Privacy Policy

1. Information you provide

If you create an account, gainstaging may collect your username, email address, password authentication data, display name, account role, and login status. Public activity may include comments, replies, likes, dislikes, reports, timestamps, and any text or links you choose to submit. If you use the contact form, gainstaging may collect your email address, optional phone number, message, account ID if logged in, and submission timestamp.

Joining the email list stores your email address, consent and confirmation timestamps, and subscription status. You must confirm through an email link before joining. We are currently collecting subscribers; automatic new-article emails and newsletter broadcasts are not enabled.

2. Editorial and admin information

Administrator and author accounts may store article records, product specifications, image references, captions, source notes, publishing status, edit history, moderation actions, and uploaded or linked review images. This information is used to operate the teardown archive and manage published review pages.

3. Automatically collected information

The production site may collect technical information such as IP address, browser type, device type, pages viewed, referral URL, approximate region, server logs, security events, and cookie or local-storage identifiers. This helps keep accounts secure, prevent abuse, debug errors, understand traffic, and improve site performance.

Account and contact endpoints use short-lived rate-limit records derived from IP addresses and request identifiers. These records use keyed hashes rather than storing raw IP addresses in the rate-limit tables. Contact delivery status is recorded so retries do not create duplicate messages.

4. Cookies and local storage

gainstaging may use cookies or browser local storage for login sessions, account preferences, comment voting, moderation state, analytics, and basic site functionality.

On public pages, we use Google Analytics only after you accept analytics cookies. It helps us understand page visits, referral sources, devices and engagement. Advertising personalization and Google signals are disabled in our website configuration. We do not send account identifiers or contact-message contents to Google Analytics. Our page-view configuration excludes URL fragments and query parameters, except validated campaign tags identifying the source, medium, campaign, and link placement. Admin pages and private article previews do not load Google Analytics. You can reject these cookies or withdraw consent through Cookie settings in the footer. We remember your choice in this browser for up to 180 days. Withdrawal stops future collection but does not erase previously collected data. Our separate Vercel Web Analytics integration remains in use on public pages. See how Google uses information from partner sites.

5. How information is used

Information is used to provide login, registration, comments, replies, likes, dislikes, reporting, contact handling, moderation, article editing, publishing, security, support, abuse prevention, analytics, and site maintenance. gainstaging does not need sensitive personal information for normal use, and users should not post private information in public comments.

6. Public visibility

Usernames, comments, replies, and visible discussion activity may be public. Email addresses, phone numbers, contact messages, password authentication data, moderation notes, and internal admin data are not intended to be public. If a comment includes personal information, it may still be visible because the user chose to post it.

7. Service providers

gainstaging may use hosting, domain, security, analytics, email, database, storage, or content-delivery providers to run the site. These providers may process information only as needed to provide their services. The domain is registered through Namecheap, and the production host may process DNS, traffic, and security logs.

Vercel hosts the website, Supabase stores account and site data, and Resend handles transactional emails. Contact messages are forwarded to our Microsoft-hosted mailbox at gainstaging.official@hotmail.com; replies are sent directly to the email address you supplied. Email delivery acceptance does not guarantee arrival in the recipient's inbox.

8. Retention

Account data, contact messages, comments, moderation records, server logs, and editorial records may be kept for as long as needed to operate the archive, preserve discussion context, maintain security, comply with legal obligations, or resolve disputes. Deleted or hidden comments may remain in backups or moderation logs for a limited period.

9. Your choices

You may request account updates, comment removal, account deletion, or privacy assistance by contacting gainstaging. Some information may be retained where necessary for security, legal compliance, abuse prevention, backups, or the integrity of technical discussion threads.

You can leave the email list using the preference link in the confirmation email, request a new link through the email-list form, or contact us. Confirmation and preference links expire; their tokens are stored as hashes.

10. Contact

For privacy questions, account requests, attribution concerns, or removal requests, contact gainstaging at gainstaging.official@hotmail.com.