MulchWorlds Updates

Good news! This update is all about your security and privacy!

SSL has been enabled and enforced site wide. All content MUST be secure, or it will not display, so if you are going to post an image, you either need to ensure the link begins with “https://”, not “http://”, or it will not display.

There may be some lingering broken images or other oddness from past posts, but since we are still in beta, there isn’t a lot of content that is actually affected.

An option to include content that isn’t secured is to save the media to your hard drive and upload it to your post directly, where MulchWorlds will serve the content securely. Please make sure you have rights to upload as we enforce DMCA requests per requirements.

Also to note, we have taken steps to enforce that all 3rd party content complies with a browsers Do Not Track policy. These steps should put us in compliance for both the EU and California rules regarding internet tracking.

To opt in to the Do Not Track functionality of this site, you must configure your browser to notify websites that you do not want to be tracked. This site DOES use 3rd party tracking cookies internally, but we will not follow you from site to site or allow 3rd parties to use MulchWorlds to track you.

We already bypass traditional social media buttons as they are simply tracking tools. Facebook is the biggest offender in this case. While everyone loves Facebook viral traffic, we will NOT be including any Facebook tracking or like or share buttons, period.

Even though we use Twitter, they are connected by one of our links, not theirs, to control tracking. I would like to open the site up more to Twitter, but I hesitate because their track record is incomplete on privacy. Plus, I happen to know they work with Nielsen, whose entire business model is and always has been tracking. While we will use Twitter, at this time we have not made a decision to invite them into our home and infrastructure.

The exception is our AMP pages where we are demoing social media shares of Google+ and Twitter to a very limited traffic group to test their impact and effectiveness. Due to the nature of MulchWorlds, I doubt that they will have much effect, but we will see.

We do make heavy use of Google services such as Youtube, however, and we do serve cookies from both of them. They are an exception as we use Google analytics for internal tracking, as well as google search for internal site search, in order to better understand visitor behavior and navigation.

Since google is particularly open about what info it knows about you, and even allows you to curate your own information with them, the decision was made to make use of Googles significant infrastructureat MulchWorlds.

As with using Gmail, we believe that the trade off is fair, however, we can only make that decision regarding us.Since Google allows you to request that they don’t track you, we hope that transparency is the right move and have taken additional steps to back your decisions about your own privacy while you are here, with us.

It is important to us that you understand exactly what our Privacy Policy is and our Do Not Track Policy.

MulchWorlds is supposed to facilitate a private gaming life where you can beat someone in a game, and you don’t have to fear them Swatting you or sending pizzas to your work. We prefer your real life identity stays out of the gaming world. We won’t stop you from giving info about yourself away, but we will do our best to ensure you don’t accidentally become associated with your real life identity via MulchWorlds.

In line with all that, although the transition to SSL has gone VERY smoothly, almost too smoothly, if you notice any problems anywhere on the site, please remember to report them bugs. Thanks and enjoy your new security and privacy!