Visibility of posts made on Depression Forums
Please note that posts made on the public forums at Depression Forums are indexed by the major search engines including google, yahoo, MSN and many others. If you are unsure which forums are public and therefore visible to the search engines, please consult an administrator for advice.
Editing posts made on Depression Forums
When you make a post on Depression Forums, the content of the post can be edited for a period of 30 minutes from the time that the post was made. This is to allow you time to correct errors or ommisions. beyond that time period, it is only possible to edit a post by contacting a staff member such as a moderator or an administrator. While we will co-operate and edit out any personal information in posts previously made by your account beyond this period, we will not delete or substantially alter the content of the posts.
Personal Information Stored and Processed by Depression Forums.
If you do nothing during your visit but browse through our web site, do searches, read pages, or download information, we will automatically gather and store certain information about your visit. This information does not identify you personally. No information about users/visitors will be sold, shared, or utilized in any commercial way. We automatically collect and store only the following information about your visit:
1. The Internet domain (for example, “company.com” if you use a private Internet access account, or “yourschool.edu” if you connect from a university’s domain)
2. Your IP address (an IP address is a number that is automatically assigned to your computer whenever you are surfing the Web) from which you access our web site;
3. the type of browser and operating system used to access our site;
4. the date and time you accessed our site;
5. the searches you made;
6. the pages you visited;
7. if you linked to this site from another web site, the address of that web site.
We use this information to help us make our site more useful to visitors — to learn about the number of visitors to our site, what part of the site they are interested in, how long they use the site, and the types of technology our visitors use.
WE DO NOT TRACK OR RECORD INFORMATION ABOUT THE IDENTITY OF INDIVIDUALS AND THEIR VISITS.
When you signed up as a member of this Forum you were asked to select a member name of your choosing. These names guarantee your anonymity. Look around. Not only are so many names non descriptive, many are quite creative and humorous.
The search engines on the internet cannot in no uncertain terms identify you unless you give your real name and not hide your email address as we suggest.
Be aware however, that if you use the same username on this site and every other site you visit on the internet, it may be possible for people that know you by that name to track you down via the search engines. We suggest that you use a unique name for this site only. If you have used the same name as used on other forums when you registered, please PM an admin explaining the issue and we will change your name to maintain your anonymity.
Please do not continue to use the same user name as you have chosen for other sites! This will guarantee your privacy.
In addition to your member name, you were asked to supply a password. That has no identifying properties.
During registration, you are asked to complete your date of birth. We use this to work out your age. According to the law, if you are under 13 years of age, we have to contact a parent to approve your account. Your age is used only to work out if this process is required to register on the site. Your age wioll be displayed on your profile, but your profile is only visible to logged in members and staff.
Optionally, you can supply your sex. If you choose to supply this information, it too will be displayed on your profile, but again is visible only to staff and logged in members.
Lastly you were asked to provide an e-mail address so that we could verify the registration through the procedure described above. That e-mail address is securely stored in our files. That’s it guys. Those are the only 3 pieces of identification we require of you.
Let us stop for a moment to pose a question. We already pointed out that we don’t share your information with anyone and we think we can easily prove it to you.
Has anyone here been bombarded with e-mails dealing with medications?? We know we can possibly get at least 20 spam mails a day dealing with unmentionable sites, gambling, weight loss, money making opportunities, etc., but we have never received an e-mail promoting Paxil or Prozac!! If your e-mail addresses were sold or in anyway harvested, we assure you they would be used. We have no doubt that each of you would have unsolicited e-mails in your inbox dealing with depression and medication and you don’t!!
What is more essential is what we don’t have you in our files:
We don’t know your address, your phone number or your social security number or any account numbers of any kind.
Since this is an open and public Forum, there is always the slight possibility that individuals or companies are combing this Forum for their own statistical purposes. We would have no knowledge of that and we truly have no way to stop them. However, even if that were the case, all they could do is tally information in mass to come up with patterns or general insights. You are not an identifiable person on this Forum. You could become a statistic of some analysis, but surely you can see that your real identity is always and automatically protected since it simply DOES NOT EXIST HERE on our Forums.
There is no Computer Tracking of Identifiable Information.
Our Web site does not track, collect or distribute personal information about individual visitors. We regularly compile aggregate statistics that show the number of visitors to our site, the requests we receive for particular information on our Web site, and the Internet Protocol (IP) number that those requests come from. These aggregated statistics may be used by DepressionForums.org to improve the Web site in an ongoing effort to provide better information and services to you.
Depression Forums, Inc. is dedicated to protecting the privacy of our visitors and to ensure that our information is accurate, complete, and up-to-date. To be useful we must gain and earn the trust and confidence of our members and visitors. Therefore, with the help of Administration and Members alike, we strive to maintain the highest possible level of integrity. Our principals are based on the best codes of practice and ethical standards. We invite suggestions on how we can do better.
We understand that health is a very personal subject and we want our Members and Visitors to be as comfortable as possible while visiting our website and using our services. This policy tells you, among other things, what information we gather from you, how we may use or disclose that information and our efforts to protect it. Please read this policy carefully, and feel free to contact us if you have any questions regarding its contents.
Cookies
In connection with your use of our site, we ask for and may collect a variety of information from and about you in different ways. For example, when you register to use our site, we ask for and store your user name, email address and other identifying contact data. Cookies were originally designed to help a website distinguish a user’s browser as a previous visitor and thus save and remember any preferences that may have been set while the user was browsing the site. Currently, websites use cookies to enhance the user’s visit; in general, cookies can securely store a user’s ID and password, personalize home pages, or identify which parts of a site have been visited.
You may set your web browser to notify you of cookie placement requests or decline cookies completely. In addition, you can delete the files that contain cookies; those files are stored as part of your Internet browser, however, if you delete cookies that have been sent from our site, this will cause you to reenter data (e.g. login again).
Advertisments
DEPRESSIONFORUMS.ORG is a private, all volunteer message board.
We rely primarily on donations or subscriptions to maintain these forums.
Any member who continues to post, send PMs and actively use this free service understands that they do so under Our Terms of Service
Nothing will follow you when you leave our site and we will continue to adhere to this policy.
We do not have anything to do with the Pharmacy Manufacturers and do not track you as in monitoring antidepressant usage and side effects such as other depression forums do.
DF has no direct funding from drug companies. However, DF does have bills to pay to cover the costs of our server and the general running of the site. In an ideal world, we would prefer to be solely sponsored by member donations and/or subscriptions, but we cannot afford to run on subscriptions alone as depression forums requires a dedicated server to run and has many other expenses to cover web design, security and data backup.
Cookies & 3rd Party Advertisements
A third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on your site. A use of a DART cookie enables it to serve ads to your users based on their visit to your sites and other sites on the Internet. Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the third ad and content network privacy policy.
We allow third-party companies to serve ads and/or collect certain anonymous information when you visit our web site. These companies may use non-personally identifiable information (e.g., click stream information, browser type, time and date, subject of advertisements clicked or scrolled over) during your visits to this and other Web sites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services likely to be of greater interest to you. These companies typically use a cookie or third party web beacon to collect this information. To learn more about this behavioral advertising practice or to opt-out of this type of advertising, you can visit http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp.
To make up the shortfall, Depressionforums.org accepts ads and links from advertising agencies. These advertising agencies sell our ad space and pay DF directly. They make their money by dealing with the large Pharma companies directly and selling ad space on many health sites, DF included.
If you look at the larger sites you will notice similar ads. If you do not wish to see the ads, you may take out a subscription for a nominal price see
Advertisement’s are distinguished by the word “Advertisement”, “Sponsored Links” and “Ads by Google” above the relevant ads
