Privacy

Who is responsible

The Thinking Board is run by an individual, not a company. Questions, requests for your data, and requests to delete it all go to dheerajr17@gmail.com, and are answered by a person.

Reading takes nothing

You can read every problem, proof, reply and room on this site without an account, without being asked for anything, and without being followed. There are no advertising cookies, no third-party trackers and no analytics of any kind on the board.

What signing in gives us

Signing in goes through Google. Google tells the board two things: your name and your email address. It does not give us your password, your contacts, your files or anything else, and we do not ask for them.

• Your email address is how the board recognises you between visits and how your proofs stay attached to you. It is never shown on the board to anybody, including editors reading the review queue — except that it is visible to the founder in the database itself, as it must be.
• Your name from Google is used as your public name until you choose an alias, which you can do at any time on your own page. After that, the alias is what readers see.

What you write

Problems, proofs, replies and room messages are stored with your account and shown publicly under your alias — that is the whole point of a forum. Editing one keeps the text you replaced out of sight but records the time of the edit, which the page shows.

Marks — convincing, beautiful, the laurel — are stored against your account so that each can be counted once and taken back. The totals are public. Which reader placed which mark is not shown on the board.

What the board keeps for its own protection

To stop one account flooding the site, the board records that an account performed a kind of action at a moment in time — no content, just the fact and the clock. These rows are deleted as they age out of their window, usually within the hour.

Cookies, and things kept in your browser

• A session cookie, set when you sign in, so the board knows it is still you. It carries no tracking identifiers and is the only cookie the site sets.
• Your browser’s own storage holds your light-or-dark choice, whether you like the editor’s preview open, and any draft you are part-way through writing. Drafts never leave your browser until you post them, and are not readable by us.

Who else handles it

The board is a small program running on other people’s computers, and those companies necessarily process what passes through them:

• Google — sign-in. Google knows you signed in to this site.
• Vercel — hosting. Its servers handle every request and keep short-lived request logs, which include IP addresses.
• Neon — the database where everything above is stored.
• A notification channel — when you submit a problem or ask to be an editor, a message saying so is sent to the person who reviews it, so that you are not left waiting. It contains your public name and what you wrote, never your email address.

Nothing is sold, rented, or handed to anyone for advertising. Nobody else receives your data unless the law requires it.

How long it is kept

Your account and what you have posted stay until you ask for them to go. Write to dheerajr17@gmail.com and you can have a copy of everything the board holds about you, or have it deleted. Deletion removes your account, your email address and your alias. Where a proof of yours has replies arguing with it, the text may be kept as an unattributed part of the record rather than deleted out from under the argument — if you would rather it went entirely, say so and it will.

You can also delete your own replies and room messages yourself, at any time, without asking anyone.

Children

You need a Google account to post here, and Google sets its own minimum age. The board is not aimed at children and asks for nothing beyond a name and an email address.

Changes

If this page changes materially the date at the top changes with it. The board has no history of quiet rewrites and does not intend to start one.

Terms of service · About the board