Privacy Policy

Effective October 6, 2026 (updated November 5, 2026)

This policy explains what personal information Bellazon collects, how we use it, who we share it with, and the choices you have. Bellazon (www.bellazon.com, including the forum at /main/ and the blog at /blog/) is operated by Bellazon LLC. Questions about this policy or your information: [email protected].

Information we collect

• Account information. Your username, email address and password (stored as a one-way hash), plus anything you add to your profile, such as a photo, cover image or signature. If you sign in with Google, Facebook or X, we receive the basic account details that service shares with us, such as your name, email address and an account identifier.
• Content you post. Topics, posts, images and other uploads, reactions, follows, and private messages. Posts, uploads and profiles are public: anyone, including search engines, can see them. Private messages are visible only to their participants and, when needed for moderation or abuse reports, to our staff.
• Technical information. IP addresses, browser and device details, and the pages you request. The forum records the IP addresses used with your account and with each post, and our servers and security providers keep request and security logs.
• Support payments. If you support Bellazon on Ko-fi, Ko-fi sends us the name shown on your payment, the email address you paid with, the amount, any message you wrote and whether you chose to make your support public. We use the email address, or a username you put in your message, only to link your support to your forum account and show a Supporter badge next to your posts (only if you chose to make your support public). If you are signed in when you click "Support on Ko-fi", we also note that click (your account and the time), so that a payment made shortly afterwards with an email address we don't recognise can still be credited to you; these notes are deleted after 30 days. We delete the email address and message once your support is linked, or after 90 days. Payments are processed by Ko-fi, PayPal or Stripe; we never see your card or bank details.
• Cookies and similar technologies. See Cookies and consent below.

How we use information

• To run the forum and your account: sign-in, posting, notifications, private messages and email you ask for.
• To keep Bellazon safe: preventing spam, fraud and abuse, enforcing our rules, and responding to copyright (DMCA) and legal requests.
• To process images. Uploads are converted to efficient formats, exact or near-exact duplicate copies may be combined into one stored file, and images are classified automatically to decide which images are shown to visitors who are not signed in and where advertising may appear.
• To understand how the site is used (analytics) and, where advertising is shown, to show and measure ads.
• To comply with the law.

Automated moderation

New posts are checked automatically for spam. To do this we send the post text and link, its topic and forum, whether it starts a new topic, and the author's username and post count to OpenAI's API. CleanTalk also checks registrations and posts, and its script runs on forum pages to detect automated visitors. Registration is protected by an hCaptcha challenge, and forms on the blog by Google reCAPTCHA. Clear spam can be removed and the account banned automatically; borderline cases are left for our moderators. Images are classified with machine-learning models that run mostly on our own servers; samples of public posts and images have also been processed with OpenAI and Google services to measure and improve the accuracy of these tools. If you think an automated decision about your account or content was wrong, contact us and a person will review it.

Cookies and consent

Essential cookies keep you signed in, protect forms against forgery, remember your cookie choice and protect the site from attacks. These are set by the forum software and by Cloudflare, and the site cannot work without them.

The forum's support request ("Support on Ko-fi") remembers in your browser's local storage how often it has been shown and whether you closed it, so it doesn't repeat. This stays on your device and is not sent to us.

Optional cookies are used for Google Analytics and, where ads are shown, by our advertising partners (including for personalised advertising). Google tags are delivered through our own domain via Cloudflare.

• In the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, optional cookies are used only if you accept them.
• Elsewhere they are on by default, and you can turn them off on the Cookies page. If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal, we treat it as an opt-out: advertising cookies and personalised advertising stay off unless you accept optional cookies.
• In those regions a cookie banner asks for your choice. Everywhere, you can accept or reject optional cookies and change your choice at any time on the Cookies page.
• When optional cookies are off, Google may still receive limited cookieless signals (such as a page view without identifiers) so that measurement can be modelled.

Learn how Google uses information from sites that use its services at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites. Where advertising is shown to visitors in the EEA, UK and Switzerland, Google's consent message may also ask for your choices.

Advertising

Bellazon is paid for partly by advertising. Ads are currently shown only to visitors who are not signed in. They come from our advertising partners (ad exchanges and similar companies, and the advertisers that buy through them) and from advertisers who book space with us directly.

When a page with an ad space loads, your browser may ask our advertising partners for an ad, and they may hold a real-time auction among advertisers. To do this they receive information such as your IP address, browser and device details, the address of the page, and identifiers stored in cookies or similar technologies. They use it to choose, personalise and measure ads and to prevent fraud, under their own privacy policies.

Our advertising partners' code runs only when optional cookies are allowed. If you reject optional cookies, or your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal and you have not accepted optional cookies, no ad request is sent to them. Ads we sell directly are served from our own servers and counted without cookies or identifiers.

Who we share information with

We do not sell personal information for money. We share it only with providers that help us run Bellazon, when you ask us to, or when the law requires it:

• Cloudflare: content delivery, security and bot protection, and delivery of Google tags.
• Amazon Web Services: sending email (Amazon SES) and storing offsite database backups (Amazon S3).
• Google: analytics, advertising, Google sign-in and reCAPTCHA on the blog.
• Advertising partners: ad exchanges and similar companies that show and measure ads, and the advertisers that buy through them, as described in Advertising.
• Meta (Facebook) and X: sign-in, only if you choose to use them.
• OpenAI: automated spam checks, as described above. Data sent through OpenAI's API is not used to train OpenAI's models by default.
• CleanTalk: anti-spam checks of registrations and posts, and bot detection on forum pages.
• hCaptcha: the bot check at registration.
• Invision Community: our forum software provider, which also provides IP-address location lookups.
• Ko-fi, PayPal and Stripe: processing support payments made on our Ko-fi page.

Where advertising cookies are used for personalised ads, some US state laws treat this as "selling" or "sharing" personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising. You can opt out by rejecting optional cookies on the Cookies page or by turning on Global Privacy Control in your browser. We may also disclose information to respond to valid legal requests, to protect the rights and safety of our members and others, or as part of a sale or transfer of the site.

International transfers

Our servers are in the United States, and our providers may process information in other countries. When information from the EEA, UK or Switzerland is transferred, we rely on our providers' legal safeguards, such as standard contractual clauses or the EU-US Data Privacy Framework.

How long we keep information

• Account information is kept while your account exists.
• Posts and uploads stay as part of the discussions they belong to unless they are removed.
• Some routine logs (errors, email, tasks and spam logs) are deleted after days to weeks.
• Other records are kept indefinitely unless we delete them: moderator and administrator action logs, account history, IP addresses and devices associated with accounts and posts, and records of automated spam decisions.
• Backups are kept for disaster recovery on a rotating schedule, and some copies (including yearly database backups) are kept long-term. Deleted information may remain in backups.

Your rights and choices

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, download or delete your personal information, to object to or restrict certain processing, and to withdraw consent at any time. To make a request, email [email protected] from the address on your account; we may need to verify your identity. You can edit most profile information yourself in your account settings. If we delete your account, posts that are part of other members' discussions may be kept in anonymised form unless the law requires otherwise. We will not treat you differently for exercising your rights.

If you are in the EEA, UK or Switzerland, our legal bases are:

• performing our agreement with you (running your account);
• our legitimate interests in operating a safe forum, preventing spam and abuse, and understanding site use;
• your consent, for optional cookies;
• legal obligations.

You also have the right to complain to your local data protection authority.

Children

Bellazon is not intended for children. You must be at least 13 years old to create an account, or older if your country sets a higher minimum age for consenting to the use of personal information (up to 16 in some European countries). We do not knowingly collect personal information from children below these ages. If you believe a child has given us personal information, contact us and we will delete it.

Security

We use encrypted connections, hashed passwords and restricted access to protect your information. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, so we cannot guarantee absolute security.

Copyright

Copyright notices under the DMCA can be sent to our designated agent at [email protected].

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as Bellazon changes. We will change the effective date above, and for significant changes we will give more prominent notice on the site.