When you join:
While you’re a member:
If you contribute money:
Automatically:
One kind: the cookie that keeps you logged in. No tracking pixels, no third-party cookies, nothing that follows you around the web. That’s why there’s no cookie banner on this site.
We ask search engines not to index the club. The major ones honour that, but it’s a request rather than a wall, and other members are people who can copy and paste. Please don’t post anything here you’d be devastated to see elsewhere.
We’re small, so we rent nearly everything. Other companies handle:
Each of them handles data on our instructions and for no purpose of their own. We don’t sell member information, and nobody gets it for marketing of their own: if a sponsor ever pays the club, they pay for our attention, not for access to you. If you want to know exactly who they are, ask at hey@writingclub.world and we’ll tell you.
Writing Club runs from the United States, and so does everything above. Anyone can join from anywhere, so if you’re writing to us from the EU, the UK, or anywhere else, your words cross a border to reach us. There’s no version of the club where they don’t. That’s simply where it is.
The companies we rent from are set up to receive that information lawfully, through either the EU-US Data Privacy Framework or the standard contract terms the European Commission publishes for this exact purpose.
Avatars are screened automatically for explicit content before they’re accepted. The check runs on our own server, recognises nobody, and keeps nothing.
We send two kinds. Account email confirms your address, resets your password, and tells you when someone has replied to you. It’s how the account works, so it can’t be switched off while the account exists.
Club email is the week’s question and the occasional bit of news. Every one of them has a one-click unsubscribe link at the bottom, and that link keeps working forever, including in a mail we sent you years ago.
As long as you’re a member. When you delete your account it all goes at once and for good: responses, comments, links, chat, contest entries, avatar, join answers. There is no recycle bin and we keep no copy.
Two things survive, and only these. Stripe keeps its own record of a payment, because tax and fraud rules require it. And if you unsubscribed, we keep your address on a do-not-email list, because forgetting it is how we’d end up mailing you again.
Several US states, including California and Colorado, give people rights to see, correct, export or delete their data. Those laws have size thresholds that a club this small sits well under, so strictly they don’t bind us. We honour the requests anyway. Just ask.
We’re a small American club. We don’t market the club in Europe, we don’t price in euros, and we don’t go looking for members there. People find us by word of mouth. So European data law may well not formally reach us. We’d rather not argue that point with our own members. If you’re in the EU or the UK, treat everything below as yours.
Why we’re allowed to hold your information at all. Your account, your writing and the email that makes the club work: because you asked us for a Writing Club membership and we can’t provide one without them. Blocking spam and counting page views: because we have a real interest in the club staying up, and it costs you nothing. Your payment record: because tax law makes us keep it. If we ever want to use your information for something outside that list, we’ll ask first, and you can say no or change your mind later.
What you can ask us for. A copy of everything we hold about you. A correction, if something’s wrong. Deletion. A pause, if you want us to stop using something while a question is open. A portable file to take elsewhere. Or an objection to us using your information at all. Email hey@writingclub.world and we’ll do it, normally within a month, always free.
And if we let you down. Tell us, and we’d like the chance to fix it. But you don’t need our permission or our involvement to complain to the data protection authority in your own country. You’re entitled to go straight there.
Writing Club is for adults, and you have to be 18 to join. We don’t knowingly collect anything from children. If we find out a member is under 18, we’ll delete the account and everything in it.
Passwords are hashed, everything travels over an encrypted connection, and who is allowed to read what is enforced by the database itself rather than only by the website. That said, no system anywhere is perfect, and we won’t pretend ours is.
We post any change on this page and update the date at the top, so that date is always the version you’re looking at. If a change is a big one, we’ll flag it on the site so you can see what’s different before it takes effect.
Write to hey@writingclub.world and a person will read it.
Writing Club is operated by a limited liability company registered in the United States. If you need its registered name, for a legal notice or just because you want to know, ask at hey@writingclub.world and we’ll tell you.