Privacy & Data Use

Recommendations you submit

When you send a recommendation, the site saves:

• whether it is for a title or a Collection, and for a title its category;
• the link you submitted, and the provider and ID the site works out from it;
• for a Collection, its name and an optional link;
• the name or username you typed, if you chose to give one;
• the note you wrote, if you chose to write one;
• a random ID the site generates, the time you submitted it, and a status that starts as pending.

The name and note are free text and entirely optional. Please don't put anything sensitive in them.

What happens next

Recommendations are reviewed before they can appear on the Voting page. While reviewing, the site owner may add private moderation notes, link a recommendation to a duplicate or to an existing catalogue entry, keep details looked up for the linked title, and record whether it has been added to the catalogue. Moderation notes and merge records are not shown publicly. The name and note you submit are used for review and are not shown on public pages today.

What is not saved

• The security-check token from the Submit page is checked and then discarded. The site does not keep it.
• The site does not deliberately save your IP address, your browser's User-Agent details or any browser fingerprint with a recommendation.

That describes what the site stores itself. It is not a statement about what Cloudflare sees; see below.

Voting and the voting cookie

You don't need an account or a name to vote. The first time you cast a vote that the site accepts, it sets one cookie in your browser so it can recognise that browser's votes later.

Name

soul_the_bard_voter

Contains

a random ID (a UUID) made when the cookie is created

Lasts

one year, then the browser drops it

Settings

HttpOnly (page scripts can't read it), SameSite=Lax, available across the site (path /), and Secure (sent only over HTTPS) on the live site

The site's database stores a vote record for each vote: a vote ID, which title or Collection it is for, the random ID from your cookie, and when you voted. If you take your vote back, that record is deleted. Your browser sends the cookie on later visits so the Voting page can show which titles you have voted for.

What the cookie is not

• It is not an account, and it is not designed to identify a real person.
• It belongs to one browser. Clearing cookies, or using another browser or device, gives you a new, separate identity.
• It is not a guarantee of one human, one vote. It is a light check to keep the counts sensible, not a way to prove who someone is.
• It is not used for advertising or analytics.

The site's own pages set no other cookies and keep nothing else in your browser's local or session storage. The services described below are run by Cloudflare and may use their own browser storage, which the site does not control.

Cloudflare and spam protection

The site is hosted on Cloudflare, which also provides some of its spam and security protection.

• Cloudflare may process ordinary request information as part of hosting, security and logging: your IP address, the address of the page you asked for, browser and network details, and timing. Don't treat a visit as anonymous to Cloudflare. It has its own policies for how it handles this; seeCloudflare's privacy policy.
• The site itself does not deliberately save visitors' IP addresses in its own database.
• To slow down automated floods, Cloudflare's rate limiting counts submissions and votes by client address. The address is used for that count and the site does not store it.
• The Submit page loads Cloudflare Turnstile from challenges.cloudflare.com to help tell people from automated spam. When you submit, the site's server checks the result with Cloudflare, and the token is not kept in the site's database.
• The site owner's moderation area is protected by Cloudflare Access. Visitors don't use it.

The site does not set or promise any retention period for Cloudflare's own records.

Artwork and other outside resources

Some catalogue artwork is loaded straight from other sites by your browser, not through this one. Any site that a title's artwork credit names can be one of them, and the sites in use change as the catalogue grows. The main ones now are:

• image.tmdb.org (TMDB)
• artworks.thetvdb.com (TheTVDB)
• coverartarchive.org (Cover Art Archive)
• i.ytimg.com (YouTube)
• www.mtishows.com (Music Theatre International)
• assets.playbill.com (Playbill)
• www.maybehappyending.com (Maybe Happy Ending)

Individual titles can also use another site, such as a production's own website. This is not a complete list.

When your browser asks one of those hosts for an image, that host can receive ordinary web request information: your IP address, browser details such as the User-Agent, and usually the address of the page that asked for the image, depending on your browser's settings. Those hosts are not sent anything from this site's recommendation or voting data.

For where artwork and information come from, and the credits, seeAbout & Attributions.

Search terms and request logs

On Browse and Voting, your search and filter choices are kept in the page's address (the part after the ?). That means a search term can appear in the URL, and the hosting provider can see request URLs in its operational logs.

Please don't type anything sensitive into the catalogue search boxes.

Analytics and tracking

This site does not currently include a separate advertising or analytics tracker in its application code.

That is not the same as saying nothing is processed outside the site. As described above, Cloudflare handles ordinary request information to host and protect it, and the artwork hosts see the requests your browser makes to them. That is operational and security processing, not advertising analytics.

Metadata services and links elsewhere

• The site owner uses services such as TMDB, YouTube and MusicBrainz to look up titles and artwork when reviewing recommendations and keeping the catalogue. Your note, your name and your voting identity are not sent to them.
• Links on this site that go elsewhere leave Soul the Bard Media. What happens there is up to that site's own practices.

How long information is kept

Only what the site is actually set up to do:

• The voting cookie lasts one year in your browser. You can delete it yourself at any time.
• Votes are kept in the database until the vote is taken back, or until they are removed as part of running the site. There is no automatic expiry.
• Recommendations, with their moderation records and any saved provider details, are kept until the site owner removes them as part of running the site. There is no automatic deletion schedule.
• Cloudflare's own logs and records are governed by Cloudflare. This site does not state a period for them.