At poppies.org we hold our users privacy in the highest regard. As such, we attempt to keep as little information about each visitor as possible, while at the same time attempting to provide maximum functionality.

The Information We Collect and What We Do With It:

Any personal information you provide to poppies.org or its staff will always remain private, and will never be sold or revealed to any third-party.

In order to access the Somni-Forum, you must provide a working e-mail address. The e-mail address you provide for access to the forums is used only for the following purposes:

• Password Retrieval
• Access to the "E-Mail Based" Features of the forums, such as message notification
  
• Authentication to prevent abuse and spamming
  
• Notices from the poppies.org administration

When each user visits the poppies.org site, the following information is logged by our server:

• The visitor's IP address
• The URL of the referring site
• The browser the visitor is using
• Which poppies.org pages the visitor accesses
• The total time spent by the visitor viewing poppies.org before leaving

This information is kept for statistical analysis only, and to prevent abusive users from posting innapropriate messages in the forums. The statistics we gather are useful in determining errors within the site, and tracking which sections of the site are most popular or need improvement. They are also used to determine where our visitors are coming from on the internet. With the exception of in the forums, your IP address is not connected to your actions on the website, except for a short period of time in our raw logs before they are processed for analysis. Once the logs are processed, the raw logs are deleted and there is no way to track which IP did what. So in other words, we may know that someone at a certain IP address visited poppies.org, but we don't know what they did.

The only place where we do draw a connection between actions on the poppies.org website and the IP address responsible for them, is when a user posts a message in the forums. This is only used to track abusive users and to block the IP addresses of abusive users from accessing the forum system.

All of the information gathered by the poppies.org servers is for internal use only, and is not made available to any third party.

For information on what information is gathered by our sponsors when visiting the poppies.org website, please read the Bla-Bla Privacy Policy.

How Poppies.org Uses Cookies to Enhance the Site:

The only sections of poppies.org that use cookies, other than the advertising provided by Bla-Bla, are the Papaver Somni-Forum, and the "Poppy Straw Polls" voting system. The cookies used in the forum are used for the following purposes only:

• Keeping track of login information for the "who's online" listing and to prevent people from forging messages through form manipulation
• Tracking which messages you have read, so you can know which threads have had new messages posted since your last visit
• Keeping your session on hand so you don't have to constantly log in if you chose the "Automatic Login" function

No personal information is stored in any of the cookies used by the forums. They are client-side only, and we do not keep track of them in any way. No information is gathered from you using cookies, and they are only used to enhance your experience with the forums. You can browse the forums with cookies turned off, but you cannot post if your browser will not accept cookies from poppies.org.

The cookies used for the "Poppy Straw Polls" are used only to keep track of whether you have voted or not. If you have voted, the system sends a cookie to your computer to tell it to show the voting results instead of the voting form. This is just to prevent people from voting multiple times, and so you can see the results once you have voted instead of constantly being shown the voting form instead.

Protecting Your Privacy:

At poppies.org we value your right to remain completely anonymous on the internet. If you feel uncomfortable with any of your information being gathered by us or any other site on the internet, there are a variety of steps you can take to ensure you remain completely anonymous.

If your ISP offers access to a "proxy" or "cache" server, using one will be sufficient to prevent poppies.org from logging any of the above mentioned information, as the only personal information we track is your IP address. Other sites on the internet may not be as benign however, so you may want to look into "public proxies" or "anonymity services" which can block all of your personal information from being disclosed to sites on the internet. For more information on anonymity and proxy servers, please refer to the "Privacy and Encryption" forum on this site, or you can find a good list of "anonymizing" services and public proxies here. One of the best anonymizing services is SafeWeb, which will both mask your IP address and encrypt your connection, keeping you totally anonymous, and preventing malicious users or agencies from snooping in on your connection to poppies.org. SafeWeb works well with the forum system, and you can post messages and interact with the site fully, provided you leave the SafeWeb settings at their default level.

If you wish to protect your ture email address from being revealed to this site or others, you can register for an @poppies.org email address by visiting the "mail" section of this site. Poppies.org E-Mail is provided by a third party, and you can read their privacy policy here.

You can also register for private and encrypted web-based email at hushmail and privacyx. Both are fine services, although you should be aware that your emails are only protected by encryption when sending mail to other hushmail or privacyx members. If you would like a more comprehensive solution to protect your messages from being read by others, we suggest you use PGP, which is a universal encryption program that is easy to use, incorporates into your existing email (and poppies.org email too) flawlessly, and provides military grade public key encryption to protect your correspondance and private documents. Users in the US and Canada can download PGP here. International users can download PGP here. A more feature-packed commercial version is available at http://www.pgp.com.

Privacy Disclaimer:

Personal data provided by each user to POPPIES.ORG will be used only in connection with services provided on this Web site and will not be given to others. While POPPIES.ORG will seek to require third-party content providers and other parties to adhere to POPPIES.ORG's privacy policies, POPPIES.ORG does not bear any responsibility for any actions or policies of such third parties. Users should be aware that when they voluntarily disclose personal information (e.g., username, e-mail address) in the Forums, that information can be collected and used by others and may result in unsolicited messages from other posters or parties.