Privacy Policy

Effective date: August 29, 2026

MUDVerse ("MUDVerse," "we," "us," or "our") operates https://www.mudverse.com/, a noncommercial hobby website for discovering, listing, ranking, and reviewing MUDs and other text-based games.

This Privacy Policy explains the information MUDVerse collects, how we use and disclose it, and the choices available to you. If you have questions or want to request a correction or deletion, email brendan@withmorehope.org.

Information We Collect

Account Information

When you create or use an account, we collect your email address, password hash, account status, account creation date, and security information such as recent login times and IP addresses. We never store your password in plain text.

Information You Submit

We collect information you choose to submit through MUDVerse, including:

  • Game listings, descriptions, connection details, websites, web-client and community links, banners, and tags.
  • Reviews, ratings, display names, affiliations, and information about how long you have played a game.
  • Games you watch and other account preferences created by your actions.
  • Email addresses used to request an account email change or transfer a game listing.
  • Messages you send when requesting support or contacting MUDVerse.

Game listings, banners, reviews, ratings, display names, and related game information are intended to be public. They may appear on MUDVerse pages, in search results, and through the public MUDVerse API. Do not submit personal information that you do not want made public.

Voting, Login, and Security Information

We collect IP addresses when visitors vote and when members submit reviews. We also record account login times, IP addresses, and browser user-agent information. We use this information to operate voting, protect accounts, investigate abuse, enforce site rules, and troubleshoot problems.

For login, registration, password recovery, email changes, and listing transfers, MUDVerse may keep rate-limit records or one-way identifiers derived from an email address or IP address. These records help prevent automated attacks and repeated abuse.

API Information

If you create a MUDVerse API key, we store a public key identifier, a one-way hash of the secret, creation and last-use times, limits, and revocation information. We also keep daily usage totals associated with the account and API endpoint, including request outcomes, rate-limit events, response sizes, and response times. API secrets, raw request URLs, and API search terms are not stored in the aggregate usage tables.

Advertising and Payment Information

If you purchase self-service advertising, PayPal processes the checkout. MUDVerse retains the owning account and ad/listing identifiers, purchase purpose, month count, amount in cents, PayPal order and capture identifiers, payment status, refund totals, review flags, and operational webhook identifiers and payload hashes. We also keep daily impression and click totals for each ad so its owner can assess performance. We do not store the identity, account, IP address, or browsing history of a person who sees or selects an ad in those aggregate totals, and we do not store payer email from PayPal, funding details, or raw card data.

Product and Game Discovery Outcomes

To understand whether MUDVerse helps visitors find and engage with games, we keep daily aggregate counts for views of guides and developer/game-owner resources, Play Now and Visit Website selections, searches with no results, combinations of filter names, completed watch, review, and vote actions, transitions from guides to game details, and first-time API key creation.

For up to 30 minutes, your browser may keep the acquisition channel, a recognized search engine, the landing-page path, and the arrival time in session storage. MUDVerse receives the action, channel, recognized search engine, landing-page path, action-page path, and—when relevant—the game or names of filters used, then immediately adds the action to a daily total. Filter measurements contain categories such as theme or connection type, not the selected values or search text.

These analytics do not store raw event records, account IDs, IP addresses, cookies, persistent visitor identifiers, full referrer URLs, search queries, filter values, review text, or vote values. Ordinary short-lived web-server and security logs remain governed separately by this policy. Counts are directional because browser privacy settings, script blocking, and referrer suppression can prevent measurement.

Automatically Collected Information

Our web server and application may automatically record information such as your IP address, browser and device information, requested page, referring page, request time, and diagnostic or security events. We use this information to deliver the site, maintain security, diagnose failures, and understand general service operation.

Game Server and Third-Party Supplied Information

The MUDVerse crawler connects to publicly reachable game servers and stores information those servers expose through the MUD Server Status Protocol (MSSP), including game details, player counts, websites, community links, and contact fields. A listing owner may also provide another person's email address when requesting a listing transfer. If you provide someone else's information, only provide what is reasonably necessary and appropriate for that purpose.

How We Use Information

We use collected information to:

  • Provide, maintain, secure, and troubleshoot MUDVerse.
  • Create and authenticate accounts and recover access.
  • Publish and manage game listings, reviews, ratings, rankings, votes, and watch lists.
  • Operate the MUDVerse API and enforce its usage limits.
  • Measure, in aggregate, whether visitors can find games and complete key discovery, community, and API actions.
  • Verify account email changes and listing ownership transfers.
  • Send transactional messages, essential service notices, and replies to support requests.
  • Detect spam, fraud, automated activity, and violations of site rules.
  • Comply with applicable legal obligations and protect MUDVerse, its users, and the public.

We do not use account email addresses for promotional marketing. MUDVerse does not use third-party analytics or behavioral advertising.

Cookies and Similar Technologies

MUDVerse uses a session cookie to keep you signed in, maintain security tokens, and remember temporary actions while you use the site. The cookie may remain on your device for up to 30 days. It is marked HttpOnly and SameSite=Lax and is marked Secure when transmitted over HTTPS.

Product-outcome measurement uses browser session storage, not a cookie or persistent identifier. Attribution expires after 30 minutes and is not extended as you browse. Query strings and full referrers are not stored.

The registration page uses Google reCAPTCHA to reduce spam and automated account creation. reCAPTCHA may set the _GRECAPTCHA cookie and collect browser, device, interaction, and network information for its risk analysis. Google's Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

You can configure your browser to reject or delete cookies. Blocking the MUDVerse session cookie may prevent account and interactive features from working. Blocking reCAPTCHA may prevent account registration.

When We Disclose Information

MUDVerse does not sell or rent personal information. We do not disclose personal information to third parties for their own marketing or for cross-site behavioral advertising.

We may disclose information in the following limited circumstances:

  • Public features. Information submitted for a public listing, review, rating, or similar feature is made available to visitors and may be included in the public API.
  • Service providers. Providers may process information only as needed to host, secure, maintain, or support MUDVerse and its communications.
  • Legal and safety reasons. We may disclose information when reasonably necessary to comply with law, respond to lawful process, investigate wrongdoing, enforce site rules, protect rights or safety, or defend against legal claims.

Service Providers

  • Google reCAPTCHA. Google provides bot and abuse protection on the registration page and processes the information described in the Cookies section.
  • Amazon Simple Email Service (SES). Amazon processes recipient addresses, message content, and delivery information when MUDVerse sends welcome, confirmation, password-recovery, email-change, listing-transfer, or other transactional messages. See the AWS Privacy Notice.
  • PayPal. PayPal processes one-time self-service advertising payments under its own privacy terms. MUDVerse receives only the operational transaction metadata described above.
  • Hosting and infrastructure providers. Our hosting, network, and database infrastructure may process stored information and ordinary request metadata as needed to provide and protect the service.

Data Retention

We retain information for as long as reasonably needed for the purpose for which it was collected, including operating the service, maintaining security and ownership history, resolving disputes, enforcing site rules, and meeting legal obligations.

  • The MUDVerse session cookie may remain on your device for up to 30 days.
  • API daily usage totals are retained for up to 12 months. Short-window API rate-limit records are retained for up to two days.
  • Anonymous daily product-outcome aggregates and per-ad impression/click totals are retained indefinitely for long-term analytics and advertiser reporting. They contain no raw event rows or persistent visitor identifiers.
  • Short-window login, registration, and recovery rate-limit records are retained for up to two days.
  • Account setup links are valid for one day. Password-recovery and email-change links are valid for one hour. Listing-transfer requests are valid for seven days.
  • Accounts and associated content are generally retained while the account or content remains part of MUDVerse.
  • Self-service ads and their payment and webhook audit history are retained for accounting, refund, dispute, fraud-prevention, and operational purposes even when an ad is disabled or expires.
  • Login, voting, review, email-change, listing-transfer, and operational records may be retained as needed for security, abuse prevention, ownership integrity, dispute handling, and site operation.

When information is no longer reasonably needed, we may delete it, de-identify it, or retain only the portions needed for the purposes described above.

Your Choices and Requests

You can update your email address and password through My Account. You can also edit or delete your own reviews and update game listings you control.

To request correction of other personal information or deletion or de-identification of your account information, email brendan@withmorehope.org. We may need to verify that you control the relevant account. We will review and respond within a reasonable time.

Deletion requests are handled case by case. We may retain or de-identify limited information needed to protect account and listing ownership, prevent fraud or abuse, resolve disputes, comply with law, and preserve the integrity of public discussions and site records. Public game listings may need to be transferred, archived, or de-identified rather than immediately removed.

Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control

When a browser exposes an enabled Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal to the site, MUDVerse disables product-outcome and ad impression/click measurement in that browser. Essential session and security features continue to function as described in this policy.

Data Security

We use reasonable administrative and technical safeguards intended to protect personal information, including hashed passwords and API secrets, restricted administrative access, secure session settings, and abuse controls. No method of Internet transmission or electronic storage is completely secure, so we cannot guarantee absolute security.

United States Processing

MUDVerse is operated from the United States. Information may be stored or processed in the United States or other locations where our service providers operate. Privacy laws in those locations may differ from those where you live.

Links to Other Sites

MUDVerse contains links to independently operated game websites, community services, and other third-party sites. Their privacy practices are governed by their own policies, and MUDVerse is not responsible for their content or practices.

Children's Privacy

MUDVerse is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has provided personal information to MUDVerse, email brendan@withmorehope.org. If we confirm that such information was collected, we will take reasonable steps to delete it.

Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy as MUDVerse changes. The effective date at the top of this page identifies the current version. Changes take effect when the updated policy is posted.

Contact

For privacy questions and correction or deletion requests, email brendan@withmorehope.org.