertising: whatever Google Analytics and Google AdSense collect. Both follow the consent defaults described below.
- In your browser only: your theme choice and your ticked checklist rows. These are written to local storage on your device and are never transmitted to us.
- Email: if you write to us, we keep the message and your address for as long as it takes to deal with it.
- The suggestion box: the text you typed and the time you sent it. See below.
- Your account, if you create one: see "Your account" below.
Links you send us
If you use the suggestion box, we store two things: what you typed, and the time you sent it. Nothing else — no name and no email, because we never asked you for either.
No IP address of yours is stored with it. The submission reaches us through our own server and is passed on from there, so the address on the record is that server's rather than yours, and nothing on the row points back at you. The box is kept from being flooded by a rate limit, which needs no record of who used it. The ordinary request data described above still applies here, exactly as it does on any other page of the site.
The text itself is read by a person, who decides whether it is worth turning into a guide. Sending one is entirely optional and nothing on the site depends on it. If you want a suggestion removed, write to us and say roughly what you sent and when — there is no account to look it up by, so that is what we have to go on.
Your account
If you create an account we store your email address, your password — as a one-way hash, which means we cannot read it and nobody can recover it from what we hold — and anything you choose to add to your profile: a display name, a headline, a bio, your experience, the year you started, and links to a website, YouTube, Twitch, X, Telegram, Steam and a Discord name. We also record when the account was created.
We use your email address to sign you in, and for nothing else. We send no email — not even a confirmation — and we have no mailing list. Your profile is shown publicly only once the editors have verified you as an author; the email address never is.
For every guide you write we store its text, its cover image if you add one, its FAQ, when it was sent for review, and what the moderator decided and wrote back. A guide is visible only to you and to the site's moderators until one of them publishes it.
Signing in sets a session cookie in your browser — see "Cookies and local storage" below. The session behind it has no expiry of its own; the cookie lasts thirty days, and signing out or changing your password ends it on every device at once.
When you sign in or sign up, your IP address is passed to our account service so that its limit on sign-in attempts applies to you alone rather than to every reader at once. It is used for that count and is not stored with your account.
We keep all of this for as long as the account exists. To have it deleted, write to support@guides-factory.com from the address you signed up with.
How we use it
To serve the pages, to keep the site up, and to see which guides are read and how far — which is how we decide what to cover next. Advertising pays for the catalogue, so the site carries ads and measures them.
We do not sell personal data, we do not buy it from brokers, and we build no profile of you ourselves. We do not send marketing email, because we have no list to send it to.
Who else is involved
Four parties see anything, and this is the whole list. Two of them are Google, and both follow the consent state described above. Transfers outside the EEA rely on standard contractual clauses.
- Cloudflare: serves every page and every image, and so processes the request data described above. On the sign-in, sign-up and suggestion forms it also runs Turnstile, a check that a person rather than a script is sending the form; it reads signals from your browser for that check alone, and it is the only thing on those pages that loads from challenges.cloudflare.com.
- Amazon Web Services: hosts the server and the database behind the guides and, if you have one, your account.
- Google Analytics 4: which pages are read and how far. IP truncated at collection.
- Google AdSense: the advertising on the site, and the measurement of it.
Your rights
If you are in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland, the GDPR and its equivalents give you the right to access the data held about you, correct it, delete it, restrict or object to its processing, and complain to your local supervisory authority.
If you are in California, Colorado, Connecticut or another US state with a privacy law, you have the right to opt out of the sharing that advertising measurement involves. "Your Privacy Choices" at the bottom of any page is that control, and we honour a Global Privacy Control signal from your browser without being asked.
If you have an account, the data we hold about you is the account itself and the guides you wrote, and you can see and change most of it on your account page. For anything you cannot change there — your email address, a copy of everything we hold, or deleting the account — write to us. Without an account we hold no profile and no contact details for you unless you have emailed us. A request about the data an advertising or analytics tag holds is best made to Google, whose own controls sit outside this site; we will help where we can. Consent you have given can be withdrawn at any time through "Your Privacy Choices", through the same prompt that asked for it, or through your browser's cookie controls.
Ask anything, including a deletion request, at support@guides-factory.com, and we will answer within thirty days.
Contact
Questions about this policy, a data request, or a takedown notice go to support@guides-factory.com. Security reports go to security@guides-factory.com — we will confirm receipt within two business days.
This page describes how the site works today; it is a plain-language statement of practice, not legal advice.