Who we are
Guestbook World (guestbookworld.com) is a free service for making online guestbooks. Questions about this policy go through our contact form.
If you make a guestbook
To give you an account we store:
- your email address, which is also how you log in;
- your password, kept only as a salted PBKDF2 hash, so nobody can read it back, us included;
- the name you give us, if you give one;
- your guestbooks, their settings and the replies you write;
- when you signed up and when you last logged in.
If you sign a guestbook
The name, message, place and website you type are shown on that guestbook, including copies of it embedded on its owner's website, until the owner hides or deletes them. Along with your message we store:
- the date and time;
- the country your connection comes from, as two letters supplied by Cloudflare. It is used only in totals for the whole site, such as how many countries messages came from, and is never shown next to your message;
- a scrambled code made from your IP address with a key that changes every day. It lets us stop floods of messages and duplicates. We do not store the IP address itself.
The owner of the guestbook can read, publish, hide, delete and reply to your message, and can download the guestbook's messages as a spreadsheet.
Cookies
We set cookies only when you log in: __Host-gbw keeps you signed in for up to 30 days and cannot be read by scripts, and gbw_in only tells our pages to show "Dashboard" instead of "Log in". Logging out removes both. We use no advertising or tracking cookies.
Spam checks
Our forms use Cloudflare Turnstile to check that a person, not a script, is sending them. Turnstile runs in your browser and Cloudflare processes technical data about the visit to do this, as described in Cloudflare's Turnstile privacy addendum.
Where the data lives
The site runs on Cloudflare's network, and accounts, guestbooks and messages are kept in a Cloudflare D1 database. We do not sell or rent personal data, and we do not share it with anyone except Cloudflare as our host, or where the law requires it.
How long we keep it
- Your account and guestbooks: until you delete them.
- Messages: until the guestbook's owner deletes them, or deletes the guestbook or the account.
- Counters used against spam: they expire within a day.
- Messages sent through our contact form: as long as we need them to answer you.
Your choices
You can change or delete everything in your dashboard. Deleting your account deletes your guestbooks and every message in them straight away. If you signed someone's guestbook and want your message removed, ask the owner of that guestbook, or contact us with the guestbook's address and the message.
Children
Accounts are for people aged 13 and over.
Changes
When this policy changes we update this page and the date at the top.