The CUTwC website is paid for and maintained by Andrew Garrard. There is no advertising, so no information is shared with advertisers. Unless I run out of funds (which, given the cost of running a web site, is unlikely) I have no desire to change this, and therefore no interest in any offers of sponsorship.
In the interests of privacy and not needing to worry people about tracking opt-outs, the web site does not store cookies or use any other means to identify individual visitors — meaning I have no idea how many visitors I’m getting (until my little server gets warm or my ISP complains, but I don’t believe that’s currently a problem unless we become way more popular). At the moment, visitor data is more likely to be depressing — but also almost irrelevant for the day-to-day operation of the Club. (To avoid more contact from website services wanting work, I’m fully aware of how to track usage, I just choose not to.)
If you manually select dark (or light) mode, a tiny amount of local storage is used to record this preference; this is not transmitted to the server (and I do not log which assets are being downloaded to infer it). If you toggle back to “Default theme”, this storage is deleted. Firefox appears to keep some memory around after this point just in case, and has a minimum amount of storage — so if you ever change theme it will claim that the web site is using 64KB of private information forever more. This annoys me, because it makes it look like something nefarious is going on (or something has been compromised); it isn’t (and as far as I can tell hasn’t).
Simlarly a small amount of local storage is used when using the tiddlywinks timer utilities in order to record the ongoing timer in case you switch away from the web browser. This storage is entirely on the device and doesn’t get transmitted to the server.
There is a recent hack which people have been using to redirect between web site favicons and use this as a way to encode visitors uniquely. CUTwC does not do this, I spent way too long trying to improve the loading times as it was. (Also, evil.) At least the CUTwC favicons work, which is more than I can say for Amazon at the time of writing. Ahem. I also don’t try to reverse engineer identities out of IP addresses and machine configuration.
While this is a work in progress, at the time of writing it is awkward to get a better security rating out of DuckDuckGo/ToSDR. Several checkpoints include things like notifying users if there are changes to terms and conditions (what users?), not handing over user information to authorities (what user information?) etc. Also it looks like you have to register on their forum to tell them about your web site that doesn’t make users register for anything. In summary, getting an A grade out of DuckDuckGo is painful; please don’t read anything into its absence.
The content on the CUTwC site is in flux as the maintainer edits things (and more information becomes available, since the club is active). On occasion, there may be need to remove or relocate existing content. If anyone wishes reference to them to be removed from the web site, please contact the site maintainer (although I can’t vouch for the internet archive). Some effort is being made to stop the Club looking unreasonably disreputable, at least by the standards of a university society, so hopefully members do not need to be too concerned about what they may have done at a Club Dinner.
If you use the contact form, your browser’s IP address is submitted along with any message. This is an attempt to simplify the process of responding to contact requests (for example by telling whether the person writing is inside the Cambridge University network) in cases where the message itself is inadequately specific — nothing more nefarious. The web site does not store or use this information, and anything in the contact form is simply emailed to the web site maintainer and forwarded to relevant members of the Committee.
Should any of this need to change (like the Committee getting oddly persistent about wanting to know web site access statistics), the notice on the home page and this clarification page will be updated.
The above assumes “normal” use of the CUTwC site. If you have privileged use of any private CUTwC facilities (such as temporary utilities hosted on the web site), the web site may use cookies as necessary to implement that functionality (although not for advertising or sharing with third parties). These services will not be linked from the CUTwC pages, and should not be linked by third parties. Hopefully if you’re using such a facility you know who I am anyway.
The content of this web site can be considered © Copyright of Cambridge University Tiddlywinks Club and of the web site maintainer (currently Andrew Garrard) from the late 1990s to, at the time of writing, 2024. Content is available for free use in promoting tiddlywinks and CUTwC, so long as it is not in the context of bringing the game, University, Club or its members into disrepute. If you wish to use the videos hosted on this web site, please make a local copy (linking back here for copyright information), since the bandwidth of my server is limited.
There is a separate page containing logos for use in association with CUTwC. Please consider that when referring to CUTwC’s “branding”.