Privacy policy
Last updated: 12 October 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 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 Hardtraxx 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 Hardtraxx
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 Hardtraxx online, work out what is slow or broken, and block abuse. Hardtraxx 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 Hardtraxx: topics and posts, private messages, chat messages, uploaded images and attachments, bookmarks, the topics, sections and artists you follow, which events you have marked yourself as attending, the posts you like, poll votes, reports and moderation history, and your notification and other settings. Hardtraxx records the IP address a post, private message, chat message or like was sent from. Those records are not public — only administrators can see them — and they exist so that abuse, spam and ban evasion can be traced. Members who are logged in can see who liked a post; how many likes your own posts hold in total is shown to you alone.
Because Hardtraxx 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 section 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 Hardtraxx.
These are not public: your email address, your password (which nobody has, see above), your private messages, your bookmarks, what and whom you follow, 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 section 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.
If you are an artist with a page here
Artists, DJs and groups in hard dance have a page on Hardtraxx. It brings together what members posted about them — releases, livesets, the events they played — with a picture, and the other names they are known under. It is built from public posts here and from publicly available sources, on the basis of our legitimate interest, and that of our members, in a record of the scene’s music and events. A page holds a stage name and work that was made public; we add a link between two names only where the artist or their label has made it public.
You do not need an account to have a say over yours. If a page is about you and something on it is wrong, you want another picture or none, a link between two names should not be there, or you do not want the page shown, write to info@hardtraxx.com. We correct it, replace or remove the picture, take the link away, or hide the page — we honour an objection, we do not argue it.
Artists, labels and organisers can also send us the picture they want shown: a press photo, a logo, a poster or a cover. Send it to info@hardtraxx.com from an address that shows it is yours to send. By sending it you give us permission to store it and show it on Hardtraxx with your page, your events or your releases, until you ask us to take it down.
Cookies and browser storage
Cookies are small text files a site stores in your browser. We use them to keep you logged in, to remember what you have read and to remember a few choices you made — not to follow you across other websites. Hardtraxx 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 sections you have already read, so unread posts can be marked as such. |
| phpbb3_s384n_htxtab phpbb3_s384n_htxftab …_htxfgenre, …_htxfsort, …_htxfplayer phpbb3_s384n_htxstab …_htxsgenre, …_htxssort, …_htxsplayer | Hardtraxx | Only while you are not logged in: the tab, genre, sort order and player choice you last picked on the homepage, Tracks, Events and Livesets. Kept 90 days. With an account these are stored with your settings instead. |
| phpbb3_s384n_ar_hide | Hardtraxx | Members only: whether the Artists page leaves out the artists you already follow. Kept a year. |
| phpbb3_s384n_htxann | Hardtraxx | Which announcements you closed, so they stay closed. Kept 30 days. |
| htx-theme htx-editor-mode htx-tracks-fold htx-artists-visit htx-guest-reads htx-guest-nudge htx-member-seen | Hardtraxx | Browser storage, not cookies: your light/dark choice, whether you last used the rich-text or the BBCode editor, whether a tracklist is folded, when you last opened the Artists page, and whether this browser has been logged in. For visitors without an account also which topics were opened in the past 7 days and whether the invitation to register was closed. These values never leave your browser; all our visitor statistics learn from them is whether a visit was a first one or a return, and whether that invitation was shown or closed. |
| __cf_bm cf_clearance and others | Cloudflare | Bot detection and, if you were shown a challenge, proof that you passed it. Necessary for Hardtraxx 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 Hardtraxx’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, Hardtraxx will still work, but it cannot keep you logged in or remember what you have read.
How we count visits
We keep visitor statistics so we can see which parts of Hardtraxx are used: which pages are opened, where visitors arrive from, and roughly which device and country they use. The statistics set no cookie, store nothing in your browser, cannot follow you to other websites and are not used for advertising.
If you are logged in, your member number is recorded with the pages you open, so that your phone and your computer count as one member. Only the administrators can see these statistics; they are not shared with anyone.
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 Hardtraxx; each of them sees only what it needs to do its job.
| Who | What they get | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Our hosting provider (Germany) | Everything on Hardtraxx | The server Hardtraxx runs on |
| Cloudflare | Every request: IP address, page, browser. Also a cookieless count of how often each page is opened, the event posters, covers and artist pictures shown on Hardtraxx, and our encrypted off-site backups | Serves and protects the site against attacks and spam, counts visits, and stores those pictures and the backups |
| Amazon Web Services (Frankfurt) | Your email address and the contents of the emails we send | 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. Hardtraxx runs on a server in Germany and its email is sent from Frankfurt, both inside the European Union. Posters, covers and artist pictures are stored with Cloudflare in Western Europe. 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 Hardtraxx can contain embedded material from other sites, such as YouTube, SoundCloud, Mixcloud, Spotify, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X, Reddit, Twitch or Streamable players and posts. 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 community. This covers the server logs, the IP address recorded with a post, the spam and bot checks, and the visitor statistics. The pages about artists rest on a legitimate interest too, ours and our members’, in a record of the scene — see “If you are an artist with a page here”.
- 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 what belongs to it (settings, bookmarks, follows, event attendances): for as long as the account exists.
- Your posts: they stay after that, unlinked from you — see “Your rights” below.
- 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 Hardtraxx 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 settings, bookmarks, follows and event attendances are deleted with the account. 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 Hardtraxx 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 Hardtraxx rather than quietly editing the page.