Privacy policy
Your privacy on the Internet is important. This document lays out how using Orbiter Forum affects your privacy, what information we collect about you and what we do with that information.
We encourage you to contact us if you have questions about this policy. You may contact us via the contact form or via the private messaging functions within the forum itself.
Additional Information: Terms of Service
INFORMATION THIS SITE GATHERS AND TRACKS
Orbiter Forum gathers two types of information about users:
Information that users provide through optional, voluntary submissions. These are voluntary submissions to receive any electronic newsletter from us, to participate in our message boards or forums and other site features, and to email a friend.
Information Orbiter Forum gathers through aggregated tracking information derived mainly by tallying page views throughout our site. Under no circumstances does Orbiter Forum divulge any information about an individual user to a third party, except to comply with applicable law or valid legal process or to protect the personal safety of our users or the public.
Optional Voluntary Information
We offer the following free services, which require some type of voluntary submission of personal information by users:
1. Message Board / Forums - Users of the site's Message Board must register for these services in order to post messages, although they needn't register to visit the site. During registration the user is required to supply date of birth, a username, password, and email address. Date of birth is verified in order to comply with COPPA before any other information is collected. Children under the age of 13 will not be able to post on the message board and will have limited site access until we receive the signed parental consent form. Please contact us via the contactform.
2. "E-mail this to a friend" - Our site users can choose to electronically forward a link, page, or documents to someone else by clicking "e-mail this to a friend". The user must provide their email address, as well as that of the recipient. This information is used only in the case of transmission errors and, of course, to let the recipient know who sent the email. The information is not used for any other purpose and it is not stored.
Orbiter Forum Gathers User Information In The Following Processes:
- Click-stream data (what you click on, and how you get from one page to another within the site)
- HTTP protocol elements
- Search terms
- Computer information (Web browser and basic operating system information)
Voluntary information collected includes:
- Birth Date (Required to register an account in order to comply with COPPA)
- Email Address
- Username
- Password
Additional voluntary information may be collected if the user chooses to enter that information in their site profile. That information includes: First Name, Location, Country, U.S. State, Occupation, Interests, and Biography, as well as other non-personally identifiable information. This allows users the ability to share information about themselves with other members of the community. Only registered users on Orbiter Forum may view this information.
USE OF INFORMATION
Orbiter Forum uses information voluntarily given by our users to provide interactive or personalized elements on the site (for instance to associate your user profile alongside posts you make to the board).
We may also use information that users voluntarily provide in order to send out electronic newsletters and to enable users to participate on the message board. We may send out newsletters to subscribers on a regular schedule (depending on the newsletter), and occasionally we may send out special editions when we think subscribers might be particularly interested in something we are doing. Orbiter Forum never shares newsletter mailing lists with any third parties, including advertisers, sponsors or partners.
INFORMATION AND LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS (AI)
Orbiter Forum do not use any data collected from our users or posted to our forum for training of Large Language Model (LLM) or Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI, GenAI) technologies. Where possible, we have taken efforts to prevent the collection of our public posts from being collected by third-parties intent on collecting information from the entire internet for this purpose. It is not possible, however, to guarantee that the information made public on Orbiter Forum will not be consumed by a third party and used for this purpose.
SHARING OF THE INFORMATION
Orbiter Forum uses the above-described information to tailor our content to suit your needs. We will not share information about individual users with any third party, except to comply with applicable law or valid legal process or to protect the personal safety of our users or the public.
ADVERTISING PROVIDERS
Orbiter Forum is not supported by advertising providers. As a result, we do not share any of the information you provide us with advertising providers of any description.
However, users may post links to the forum which contain tracking information embedded within them, or links to services that, when clicked, will record that they were clicked on from this website. This is (unfortunately) beyond our control.
CHILDREN
Consistent with the Federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA), we will never knowingly request personally identifiable information from anyone under the age of 13 without requesting parental consent. Upon registering, children under 13 will be prompted to include their parent's email address in which the site will use to send the parent information about their child's account and the steps they must complete in order to allow their child full access to Orbiter Forum.
Children under the age of 13 will not be able to post on the message board and will have limited site access until we receive the signed parental consent form. Please contact us via the contactform. If we do not receive parental consent within 30 days of registration, the account and all information will be deleted.
Parents may at anytime request their child's account to be closed and all personally identifiable information deleted from our database. Please contact us here to suspend your consent and to request the closure of your child's account.
COOKIES
When you visit us, we may place a text file called a "cookie" in the browser files of your computer. This is usually for holding your login session (if you choose to log in) and your preferences. You don't have to accept cookies to use this site, however you do need cookies to participate actively in message boards, forums, polling, and surveys, because you have to be logged in to do that, and this feature relies on cookies.
USAGE TRACKING
Orbiter Forum tracks user traffic patterns throughout all of our site in the form of "view" counts. When you view content on the forum, whether you are logged in or not, this action is recorded by those counters. However, we do not correlate this information with data about individual users. For administrative use only, Orbiter Forum does break down overall usage statistics according to a user's domain name, browser type, and MIME type by reading this information from the browser string (information contained in every user's browser). This helps us to understand what browser versions to prioritise support for, for instance.
SECURITY
Orbiter Forum operates on a secure data network protected by industry standard firewall and password protection systems. Our security and privacy policies are periodically reviewed and enhanced as necessary and only authorized individuals have access to the information provided by our members.
ACCOUNT REMOVAL
You may choose to delete your account with us, should you wish to. Please contact us to make this request - the forum does not offer a "delete account" option.
When your account is removed, the posts made under this account will remain visible on the forum, however the account's name will be randomised to anonymise the original posting identity. The account will then be removed, and any other data associated with it removed (the information outlined in this document).
YOUR CONSENT
By using this site, you consent to the collection and use of this information by Orbiter Forum as outlined above. If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes on this page so that you are always aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances we disclose it. Any changes to the privacy policy will also be announced on the forum itself along with a summary of what was changed and why.
CAPTCHA privacy policy
This site is protected by hCaptcha and its privacy policy and terms of service apply.