Privacy policy

The short version

MCReferencehas no accounts, no login, no comments and no newsletter, so there is no password or profile of yours stored here. We do not build profiles of visitors ourselves, and we do not sell anybody’s data.

The site is paid for by adverts from Google. Google and its advertising partners can use cookies and similar technology to show and measure those adverts and, where you allow it, to personalise them from what they know about you. In the European Economic Area, the UK and Switzerland, anything that needs your consent waits for it, adverts are only personalised if you agreed, and you can change your answer at any time.

Who is responsible

The controller of the personal data described here, in the words of the GDPR, is the operator of MCReference, who runs the site from the Netherlands. Questions about this policy or about your data go to hello@mcreference.com, the same address as on the contact page.

What is collected automatically

Like every web server, ours records a line per request: the page asked for, the time, the browser’s user agent string, and the IP address the request came from. These logs exist so the site can be kept running and abuse can be stopped. They are not linked to any identity, are not used for advertising, and are deleted after about two weeks.

Every request also passes through Cloudflare, which delivers the site and protects it from attacks and automated abuse. To tell people from bots, Cloudflare runs a small script on the page (its JavaScript Detections) and may set a security cookie such as __cf_bm or cf_clearance. These exist only to keep the site secure, carry no advertising identifier, and are not used to follow you across other sites.

Cookies and similar technology

What can end up stored in your browser while you use this site, and why:

• Your theme.Light or dark, kept in your browser’s local storage under theme so the page does not flash the wrong colour on your next visit. It never leaves your device.
• Cloudflare’s security cookies, such as __cf_bm (30 minutes) and cf_clearance, set only when Cloudflare needs them to tell a person from a bot. They are strictly necessary, so they do not wait for consent.
• Your consent choice.Google’s consent message keeps the answer you gave it in two cookies on this domain, FCCDCF (about 13 months) and FCNEC (about 12 months), so that it does not ask again on every page.
• Google Analytics: _ga and _ga_<id>, for up to two years, to tell a returning visitor from a new one. In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland they are only set if you consent.
• Google advertising: cookies such as __gads, __gpi and __eoion this domain, and others on Google’s own domains such as doubleclick.net, used to serve adverts, limit how often you see the same one, measure them, fight fraud and, where you allow it, personalise them. In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland they are only used as your consent choices allow.

Your choices

If you visit from the European Economic Area, the UK or Switzerland, Google’s consent message asks you on your first visit whether Google and its partners may store and read information on your device and use your data for the purposes it lists, such as personalised adverts and measurement. It is a consent management platform registered with IAB Europe’s Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF), so your answer reaches Google and every advertising partner in a standard form they are bound to respect. You can agree, decline, or choose purpose by purpose and partner by partner.

To change or withdraw your choice later, open Privacy and cookie settings. Google shows it as a small floating link on every page wherever these rules apply, and the same control is in the footer. A withdrawal counts from that moment on; it does not undo what was lawfully done before it.

If you do not consent, adverts are still shown, but only limited or non-personalised ones: chosen from the page you are reading and your general location rather than from a profile of you, and in the limited case served without using cookies or local storage for advertising at all.

Outside the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, Google may personalise adverts without asking first. Wherever you are, you can turn personalised adverts from Google off in Google’s ad settings, and opt out of many other vendors’ use of cookies for personalised adverts at aboutads.info or, in Europe, at youronlinechoices.eu. Any browser setting that blocks third-party cookies limits them too.

If you live in a US state whose privacy law lets you opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information for targeted advertising, such as California, use Google’s “Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information” link where Google shows it, or turn on the Global Privacy Control in your browser, which Google honours as that opt-out. You can also write to us.

Advertising

This site shows adverts served by Google AdSense. Google, as a third-party vendor, uses cookies to serve adverts based on your previous visits to this website and to other websites, and its use of advertising cookies lets Google and its partners serve adverts to you based on those visits. To do that, Google and its partners may place and read cookies in your browser, or use web beacons and your IP address, to collect information as a result of adverts being served here.

Other third-party vendors and ad networks may also serve adverts here through Google, with cookies of their own. In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland they are the partners listed in Google’s consent message, and each one may only do what your answer there allows.

Google explains how it uses information from sites that show its adverts at policies.google.com, and how its advertising products handle personal data at business.safety.google. The ways to opt out are under “Your choices” above.

Analytics

This site uses Google Analytics to count visits and see which pages are read. It records the page you asked for, roughly where in the world you are, and what kind of device and browser you used. It does not receive your name or email address, because this site never asks for either, and Google Analytics does not log or store IP addresses.

It runs in Google’s consent mode. For visitors from the EEA, the UK and Switzerland it sets no cookies unless you consent to them in Google’s message: until then each page view is sent as a cookieless ping, with no identifier that could recognise you on a later visit. Everywhere else it sets its cookies by default.

Google describes what it does with the data at policies.google.com. You can opt out of Google Analytics entirely with Google’s own browser add-on, and any browser setting that blocks its cookies stops the part that recognises returning visitors.

The feedback form

The “Send us a message” line at the bottom of every page opens a short form. What you send is passed to a Discord channel where we read it: your message, the address of the page you were on and, only if you fill it in, the email address or Discord name you left for a reply. It is used to fix the page and to answer you, and for nothing else. Discord keeps it until we delete it; ask and we will.

To stop one person flooding that channel, the server counts messages per IP address over ten-minute windows. That count lives only in the running server’s memory: it is never written to disk, never sent to Discord, and gone when the server restarts.

Images and files loaded from other sites

MCReference does not host downloadable files, and it does not copy project icons or screenshots to its own storage. They come from the host the author published them on: some your browser fetches directly, so that host sees your IP address the way any website does, and at most that the request came from mcreference.com; others our own server fetches and resizes first, in which case that host only ever sees our server. Every download link points at the author’s own release. We do this rather than copying the files because they belong to their authors, and linking with credit is the honest way to show somebody else’s work.

The server status tool is the one page that asks an outside service at the time you use it: it sends the server address you type to mcstatus.io, and while that page is open your browser asks mcstatus.io again every ten seconds to keep the player count current, so mcstatus.io sees those requests and your IP address with them.

When you follow a link to another site, your browser tells the destination at most that you came from mcreference.com, not which page.

Legal bases

Where the GDPR or the UK GDPR applies, each use of personal data rests on one of two bases:

• Consent (Article 6(1)(a)): storing or reading anything on your device that is not strictly necessary, including Google Analytics cookies, and personalised advertising. You give or refuse it in Google’s consent message and can withdraw it there at any time.
• Legitimate interests(Article 6(1)(f)): keeping the site running and secure (the server logs, Cloudflare’s protection, the feedback form’s flood limit) and answering messages you send us. Showing adverts that do not rely on a profile of you, which is how the site pays for itself, rests on it too. You can object to any of these by writing to us, or, where an advertising partner relies on it, in Google’s consent message.

Where the data is processed

Google, Cloudflare and Discord are US companies, and the data they handle for this site may be processed outside the European Economic Area, including in the United States. Where it is, they rely on the safeguards the GDPR requires for such transfers, such as the EU-US Data Privacy Framework or the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses.

Your rights

Where the GDPR or the UK GDPR applies to you, you can ask what personal data we hold about you and for a copy of it, have it corrected or deleted, restrict or object to how it is used, receive it in a portable form, and withdraw consent at any time without affecting what was done before. Write to hello@mcreference.com and we will answer within a month. We hold very little (no account, no profile, server logs that are gone after about two weeks), so the answer is often a short one.

For what Google and its partners hold from advertising and analytics, Google is the one to ask: Google’s privacy policy explains how, and its ad settings show what is used for advertising.

You also have the right to complain to a data protection authority: in the Netherlands, where this site is run, that is the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens; otherwise the authority where you live or work.

Children

MCReference is a technical reference for software. It is not directed at children, and it does not knowingly collect anything from anyone.

Changes to this policy

The date at the top of this page is the date it last changed. Because the policy describes what the code actually does, it is edited in the same change as the behaviour it describes rather than afterwards.