Privacy Policy - The Modding Community

Where the GDPR applies, we must be able to say why we are allowed to process each thing we hold. Ours are:

• Contract (Art. 6(1)(b)) — everything needed to give you the account and services you asked for: your profile, sessions, the content you publish, your purchases and your notification delivery.
• Legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)) — keeping the platform safe, working and honest. This covers abuse prevention, rate limiting, moderation records, API and integration request logs, error diagnostics, aggregate item statistics, and the anonymous analytics described below. We have weighed these against your interests and limited each to what the purpose actually needs.
• Consent (Art. 6(1)(a)) — the things you switch on yourself: optional public listing, optional profile and activity visibility, optional notification channels, and the browser location permission behind the Show Ping feature. You can withdraw any of these at any time, and withdrawing does not affect processing that already happened.
• Legal obligation (Art. 6(1)(c)) — retaining what we must retain, and responding to lawful requests.

We do not rely on legitimate interests for advertising, profiling for marketing, or data sales, because we do none of those things.

A large part of this service is public on purpose . Your username, avatar, published items, comments, reviews, ratings and public group memberships are visible to anyone, including search engines, and may be cached or copied by third parties beyond our control. Deleting content removes it from our services; it cannot un-publish copies somebody else already made. Treat anything you post as permanent.

You may sign in with any of the following, available on the login page:

• Discord
• Google
• GitHub
• Steam
• Email - a one-time six-digit code sent to your address.

We never store a password . Email sign-in is passwordless: the code we send is short-lived, single-use, and discarded once it is checked or expires.

When you sign in through an external provider, we store the data that provider returns to us, which may include:

• Email (Steam does not provide one, and other providers may withhold it)
• Username and display name
• Avatar (image)
• The provider's account identifier and the access tokens needed to keep the connection working

You may link or unlink additional providers at any time from your account's Connections page.

Everything on your profile is optional and supplied by you. This includes your username , display name , biography , avatar and any social links you choose to add (website, Discord, Steam, GitHub, X, Facebook or Instagram).

You control who can see you:

• Public listing - whether you appear in the public users browser. This is off by default ; we never list a member without their consent.
• Profile visibility - whether your public profile page is visible to everyone.
• Activity visibility - whether other members can see your presence indicator, and whether it is derived from your activity or pinned manually to Idle or Away.

To keep accounts safe we store:

• Sessions - a session token and its expiry, so you stay signed in.
• Two-factor authentication - if you enable it, your TOTP secret and the date it was armed. Recovery codes are stored only as SHA-256 hashes and are consumed on use, so we can never read them back.
• Verification tokens - short-lived sign-in and verification codes, along with a failed-attempt counter that burns a code after a handful of wrong guesses.
• Rate-limit counters - keyed to an IP address or email address, kept only for as long as the limit window lasts.

Sign-in and other sensitive forms are protected by Cloudflare Turnstile, a privacy-focused CAPTCHA alternative. Turnstile receives your IP address in order to score the request.

Your account settings are stored alongside your account and include your time zone , language , and your notification preferences (email and push channels, plus per-category opt-ins for system messages, comments, reviews, releases, mentions and moderation notices). You can also mute mention notifications for individual items you own, or for an entire content type.

We record when you registered , when you last signed in , and when you were last seen . The last of these is refreshed by a lightweight heartbeat while you are actually using the site. It powers presence indicators and lets our staff identify dormant accounts; it is not shared with anyone if you have disabled activity visibility.

We store the following interaction data:

• Favorites and filters (hidden items) - stored against your account when signed in, or in the tmc_settings cookie when you are not. Neither list is publicly visible.
• Views - a single row per item per visitor, keyed to your account when signed in or the anonymous sid cookie when you are not. This is what produces view counts; it is a count, not a browsing history.
• Downloads - recorded the same way, once per file per visitor, to produce download counts.
• Ratings and reviews - your like or dislike and any written review, both publicly attributed to you.
• Notifications - the notifications delivered to you, their read state, and the link they point at.

Aggregate statistics (view, download and favorite totals over time) are stored as periodic snapshots per item , not per user, and are retained for up to three years .

Files you upload — images, archives, plugins and scripts — are stored with an object storage provider ( S3-compatible ). We record the file's owner , type , size , storage key , any title and description you supply, and its upload and edit timestamps . We do not read or index the contents of your archives beyond what is needed to serve and moderate them.

Please be aware that files you upload may contain personal data you did not intend to share — image EXIF metadata, paths containing your name, or configuration files containing credentials. We do not strip this for you. Review what you upload.

If you create an API key , we store its name, a short public prefix , and a SHA-256 hash of the secret. The plaintext key is shown to you once at creation and is never recoverable afterwards. We also store the key's scope, permissions, expiry, revocation state, optional IP allowlist and rate limit.

Requests made with an API key are logged. Those logs contain the request method , path , response status , the item involved, and the IP address the request came from. This is a security and abuse-prevention measure, and the logs are visible to you for your own keys and to our staff.

When you report content, we store the report, its contents, and who filed it. Reports are visible to our moderation staff, not to the reported party's audience.

When a penalty (a restriction or ban) is applied to an account or an item, we store its type, reason, expiry, the staff member who issued it, and any appeal conversation between the affected member and staff. Moderation records are retained even after the penalty expires so that repeat behaviour can be assessed fairly.

Direct messages, group conversations and their attachments are stored so they can be delivered and re-read. We keep each message's author , recipients , timestamps , read state and any attachment you send.

Message bodies are held encrypted at rest , and attachments sent in a conversation are stored as private objects rather than on the public CDN. This is not end-to-end encryption , and we will not pretend otherwise: we hold the keys, which means we are technically able to read a conversation and would be obliged to disclose one if lawfully compelled. We access message contents only when investigating a report or a legal request — never routinely, and never for analytics.

Deleting a message removes it for everyone in the conversation. The other participants may already have read, screenshotted or quoted it, which we cannot undo.

If you join a party or a live channel we store your membership, join and leave times, ready state, the matches the party played, and any scores reported for you. Where a party is tied to a game server, an authorised integration running on that server may report your in-game join, leave and score events (see below). Party and match records are visible to the other members of that party.

We store who you follow , who you have added as a friend , who you have blocked , the groups you belong to, and the invitations you have been sent. Follows and public group memberships are visible to others; your block list is private and is never revealed to the person you blocked.

Status updates you post, and the activity entries generated when you publish or interact with something, appear in the feeds of people who follow you, subject to the visibility settings on your account.

Topics, replies, roadmap entries, changelog notes, feedback posts and the votes cast on them are stored with your account as the author, and are public wherever the board they were posted to is public.

Payments are processed by Stripe and PayPal. Your card number, bank details and billing address go to them, not to us — we never receive or store them, and we could not retrieve them if asked.

What we do store against your account is:

• The processor's subscription and customer identifiers , so a renewal or cancellation can be matched to you.
• The status of a subscription, when the current period ends, and whether it is set to cancel.
• The amount and currency charged at signup, as a record of what you agreed to.
• An immutable credit ledger : every purchase, renewal, gift sent or received, spend, refund and staff adjustment, with the balance after each. This is what makes your balance auditable, and it is also a financial record — so ledger rows are kept even after the thing they paid for is gone.
• Which content items you have purchased access to, and when that access expires.

Your balance, your ledger and your purchases are private to you and to our staff. A creator whose item you bought is told that a purchase occurred and can see it in their own figures; they never receive your payment details. If you gift credits to another member, that member necessarily sees who sent them.

We store and rely on site cookies for persistent settings across our browsers. The cookie name and key we use is tmc_settings , and settings are stored in JSON format. Preferences are kept per content type (apps, assets, mods, servers, server maps, communities, collections, groups, articles, categories and users), and cover:

• Layout - grid or table view, pagination style, and how many results to show per page.
• Sorting - the current sort column and direction.
• Filters - the apps, categories and tags you are filtering by, plus your favorited and filtered item IDs when you are not signed in .
• Content toggles - whether to show NSFW items and whether to show archived items.
• Appearance - whether background images are enabled.

The server browser stores a few additional options of its own, including showing only online servers, minimum and maximum user and slot counts, hiding full or empty servers, showing password-protected or insecure servers, showing only official servers, filtering by country, auto-refreshing the list, color-coding user counts, and whether to show ping.

All users can favorite and filter (hide) servers in our server browser. The storage method depends on whether the user is signed in or not:

• Users who are not signed in use cookie storage as described above.
• Users who are signed in use our database (we map user IDs to server IDs in a database table).

Favorite and filtered server lists are not publicly visible to other users.

If you enable the Show Ping setting, you will most likely need to give access to our website to access your location . This is just your geo location and we do not store any of this information.

If you claim a game server, we generate a short-lived claim token that you place on the live server (for example, in its name or description) so our query system can verify you control it. The token is valid for 15 minutes and is stored with your account and the server it targets.

We track and display servers in our server browser. We currently track servers in the following games (this list will expand over time):

• Counter-Strike 2 (Valve)
• Rust (FacePunch)
• Project Zomboid (The Indie Stone)
• Garry's Mod (FacePunch)
• Arma 3 (Bohemia Interactive)
• 7 Days to Die
• Left 4 Dead 2 (Valve)
• Team Fortress 2 (Valve)
• Unturned
• Counter-Strike: Source (Valve)
• Killing Floor (Tripwire Interactive)
• Killing Floor 2 (Tripwire Interactive)
• No More Room In Hell
• Left 4 Dead (Valve)
• Counter-Strike (Valve)
• Half-Life 2: DeathMatch (Valve)
• Sven: Co-op
• Insurgency
• Fistful of Frags
• Synergy
• Hell Let Loose
• Day of Defeat: Source (Valve)
• Red Orchestra 2
• Zombie Panic! Source
• Pirates, Vikings, & Knights II
• Half-Life DeathMatch: Source

We track , store , and display the following information from each server:

• Name
• IP address and hostname
• Port number (game and query)
• Online status
• User counts (current, max, and bots)
• Map name and game mode
• Game version, operating system, and whether the server is passworded, secure or dedicated
• Approximate geographic location (country, and latitude/longitude of the hosting region)
• Publicly exposed server variables and rules

Additionally, we also track , store , and display user information from servers. This includes:

• Name (usually Steam display name)
• Steam ID, when the server exposes it
• Score (current session and cumulative)
• Play time (current session and cumulative)
• Current index on server, online status, and session start and end times

This information is broadcast publicly by the game server itself over the game's standard query protocol. It is the same data any player sees in their in-game server browser. We do not join servers, read chat, or collect anything a server does not already publish.

We also automatically add servers to our server browser without permission from server owners. This is because these servers are already listed in public server browsers . We retrieve them from the Valve Master Server . Users can also manually add servers by IP and port.

If you are a server owner and would like your server removed , or an in-game player who would like your name and statistics removed , please reach out to us and we will take care of it.

If you are in one of these regions, you additionally have the right to:

• Access — obtain a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
• Rectification — have inaccurate data corrected.
• Erasure — have your data deleted where we have no overriding reason to keep it.
• Restriction — have us pause processing while a dispute is resolved.
• Portability — receive the data you gave us in a structured, machine-readable format, and have it sent onward where technically feasible.
• Object — object to processing we base on legitimate interests, including our security and abuse-prevention logging. We will stop unless we can show compelling grounds that override your interests.
• Withdraw consent — for anything you switched on yourself, at any time, without affecting what was lawful before.

Exercise any of these by writing to [email protected]. We answer within one month , and will tell you if we need the extension the GDPR permits. We do not charge for this, and we do not require an account to make a request — though we may need to verify that the request really comes from you.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with your national supervisory authority . We would much rather you came to us first, but that right is yours regardless.

If you live in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia or another US state with a comprehensive privacy law, you have the right to know what we collect, to access and correct it, to delete it, and to not be discriminated against for exercising any of them. The account tools above cover all of these directly; anything they do not, we will do on request.

To be explicit about the parts these laws care about most:

• We do not sell your personal information, and we never have.
• We do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising.
• We do not process sensitive personal information for the purpose of inferring characteristics about you.
• We run no targeted advertising , so there is no advertising opt-out to offer.

You may use an authorised agent to make a request. If we ever have to decline one, we will tell you why and how to appeal it.