The Best World Forum - Our Privacy Policy

(1) Contact the admin on privacy questions:
If you have any questions concerning your privacy using this website that go beyond the following text, feel free to contact the admin anytime. You find a link to do so near the bottom of every page.

(2) Admins and moderators fully respect your privacy:
This website and online community is administrated with the highest ethical standards, far above mere moral, and especially legal, frameworks. The admins and moderators will never spy on you or otherwise abuse their data control powers, treating your privacy as if it were their highly regarded own. In particular, any Private Messages that you send or receive on this website are truly private and will not be read by any admin or moderator under any circumstances. See the FAQ for how to stop a user from sending you further Private Messages (setting an auto-delete rule). You find a link to the FAQ below the site top banner of every page. If you need additional help or advice regarding disturbing Private Messages, contact the admin.

(3) The internet is unsafe:
As much as the admins and moderators respect your privacy, they cannot protect you from the worst transgressors into your privacy, who spy without any shame and morals, and potentially would employ any kind of abuse as it suits them, like the organized crime, first of all the most-organized crime, namely the police and secret services of all states. They can get, and in any given case probably have, access to web servers and of course web transmissions. And even though most "experts" claim that SSL (see below in section 9) is safe, some real experts (like famous hackers) doubt or outright deny it. Always use the internet with great care, always consider it unsafe, regardless of how much this or that solution is proffered to you as "protecting your privacy". Almost all of them are either false promises — or even deceitful traps.

(4) Protect your personal data:
There are quite many dangerously mad and crazy people in the world, most of which actually do have access to the internet. Try to avoid "inviting" being attacked in any seriously dangerous form by any of them. Posting personal addresses and phone numbers is forbidden on this website (see the Community Rules, linked near the bottom of every page), posting email addresses and other contact information is hereby advised against. You can exchange such data in private messages, but always be careful: also you and your gut feelings/"instinct" might be tricked by a pathological and/or professional con artist. On the other hand, most people are normal and honest and friendly, of course, and we need to live, trust, love, and enjoy life, so don't get paranoid either. As everywhere in life: Prepare well for the worst, but expect the best.

(5) Protect your login and user account:
a. Never log in to this website after following some web link to it. So-called phishing crimes can create URL web addresses that look very much like, or even absolutely identical to, a real weblink, and create a perfect copy of that website's look and (first) feel. If you then enter your login information, they will use it on the real website to hack into your account. To avoid this, only log in to websites after you typed in their URL in your web browser yourself, or use bookmarks.

b. Never give your password to anybody else (real admins, moderators, or support teams will never ask you for your password, if they do, they are almost certainly fraudsters), and make sure nobody can copy your password from a note. If you need written clues for your passwords, at least use some cipher/code, better only use shortened clues, at best combine both methods. You might use one long password (such as the initial letters of lines of a song or poem, regarding case and including punctuation, extended by something personal), and add this to any website-specific password.

Example: From "Heal the world, make it a better place!", using the first letters of each word and the punctuation, you get "Htw,miabp!" Title case yields more capitals, which is even better: "HtW,MiaBP!". Now add somethiung random, maybe your favorite colour: "HtW,MiaBP!blue". This alone is an ultra-strong password. If your password for your email account is "beaver", change it to "HtW,MiaBP!bluebeaver", and you only need the clue "email: +bvr". This would be quite safe.

(6) Secure what is important to you:
This website may not always be accessible, and may even be discontinued one day. Therefore always save copies of everything that is important to you, for example to your local harddrive. Also establish secondary communication channels with contacts that you make here and really want to stay in touch with. Exchange email addresses, messenger IDs or other contact information, provided you trust them enough.


ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:


(7) How your data is stored:
Most of the data that you enter on this website, such as your login and profile information, all posts, all private messages and all uploaded files, are stored in a filesystem on the web server as part of what makes this website useful for you and every other user. Information needed very often by your web browser while you are using the website, such as your login status and your language, are stored on your own local filesystem — these files are called "cookies" and you can open and read them in your browser (some may be encrypted for security reasons and read like random letters and numbers).

(8) How your password is protected:
Your password is not saved anywhere by the website; instead a so-called hash algorithm is used to mathematically generate a pattern that is stored instead of your password, from which your password cannot be inferred back, and which is almost certainly not generated by any other password. When you log in, your entered password's hash pattern is compared against the saved one to validate your login — a secure standard procedure for all modern websites.

(9) How your data is transmitted:
Your web browser and the web server of this website first create an encrypted connection, then send your data across it, using SSL (the Secure Sockets Layer, indicated by the https:// URL prefix in your web browser, as opposed to the unencrypted browsing http:// prefix) to prevent nearly all transmission spying attempts, at least those attempted by laymen.

(10) How your data is processed:
The internet software behind this website and online community is based on the open-source and free phpBB Forum Software (weblink: phpBB.com) and dozens of installed extensions for it, altogether millions and millions of lines of program code, configured and modified to generate the look and feel that this website and online community presents to you. Most of the software runs on the web server (data safety checking, storing, sorting, searching, loading, as well as all pages data assembly), the rest of the work (displaying the pages nicely, and all interactive elements on a page) is done by your web browser, following the software commands it gets from the web server (such as HTML page content structuring, CSS design definitions, and Javascript interactivity/automation/animation programs).