What this website stores, why, and for how long.
When you use the contact form, we save the name, email address, enquiry category and message you provide so the site administrator can read and respond to your enquiry. These records are available only through a password-protected admin area and are retained for up to 180 days in the website database. Expired records are cleared when the backend next runs. You do not need to provide any information beyond the form fields.
The form also attempts to send an email notification to the relevant College address. Email copies and server backups are managed separately and may remain after a record is removed from the website database.
The merchandise is fictional. We count add-to-basket clicks and checkout attempts by product and UTC date to understand which items attract interest. These totals are retained for 180 days. The shop statistics do not contain names, email addresses, visitor identifiers or payment information. Repeated clicks are counted separately.
The imaginary basket uses your browser’s local storage to remember its item count. You can clear it through your browser’s site-data settings. We do not use analytics cookies for the shop register.
We count page views, thesis PDF opens, the website a visitor arrived from and the country of the connection, as daily totals, so the College can see what is read and where readers come from. This is done by the site’s own script and stored on our own server; nothing is sent to a third party and no cookie is set. To count each visitor once a day we keep a keyed hash of the connection address, browser and date for two days; the address itself is not stored. Country is looked up on our server from an offline database. Totals are retained for 180 days.
To tell new readers from returning ones, the site’s script keeps one item in your own browser: the date of your last visit. It is not a cookie, it is never sent to us, and it identifies nobody. Your browser uses it to tell our server one of two words, “new” or “returning”, and roughly how long you have been away (a day, a week, a month, longer). We keep only the daily totals of those words. We cannot tell which visitor returned, or link one visit to another.
If you would rather not be counted at all, use the button below. Your choice is kept in this browser, so it applies to this browser only and is forgotten if you clear your browsing data.
The server processes your IP address to receive requests. Short-lived security counters use a keyed hash of the address to limit repeated submissions and login attempts; raw IP addresses are not stored in the enquiry or shop database. The web server may separately record normal access logs, including IP addresses. The admin area uses a secure session cookie for login, and marks a browser that has logged in with a second cookie saying only “staff”, so that the College’s own visits are left out of the statistics. Neither cookie is ever set for a visitor to the public pages.
Contact the site administrator at contact@kingethelred.college with questions about your enquiry or to request removal of its stored copy.
King Ethelred’s is a fictional parody institution. The correspondence, unfortunately, is real.
