Privacy
What this site stores, and what it doesn't
Springfall.games is a small site for one in-development game. It carries no advertising, no analytics and no tracking of any kind, and it exists on as little of your data as it can. This page says exactly what that means.
The short version
- If you only read the site, nothing about you is stored at all. No cookie is set, no account exists, and nothing is logged beyond the ordinary server records described below.
- Nothing here is loaded from anyone else's server. No fonts from Google, no embedded videos, no social widgets, no CDN. Your browser talks to this site and nothing else.
- There is no advertising and no analytics. Your data is never sold, shared or used to profile you, because it is never collected in the first place.
- Signing in is optional and only needed to take part in the progress tracker. It stores the minimum listed below.
- You can delete everything yourself, at any time, from your account page. It happens immediately. Individual comments can be edited or deleted from the thread they are in.
Why there is no cookie banner
Consent banners exist because most sites set cookies for tracking and advertising. This one does not. The only cookie it ever sets is the one that keeps you signed in after you have chosen to sign in, and New Zealand's Privacy Act has no cookie-consent regime to satisfy in the first place.
Worth saying anyway, because it is the more demanding test: that cookie would count as strictly necessary under the EU's ePrivacy rules too — the one category that never needs consent — because without it a sign-in cannot work at all. If this site ever sets a cookie that does not clear that bar, a banner will appear and this paragraph will be the first thing rewritten.
What is stored if you sign in
You can sign in with Steam, GitHub or Discord. None of them gives this site your password — you authenticate with them, not here — and none of them is asked for your email address.
What each one actually hands over
These are not equivalent, so they are set out separately rather than averaged into a single claim. The middle column is what the provider sends; the right column is what survives that.
| Provider | What it sends this site | What is kept |
|---|---|---|
| Steam OpenID 2.0 |
A SteamID64, and nothing else. Not a name, not an avatar, not an email — the protocol has no field for them. It is a seventeen-digit number. | The number. A persona name and avatar address can be fetched by a separate, optional lookup, but that lookup is not switched on today — so a Steam sign-in currently stores the number alone, and you appear with no name until you choose one. |
| GitHub OAuth2, scope read:user |
Your public profile: account number, username, avatar address, and the other public fields
GitHub returns with them. user:email is not requested, which
is the scope that would have exposed your address.
|
The account number, the username, the avatar address. The rest is discarded unread. |
| Discord OAuth2, scope identify |
Your account id, username, display name and avatar — and, because they come in the same
response, your locale, Nitro status, banner and account flags.
The email scope is not requested, and neither is
guilds, so which servers you are in is never visible to this site.
|
The account id, the display name (or the username if you have not set one), and the avatar address. The locale, Nitro status, banner and flags are received and thrown away — they are not stored, and there is nowhere in the database for them to go. |
The access token is handed straight back. For GitHub and Discord this site is issued a short-lived token to read your profile with, and it revokes that token the moment it has finished — it is never written down, and it is not left sitting on your provider account as a standing permission. Steam issues no token at all; there is nothing to revoke.
Your account number is never published. Whichever service you used, the id it gave is kept so that signing in again finds the same account. It is never shown next to a comment, never sent to the page in your browser, and never given to anyone. This matters most for Steam: a SteamID64 resolves to a full public profile — real name if you have set one, friends list, playtime, and every other game you own — so printing one beside a comment would say far more about you than a name does.
| What | Why | How long |
|---|---|---|
| Your Steam ID, or your GitHub account number | To recognise you as the same person next time, and to keep one vote per person per feature | Until you delete your account |
| The name your provider gave, if it gave one | So a comment has a name on it rather than a number | Until you delete your account |
| A display name you type yourself, if you set one | So you are not stuck with a Steam persona from 2011. It is kept separately from the provider's name, so signing in again cannot overwrite it | Until you clear it, or delete your account |
| A short bio, if you write one | Optional, and blank unless you fill it in | Until you clear it, or delete your account |
| Whether you prefer to comment anonymously | So the setting survives moving to another device | Until you change it, or delete your account |
| The address of your profile picture | Stored but not currently displayed anywhere, so that turning avatars on later would not require everyone to sign in again | Until you delete your account |
| A sign-in session | To keep you signed in between pages | 30 days, or until you sign out |
| Anything you choose to post — your votes and your comments | It is the point of the feature | Until you delete it, or delete your account |
No email address is ever requested or stored, by any of the three. There is no mailing list. Nothing on this site can email you.
Posting anonymously
A comment can be posted with your name withheld. It is worth being exact about what that means: the byline is hidden from other readers, and the comment is still yours. It appears in your own activity list, and a moderator can still see who wrote it. That is deliberate — anonymity here is a byline setting, not a way of being unaccountable — and it is said plainly next to the setting rather than only here.
Which way you voted is never shown to anyone. The tracker publishes totals; the only place an individual vote is ever returned is your own account page, to you.
What the sign-in cookie actually contains
A random number, and a signature proving this site issued it. It holds no personal information,
it cannot be read by any other website, and it is useless to anyone who copies it out of the
database — only a one-way hash of it is stored, in the same way passwords are. It is marked
HttpOnly, Secure and SameSite=Lax.
Ordinary server records
This site is hosted by Netlify and its database is hosted by Neon. Like every web host, Netlify records requests — including IP addresses — for security and reliability. That is a normal function of running a server rather than something this site does with your data, it is not used to build any profile of you, and it is not something this site can read or query.
Both of those services are overseas. The site and its database are hosted in the United States, so the little that is stored about you is stored there rather than in New Zealand. That is worth stating plainly rather than leaving you to infer it from a hosting provider's name.
When you sign in, your browser talks to Steam, GitHub or Discord directly, and that provider necessarily learns that you signed in to this site. What they do with that is covered by their own privacy policies, not this one. Nothing is sent to the two you did not choose.
Deleting your data
A single comment
Every comment you have written carries Edit and Delete in the thread it is in. Deleting one removes the row outright — it is gone for everyone, including from your own activity list, and it cannot be undone. Editing one leaves a small edited marker, because rewriting something other people have already replied to should not be invisible.
The one exception: a comment a moderator has already removed can be neither edited nor deleted. That record is what makes a moderation decision reviewable, and it would be no use if the person moderated could erase it.
Your whole account
Sign in, go to your account page, and use Delete my account. This happens straight away and cannot be undone. It removes your account, your sign-in sessions and your votes.
Comments you leave behind are handled differently, and deliberately: the text stays, but your name comes off it. Deleting a whole conversation because one person in it left would erase other people's replies along with your words. If you would rather they were gone entirely, delete them individually first — that button removes them completely — and then delete the account.
Your rights
Under New Zealand's Privacy Act 2020 you have the right to see what is held about you and to ask for it to be corrected, and to complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner if you think it has been handled badly. The delete button above goes further than the Act requires: it erases the account outright, immediately, without needing to ask anyone.
If you are reading this somewhere else — the UK, the EU, Australia — you may have additional rights under your own law, and you are welcome to exercise them here. In practice the answer is the same wherever you are: the delete button does erasure, and anything else goes through the Discord. This site is not going to claim a compliance badge it has not earned; it collects almost nothing, and what it does collect it will show you or delete on request.
Springfall is made by one person, through Vale Wind Limited, a company registered in New Zealand — that company is the agency responsible for everything described on this page. There is no privacy officer with a separate desk, because there is no team: the person reading your request is the person who wrote it.
Children
This site is not directed at children, and signing in requires a Steam, GitHub or Discord account — all three of which set their own minimum ages.
Changes
If what is collected changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top moves. The rules for using the site — what you may post, how moderation works, and what the progress tracker does and does not promise — are on the terms page.
Springfall's source is not public, so you cannot read this page's history for yourself. What you get instead is a commitment: anything material — a new kind of data, a new third party, a new cookie — gets said out loud in the devlog and the Discord, rather than quietly edited in here and left for you to notice.