We value anonymity above anything else on our site.
The site only stores two pieces of personal information about any registered user:
- The email address
- an arbitrary “author name”
The Email Address
The email address is also the login handle for your account.
We need the email address so we can send you notifications. If you’ve published or are planning to publish a story, this is extremely important, because we send you all kinds of notifications in the process of publishing a story, and you also want to be notified in case someone is writing a comment on your stories.
But also, if you’re only reading on the site, you will get a notification if anyone reacts to a comment you’ve written on a story.
Most importantly, a working email address is the only way to reset your password if you’ve lost it and locked yourself out of the site.
However, before we can send a notification to an email address, we need the user to confirm that it’s indeed their address. For this, we use a standard verification process, where you receive an email sent to the address you provided. You must click a link in the email to confirm that it’s actually your address.
For now, if you don’t validate your address, you can still use the site without any restrictions; however, you won’t be able to receive notifications. This might change in the future, in case we have to protect ourselves against malicious users.
We understand that many people are very concerned about their email address getting into the wrong hands. We don’t share your email address with anyone, and we’re even relocating the site outside the USA to ensure we can’t be compelled to disclose it to officials.
But it’s still a prudent idea to use an anonymous email address to access the site. There are many providers for anonymous and untrackable email addresses on the internet. One well-known, but by far not the only one, is Proton Mail.
The Author Name
The author name is totally arbitrary, and it’s up to you to choose a name that doesn’t give away anything about your real identity.
The name will be used on your Profile Page and as the default name for any comment or story you write (but you can, in fact, choose to alter the name when you write a comment or story).
To prevent impersonation of another known user, we ensure that author names are unique.