Privacy Policy

 

As a site dedicated to people with mental illnesses, Mood Garden is sensitive to the privacy of the information shared by you on our site and the information we collect from you.

The main site itself does not collect any personally identifiable information or medical information (eg. name, phone number, address, or diagnosis). We request that you do not disclose personally identifiable information to others on our forum or chat; our moderators have been instructed to remove any such information when they come across them. There is no tracking of who views this site, what pages are viewed, and the links you used to enter or exit the site. We review traffic rankings of the website, as compiled by our webhost and independent site trackers like Alexa.com. These are aggregated statistics and no personal information is collected in this process.

For our message board, which is accessible by membership only, we do the following:

• We require you to register with a valid email address; your membership is completed when you validate a link sent to your email address (the one you used to register on the forum). Your email address is stored on our database for purposes of using the forum. You have the option to hide your email address from other members of the forum. You can do this either at registration time or afterwards (on your membership profile). Your IP address is recorded at the time of registration and whenever you post; this information is visible only to the administrators of the forum. We use the IP address, if necessary, to ban disruptive members. We do not share or disclose your email address or IP address with anyone else.

The password you enter during registration is stored in an encrypted form and cannot be retrieved by administrators. You may change your password on your profile, which will require you to revalidate your email. Administrators cannot retrieve your password if you lose it; however, you can request them to reset it to a temporary password; you may then change it in your profile when you log in to the forum.

The registration form has optional fields where you can enter your location, birthday, messenger information etc. Entering these enriches your forum experience, but you are not obligated to enter any of the optional fields. This information is for display on the forum only; it is not used for any other purposes and not disclosed to or shared with other entities.


• Our forum uses cookies to identify your log-in session, so that you can navigate within the forum in a logged-in status. You can block this cookie in your browser, and the forum will use a session id instead. We recommend allowing cookies from the forum to make it easier to participate on the forum. We do not use cookies to track usage of the forum or for collection of any personal information.


• We encourage you to ask on the forum about any privacy issue which may be of concern to you. Your confidentiality is important to us and to you, and we request that you do not reveal your real name or any personally identifiable information on our forum. Anonymous participation is important for all of us.

For our chat room, you are not required to register. You may use any username and enter the chat room. Your IP is visible to any moderator who is present in the room, but no record is maintained. We request you to follow the strict guidelines mentioned on our chat page, to ensure healthy participation for everyone involved. Our chat rooms are moderated; however, we cannot guarantee that a moderator will be present at all times. You agree to use the chat room at your own risk. You can always exit the chat room if participation is not helpful to you.

The chat room software allows the administrators to view your IP address, which may be used to ban members who disrupt or abuse the chat room in violation of our usage guidelines. The software has a feature for the chat sessions to be logged in a transcript that is accessible only to the owner of this site. We have chosen NOT to use this logging feature. However, moderators can get a transcript of the chat session when they are present in the chat room. You can also save a transcript of private conversations you have with another member, but you cannot save a transcript of the chat rooms themselves.

Membership is not required for participation in the chat room. However, you may choose to register your username exclusively. You will have to provide a password for this, and this password is recorded in an unencrypted form, visible only to the administrators.