Privacy policy
Last updated: 10 September 2026
This policy explains what “Hardtraxx” (https://hardtraxx.com) records about you, why, who else gets to see it, and what you can do about it. “Hardtraxx” is a privately run community forum about hard dance music; the people who run it are the sole party responsible for your information (the “controller” under the General Data Protection Regulation). We are based in the Netherlands and the board is hosted in Germany, inside the European Union.
To reach us about anything in this policy, write to info@hardtraxx.com, or contact any of the administrators listed on the The team page.
What we collect
When you only read the board
Our server and the service in front of it record the pages you request, your IP address, the time of the request, and what your browser reports about itself (user agent, language, referring page). These records are what lets us keep the board online, work out what is slow or broken, and block abuse. The board itself also gives you a session and, once you have opened a topic, remembers which topics you have read, so that “new posts” means something.
When you register
An account needs a username, a password and a working email address. The password is never stored: what we keep is a one-way hash of it, from which the password cannot be recovered. Nobody from “Hardtraxx” will ever ask you for your password. Anything beyond those three fields — your avatar, location, website, birthday, signature, contact fields — is yours to fill in or leave blank, and yours to change or empty at any time in the User Control Panel.
While you are registering, your email address and IP address are checked against a public spam database and you are asked to pass an anti-bot check. See “Who else sees data” below.
When you take part
We store what you send us and what you do on the board: topics and posts, private messages, chat messages, uploaded images and attachments, bookmarks, which events you have marked yourself as attending, poll votes, reports and moderation history, and your notification and board settings. The board records the IP address a post, private message or chat message was sent from. That record is not public — only administrators can see it — and it exists so that abuse, spam and ban evasion can be traced.
Because the board keeps track of what you have read and when you were last active, it also stores a “last active” timestamp per session and per account.
What is public, and what is not
What you post in a forum that guests can read — which is nearly all of them — is public. Your username, avatar, the profile fields you filled in, your post count, your join date, your topics and posts and your event attendances can be read by anyone on the internet, whether or not they have an account. Search engines index them, and so do the crawlers of AI companies — we allow both deliberately, because it is how people find this board.
These are not public: your email address, your password (which nobody has, see above), your private messages, your bookmarks, your IP addresses, how you voted in a poll (only the totals are shown), your notification settings, anything you left blank, and anything in a forum that is closed to guests or to members.
Please take this seriously in the other direction too: what you write about other people is published under your name, and posting someone else’s personal details is not allowed.
Cookies and browser storage
Cookies are small text files a site stores in your browser. We use them to keep you logged in and to remember what you have read — not to follow you across other websites. The board carries no advertising and no third-party tracking cookies.
| Name | Set by | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| phpbb3_s384n_u phpbb3_s384n_k phpbb3_s384n_sid | Hardtraxx | Your user id, the “keep me logged in” key and the session id. Without these you cannot stay logged in. |
| phpbb3_s384n_track | Hardtraxx | Which topics and forums you have already read, so unread posts can be marked as such. |
| htx-theme htx-editor-mode | Hardtraxx | Browser storage, not cookies: your light/dark choice and whether you last used the rich-text or the BBCode editor. They never leave your browser. |
| __cf_bm cf_clearance and others | Cloudflare | Bot detection and, if you were shown a challenge, proof that you passed it. Necessary for the board to stay reachable during attacks. |
| none | Hardtraxx | Our visitor statistics set no cookie and store nothing in your browser. See “How we count visits” below. |
You can delete the board’s own cookies at any time with the “Delete cookies” link in the footer, and all cookies through your browser’s settings. If you delete or block them, the board will still work, but it cannot keep you logged in or remember what you have read.
How we count visits
We keep simple visitor statistics so we can see which parts of the board are used: the page opened, the site you arrived from, the type of browser and device, and the country your IP address points to. Two things produce them, and neither sets a cookie or stores anything in your browser:
- Plausible, running on our own server rather than as someone else’s service. Nothing is sent to the company that makes it, and no profile is built about you.
- Cloudflare’s page counter, part of the same service that already serves and protects the board.
Neither can follow you to other websites, and neither is used for advertising. Your IP address is used to derive a country and is not stored with the statistics.
Who else sees data
We do not sell your information and we do not hand it to anyone for their own marketing. We do use a small number of companies to run the board; each of them sees only what it needs to do its job.
| Who | What they get | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Our hosting provider (Germany) | Everything on the board | The server the board runs on |
| Cloudflare | Every request: IP address, page, browser. Also a cookieless count of how often each page is opened, and our encrypted off-site backups | Serves and protects the site against attacks and spam, counts visits, and stores the backups |
| Amazon Web Services (Frankfurt) | Your email address and the contents of board emails | Sends registration, password-reset and notification email |
| StopForumSpam | At registration only: your email address and IP address, looked up against their list | Blocking known spam registrations. We look their list up; we do not submit you to it |
| Cloudflare Turnstile | At registration and on some forms: your IP address and browser signals | Telling humans from bots without a puzzle to solve |
Where your data is. The board runs on a server in Germany and its email is sent from Frankfurt, both inside the European Union. Some of the services above are based outside the European Economic Area — Cloudflare is a United States company, StopForumSpam is in the United Kingdom. Where data reaches them, it is covered by the European Commission’s adequacy decisions (the United Kingdom, and the EU–US Data Privacy Framework) or by the Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses. Write to info@hardtraxx.com if you want to know which applies to a particular service.
Beyond that we only pass on personal data if we are legally required to — a court order or a lawful request from an authority — and we will tell you when that happens unless we are forbidden from doing so.
Posts on this board can contain embedded material from other sites, such as YouTube, SoundCloud or Mixcloud players. Opening a page with such an embed contacts that site, which then sees your IP address under its own privacy policy, not this one.
Why we are allowed to do this
- To perform what you asked for. If you register, we need your username, email address and password to give you the account you asked for, and to store what you post.
- Our legitimate interest in a working, non-spammed board. This covers the server logs, the IP address recorded with a post, the spam and bot checks, and the visitor statistics.
- Your consent, where you have given it: any optional profile field or notification you switch on yourself. You can withdraw consent at any time.
- Made public by you, for anything you deliberately publish in a post — including anything sensitive you may reveal about yourself in one.
You must be at least 16 years old to register. If you are younger and have an account, tell us and we will remove it.
How long we keep it
- Your account and posts: for as long as the account exists.
- Server and access logs: 14 days, after which they are deleted automatically.
- Backups: encrypted and stored off-site. We keep the last 14 daily, 8 weekly and 6 monthly backups; older ones are deleted. This is why deleted data can survive for a while in a backup before it is gone for good.
- Chat messages: kept in the chat archive; you can ask us to remove yours.
Security
The connection between your browser and this board is encrypted (HTTPS). Passwords are stored only as one-way hashes. Backups are encrypted before they leave the server, with a key that is not stored with them. Access to the server is limited to the administrators. No system is perfectly secure, so please use a password you do not use anywhere else, and tell us if something looks wrong.
Your rights
You can, at any time:
- See what we hold about you. Most of it is in your User Control Panel; for the rest, ask us and we will send it to you.
- Correct it. Your profile and settings are yours to edit; ask us if something you cannot reach is wrong.
- Have your account deleted. Ask us and we will do it. Your posts are part of conversations other people took part in, so the default is that we remove your account and unlink your posts from it rather than delete threads other members wrote in. If a specific post of yours needs to go, say which one and why.
- Object, or withdraw consent to a particular use of your data.
- Take your data elsewhere — we will give you what you gave us in a usable file.
Write to info@hardtraxx.com for any of these. We answer within a month. If you think we have handled your data badly and we cannot sort it out between us, you can complain to the Dutch data protection authority, the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens.
Changes to this policy
When something about the board changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top changes too. If a change matters to you, we will say so on the board rather than quietly editing the page.