Membership and privacy

GardenForums.com a friendly and growing community of gardeners. We feature a Garden Discussion Forum and Garden Photo Gallery. It's a fun and friendly place to talk with other gardeners, ask questions, share you knowledge, view and post photos and more! Whether you're a master gardener, or brand new to the hobby, you'll find something of interest here.



bob

Administrator
Staff member
Membership to the forum is free. It only takes a minute to sign up, no credit card needed (ever, since it's free) and we don't sell your e-mail address.

With all the recent news about Facebook and how they treat your privacy, I thought it best to inform members of what private information this website keeps on members.

Only 4 items of personal information are kept:
User name - Chosen by you, this does not have to be your real name.
e-mail address - The e-mail needs to actually work for confirmation, password reset and optional forum notifications. We suggest using a secondary e-mail for this site and other online sites, Yahoo and Gmail are good options.
Password - Allows you to log in and use the forum features. We strongly suggest not using the same password as you use for critical sites like banking and credit cards. That is simply good practice for all websites.
Date of birth - Required by law for age verification. (See below)

That's it. No credit card info will ever be requested, as the site is free. No home address info, phone number, where you went to school, work, play or anything else. The personal information is as minimal as we can possibly make it. If it wasn't for rampant spammers, we would let anyone post without registering at all.

Why do we ask for date of birth? COPPA:
The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) is a law created to protect the privacy of children under 13. The Act was passed by the U.S. Congress in 1998 and took effect in April 2000. COPPA is managed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
Even though the site is free, to comply with COPPA, we still must verify that you are at least 13 before allowing you to join. Worried about giving your date of birth? Change the year, we'll never know (Just don't lie about being over 12 please! It is our full intent to comply with the COPPA rules.) I suggest using the right day and month as the forum likes to tell you happy birthday. But, if you made a "typo", we won't know since we have no way to verify the info. That said, since we don't even know your real name in most cases, let alone any other personal info using the real date is a pretty low risk in my opinion.
 
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