Community Forum Privacy

Controller

Benjamin Straatmann
Thamaschstraße 2
86687 Kaisheim, Germany
Email: contact@bambuhub.net

Full legal details are in the Impressum.

What the forum is built on

The forum runs on Discourse, open-source community software, self-hosted on our own server. Reading the forum does not require an account. Posting or replying does.

Data we process

When you register an account:

• Email address (required, used to confirm your account and send notifications)
• Username (public)
• Password (stored only as a salted hash, never in plain text)
• Optional profile details you choose to add (display name, avatar, bio, location)

When you post: the content of your topics and replies is stored and shown publicly, together with your username and the time of posting.

Automatically, for technical operation and security: IP address, browser type (user agent), timestamps, and activity data such as which topics you read. Discourse uses this for spam prevention, rate limiting, and abuse protection.

Cookies

The forum sets cookies that are technically necessary to run it: a session cookie and an authentication token so you stay logged in, plus a preference cookie. These are not advertising or cross-site tracking cookies. There are no third-party advertising or tracking cookies on the forum.

Purposes and legal bases (GDPR)

• Running your account and letting you post – Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR (performance of the user agreement) and Art. 6(1)(f) (our legitimate interest in operating a community).
• Account and notification emails – Art. 6(1)(b) and (f).
• Security, spam prevention, logs – Art. 6(1)(f) (legitimate interest in a functioning, secure service).

Services and recipients (processors)

We use a small number of service providers to run the forum. Each processes data only on our instructions under a data processing agreement:

• IONOS SE (Germany) – hosts the server the forum runs on. Data is stored on a server located in Germany.
• Cloudflare, Inc. – provides the secure tunnel and content delivery in front of the forum; processes connection data (including your IP) to route and protect traffic. Transfers to the US are covered by standard contractual clauses / the EU-US Data Privacy Framework.
• Brevo (Sendinblue SAS, France, EU) – sends the forum's transactional emails (account confirmation, notifications, password resets).

We do not sell your data and do not share it beyond what is needed to run the forum.

Retention

Account and post data is kept for as long as your account exists. Technical logs are kept only for a limited period for security and troubleshooting. If you delete your account, your personal data is removed; posts may be anonymised rather than deleted where removing them would break the readability of threads other people rely on.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you have the right to access, rectify, erase, restrict, and port your data, and to object to processing based on legitimate interest. You can manage or delete your account directly in your forum preferences, or contact us at contact@bambuhub.net. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority. The competent authority for us is the Bayerisches Landesamt für Datenschutzaufsicht (BayLDA), Ansbach.

Changes

We may update this policy if the forum's technical setup changes. The date at the top reflects the last update.

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Datenschutzerklärung (Community-Forum) – deutsche Fassung