Cookies and Privacy –

Start Your Meeples is hosted on WordPress.com and as such it uses cookies that WordPress blogs use by default. Start Your Meeples does not use advertising banners on the site, and so does not collect any information for third party use.

Recently, WordPress.com have allowed for Google Analytics to be installed on Premium Blogs. As such, Google Analytics has now been implemented so I can better understand what people like to read.

To find out more about the WordPress.com cookies you can click here.

To find out more about Google Analytics cookies you can click here.

To read the official WordPress Privacy Policy, as well as details about the cookies, you can click here.

Tools –

This site uses the WordPress Jetpack Plugin (it comes with WordPress blogs as basic). Through this, I can tell what countries visitors are from, how they found the site, and what pages they look at. These are provided as three separate statistics and update every three minutes. It doesn’t link the three data points together, but instead will give me a breakdown of countries, pages, and sources. You can find out more about the Jetpack plugin here.

I also use Google’s Webmaster Tools (also known as the Search Console). This is mainly for me to manage how each page is seen and crawled; however, it does give me some usage statistics. This includes being able to look at the queries people use to find this blog, the pages they find on Google, and the countries those users come from. You can find out more about Google’s Search Console and the data it allows me to see here.

Finally, this blog uses Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a tool that allows for people who run websites (like this one) to see more information about what is being viewed on their site. This allows for more information about where website visitors come from. It also allows for information such as by what means a website visitor has found the website, how long they stay, and how many pages they visit. You can find out more about Google Analytics generally here.

An important point to note is that I do not personally aggregate the data. Any aggregation is done via the above tools – Jetpack, Google Analytics, or the Google Search Console.

Subscribers –

If you subscribe to Start Your Meeples then the emails are in your control. When you first sign up you will be asked to confirm both your email address and then how often you want to receive emails. You can unsubscribe from the bottom of every email, and this will remove you from the mailing list; however, if you struggle to do this for any reason, or are unsure if you are unsubscribed, then feel free to drop me an email and I will manually remove you from the list. Your email will then be removed and forgotten to the best of my ability.

Contacting via this Blog –

To contact me you do need to provide an email address, but this is just so I can respond (the contact goes through a form to avoid crawlers from spamming my email address!). If you email me, I will not sign you up automatically to my mailing list. That just wouldn’t be cool.

If you would rather contact me and not provide an email address, then please feel free to send me a message via Instagram or Facebook.

A note from Luke about this blog –

I am just a lone blogger, looking to share the love of board games, and nothing more. This blog is not currently monitised, and I do not seek to harvest data. Start Your Meeples really is just about board games and enjoying them.

Even though I don’t make money out of this blog, I have done my best to make it GDPR compliant in so far as my understanding of GDPR and the WordPress tools I have access to. This also goes for Google Analytics.

If you have any questions about this or anything else on the blog then please feel free to contact me. I am a friendly chap and will aim to answer your questions as quickly as possible.