This policy explains what information Pokemerald (pokemerald.com) collects when you visit or contact us, why we collect it and what choices you have. We have written it from the way the site is actually set up today. In this policy, “we” and “us” mean Pokemerald.
In Short
- You do not need an account to use the site, and visitor registration is turned off.
- We receive personal information if you leave a comment or send us a message.
- Analytics, advertising and security services run on the site. They use cookies, device information and IP addresses, as described below.
- We link to other websites, including game creators’ pages and file hosts. Their privacy practices are their own.
Information We Collect
Information you give us
- Comments: your name, email address, optional website and the comment itself. WordPress also records your IP address and browser user agent with each comment to help us handle spam.
- Contact form: your name, email address and message.
Information collected automatically
When you visit, our hosting, content delivery, security and analytics tools receive technical information such as your IP address, browser and device type, the pages you request and the page that referred you. Some of this is processed by the third-party services listed below.
How We Use Information
- To reply to your messages and handle requests, including corrections and copyright notices.
- To publish and moderate comments, and to keep the site secure and free of spam and abuse.
- To understand how the site is used so we can improve it, and to show popular posts based on page views.
- To show advertising that helps cover the costs of running the site.
Contact Form
Our contact form is built with WPForms. When you submit it, the name, email address and message you enter are delivered to us by email at the site’s administrator address. The form plugin we use does not keep an archive of submissions inside WordPress. The form has built-in spam protection (a hidden field and a security token) and we do not use a third-party CAPTCHA service on it.
We keep your message and our reply for as long as we need them to deal with your request, and we may keep correspondence about copyright notices for longer so we have a record. You can ask us to delete your message by using the contact form again.
Comments
Comments are public. Anything you write, including the name you enter, can be seen by other visitors. Your email address is not shown. The comment form includes an optional box that saves your name, email address and website in cookies in your browser so you do not have to retype them; these cookies normally last about a year.
WordPress may send an anonymised string created from your email address (a hash) to Gravatar to see whether you have a profile picture, and the picture is then shown next to your comment. Gravatar’s privacy policy is available at automattic.com/privacy. We keep comments until we remove them, so that follow-up comments can be handled and the discussion stays intact.
Cookies and Similar Technologies
Cookies and browser storage are small pieces of data stored on your device. On Pokemerald they are used in these ways:
- Analytics: Google Analytics, added through Google Site Kit, uses cookies and similar identifiers to measure how visitors use the site.
- Advertising: Google AdSense, added through an ad-management plugin, may use cookies and advertising identifiers to show and measure ads. The plugin also stores a cookie named quads_browser_width containing your screen width to choose suitable ad sizes.
- Site features: our theme stores a cookie named ruby_cookie_popup for 30 days after you click Accept on the cookie notice, a cookie named RBBookmarkData that remembers posts you bookmark with “Read it later”, and browser storage for your light or dark mode preference and a cached search index that speeds up the site search.
- Comments: the optional comment cookies described above.
The cookie notice on the site tells you that we use cookies. Clicking Accept stores a cookie so we do not show the notice again. It does not switch individual cookies on or off, so to block or delete cookies, use your browser settings. Blocking some cookies may affect features such as bookmarks.
Analytics
We use Google Analytics 4 to see which pages are visited, roughly where visitors come from, what devices and browsers they use and how they found us. Google processes this data on our behalf. You can learn more about how Google uses data from sites that use its services at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites, and you can opt out with the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on. How long analytics data is kept depends on the retention setting in our Google Analytics property.
Advertising
Pokemerald shows ads served by Google AdSense. Google and its advertising partners may use cookies and identifiers to show ads based on your visits to this and other websites and to measure ads. Whether ads are personalised depends on your Google settings and on the rules that apply where you live. You can manage your choices at adssettings.google.com or learn about industry opt-outs at aboutads.info. We do not control the information advertisers collect.
Other Services We Use
- Hosting: the site is hosted by Hostinger, whose servers receive and log your requests.
- Content delivery and security: Cloudflare sits in front of the site and processes visitor requests, including IP addresses, to deliver pages and protect the site.
- Site security: the Wordfence security plugin runs a firewall and malware scanning on the site and processes request details such as IP addresses to block attacks.
- Caching: a caching plugin on our server stores copies of pages so they load faster.
- Fonts: pages load fonts from Google Fonts, so your browser requests them from Google’s servers, which receive your IP address.
- View counts: a plugin counts page views so we can show popular posts.
- Embedded content: if a page embeds content from another website, such as a video, that website may collect information about you as if you had visited it directly.
Links to Other Websites
Pokemerald links to other sites, including social profiles (X/Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr and YouTube), game creators’ pages and third-party file hosts. We do not control these sites and are not responsible for their privacy practices. Please read their policies before you share information with them.
Data Retention
- Comments are kept until we delete them.
- Messages sent through the contact form are kept in our email for as long as needed to handle your request.
- Analytics, advertising, hosting, CDN and security data are kept by those providers according to their own policies and the settings we have chosen.
Security
The site is served over HTTPS and protected by a firewall and malware scanning. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, so we cannot guarantee absolute security.
Your Choices and Rights
Depending on where you live, you may have rights over your personal information, such as asking to access, correct or delete it, or to object to certain processing. If you have left a comment or sent us a message and want a copy of what we hold or want it removed, contact us using the form on our Contact Us page and tell us which comment or message you mean. We may need to confirm that the request comes from you, and we will consider each request under the law that applies to it. You can also limit cookies in your browser and use the Google opt-outs described above.
International Processing
Our hosting, CDN, analytics and advertising providers operate internationally, so information about your visit may be processed in countries other than your own.
Children’s Privacy
Pokemerald is a general-interest website about Pokémon fan games. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has sent us personal information through a comment or the contact form, please tell us and we will delete it.
Changes to This Policy
We may update this policy when our setup or the law changes. The date at the top shows when it was last updated. If we make significant changes, we will update this page.
Contact Us
For privacy questions or requests, use our Contact Us page. Please do not include sensitive personal information in your message.