Privacy notice

What CDLWire collects, why, and how long it is kept.

Comments

You can comment with just a display name. No account, no email address, nothing to sign up for.

Every comment is held for human review before it appears publicly. Nothing is published automatically — the automated news system has no access to comments and cannot approve them.

Approved comments appear publicly under the article, showing the display name and the date the comment was submitted.

Approved comments stay up while their article is published. If an article is removed, its comments are removed with it.

Comments that are spam, abusive, or off-topic are rejected and never shown.

To ask for one of your comments to be removed, message the Tri-State Area Driver Facebook page and mention the article and the display name you used.

How long data is kept

Approved comments: kept while the article stays published, or until removed at your request or by moderation.

Comments still waiting for review, and rejected comments (including spam caught automatically): deleted automatically after 30 days.

Technical fingerprints (see below): deleted automatically after 7 days.

These deletions are done by an automatic daily job — not by hand, and not “when someone gets around to it.”

One honest caveat: the database keeps automatic backups that can restore it to any point in the last 7 days. A deleted comment or fingerprint can therefore still exist inside those backups for up to 7 days after it is gone from the live database. That backup window is set by the database provider and cannot be shortened from our side.

Technical data

To slow down spam and abuse, the site stores a salted one-way hash (“fingerprint”) of the network address a comment comes from. The address itself is never stored, and the fingerprint cannot be turned directly back into the address — but the same address always produces the same fingerprint, so it is treated as identifying data: used only for rate-limiting and spam detection, never displayed, never passed to anyone else, and deleted after 7 days.

To understand readership, each pageview increments an anonymous counter recording only the day, the page visited, the visitor’s country, the site that referred them (if any), and whether they are on mobile or desktop. When a page is left, a second anonymous counter records how far down the page was scrolled and roughly how long the page was open. No network address, fingerprint, or anything identifying an individual visitor is stored.

Email signup is on. One email address per signup, typed by you into the form on an article page — signup is never pre-checked or automatic.

Your address joins the mailing list the moment you sign up — no confirmation email, no waiting. If you typed the address by mistake, the unsubscribe link in any email (or a quick message to the Facebook page below) gets you off the list.

Addresses are stored in the same Cloudflare D1 database as comments. The provider that delivers the emails is Resend, Inc. — Resend processes addresses to send CDLWire emails. Every email carries an unsubscribe link; unsubscribing takes effect immediately, and unsubscribed addresses are deleted automatically after 30 days.

Comment data is never used for marketing.

Moderation and access

The /moderate/ page itself is a static login screen: anyone who visits the address sees only the token prompt — the page contains no comment data and can do nothing on its own. Everything behind it is access-controlled: listing the queue, approving, or rejecting a comment each require the admin token, checked by the server on every request before anything is returned or changed.

The page is also unlinked from the rest of the site and excluded from search engines, but that is not what protects it — the server-side token check on every data request is. The token travels in a request header only (never in the page address, where it could leak into logs) and lives only in the admin’s browser tab while in use.

The moderation queue never shows network addresses or fingerprints — only the display name, comment text, article, and dates.

Where data lives

Comments are stored in a Cloudflare D1 database, separate from the website files. The site is rebuilt often; rebuilding never touches the database.

Questions about your data

Message the Tri-State Area Driver Facebook page.

Last updated: October 2, 2026.