Privacy Policy

We keep this short and plain, because we collect very little.

Who we are

Bang! Plugins is a trading name associated with Bang! Graphics, which is a trading name of Andrew Luckman, a sole trader in the United Kingdom. Andrew Luckman is the data controller for everything described here. This policy covers this website, bangplugins.com.

You can reach us about anything in this policy at support@bangplugins.com, through our support form, or by post at 29 Broomfield Avenue, Leigh on Sea, Essex, SS9 4BL.

The support form

When you use our support form we receive your name, your email address, your message, and which plugin and type of request you chose. This arrives as an email in our support inbox, and we send a short confirmation to your address. We use these details only to reply to you. This website has no database - your enquiry is not stored anywhere except our mailbox, and we keep it only as long as we need it to help you. Ask us to delete a past enquiry and we will.

If you ask us to tell you when a plugin launches, we will email you about that launch and nothing else. We keep no marketing lists and send no newsletters.

We also keep a short record of anything the form refuses as spam, so that a genuine message wrongly caught can be found and answered rather than lost. It holds what you typed, it is stored where no web address can reach it, and it is deleted automatically after six months.

Spam protection on the support form

The support page uses Cloudflare Turnstile, a check that tells a person apart from an automated script. We added it because the form was being used to send us marketing rather than support requests. For almost everyone it passes silently and there is nothing to click.

To make that judgement Cloudflare receives your IP address, your browser’s user agent string, a fingerprint of the secure connection your browser makes, and the identifier of our form along with the page it sits on. Cloudflare uses this to decide whether you are a person and to improve how that check works, and states that it cannot identify individuals from those signals. It is not advertising, it does not follow you to other websites, it sets no cookie on this site, and it stores nothing in your browser. Cloudflare describes its part in its own Turnstile privacy policy.

This one runs whatever you chose in the cookie banner. Without it the form cannot tell a customer from a spam script and would stop being usable, so it is necessary rather than optional. It is the only thing on this website that loads from a third party regardless of your choice, and it is on the support page and nowhere else.

Cookies and analytics

Nothing is loaded from Google until you say yes. If you decline, or simply never answer the banner, no analytics script is requested, no analytics cookie is set and no visit is recorded. The only thing kept in your browser at that point is a single preference remembering your answer, and it is held in your browser’s local storage rather than in a cookie, so it is never sent to us or to anyone else.

If you accept, we load Google Analytics. It sets two cookies, _ga and _ga_G-8PCQWX6F1N, which last two years and let it tell a returning visit from a new one. We use it to count visits and see which pages get read, which is how we decide what to write about next. Google acts as our analytics provider under its data processing terms and handles this data on servers outside the UK, including in the United States; it describes its part in its own privacy policy. Advertising features, ad personalisation and Google Signals are switched off in our account, so nothing collected here is used to build an advertising profile of you. Google holds the data for a limited period set in our account, and we keep no copy of it ourselves.

You can change your mind whenever you like using the Cookie settings link at the bottom of every page. Turning analytics off takes effect immediately, without reloading the page, and deletes the cookies Google set.

Fonts

Our typefaces are served from this website rather than from Google Fonts, so reading a page here does not hand your IP address to a font provider.

Server logs

Like almost every website, our hosting provider keeps standard access logs (IP address, browser type, pages requested) for security and diagnostics. Our host is 20i, based in the UK.

Our plugins

Bang! Cart and Bang! Invites run on your own website, not ours. The free plugins send no data to us at all - no telemetry, no usage tracking, no phoning home. Bang! Cart talks to Stripe to process payments, and what Stripe does with that data is described in the plugin’s listing and Stripe’s own policies.

Bang! Cart Pro is the exception, because a paid plugin has to know whether it has been paid for. It checks its licence with Freemius, and doing so tells them your site’s address and which versions of WordPress, PHP and the plugin it is running on. That is what makes a licence work and updates arrive; there is no way to have those things without it. Anything beyond that is asked separately and is entirely optional - declining changes nothing about how the plugin behaves.

Buying Bang! Cart Pro

Freemius, Inc. handle the sale. They are the merchant of record, which means they are the legal seller, not us. Your name, email address, billing address and payment details go to them; your card details never reach us and never reach your own website. They charge and account for any VAT due.

Nothing from Freemius loads on this website until you press a buy button. Browsing the pricing page contacts nobody. Pressing Buy fetches their checkout script and opens their payment panel over the page, and from that moment your browser is talking to Freemius directly.

Freemius are a United States company, at 4023 Kennett Pike, Wilmington, DE 19807. Buying Pro therefore sends your details outside the UK. What we see afterwards is your name, your email address, which licence you bought and when it renews - enough to support you and to know whether your licence is live. We use it for nothing else. What Freemius do with the rest is set out in their own privacy policy, which is also linked from the checkout and from every receipt they send you.

The emails that come with a Pro licence

Your licence key, receipts, invoices and renewal reminders are sent by Freemius rather than by us, through their mail provider SendGrid. They arrive from an address at bangplugins.com and they look like ours, so it is worth saying plainly whose they are.

Those emails are tracked, and we cannot switch it off. Each one carries a small invisible image and rewritten links, both served from click.freemius.com, which tell Freemius whether the message was opened and whether a link in it was clicked. This is part of how their platform sends mail and there is no setting on our side that removes it. We would turn it off if we could. If you would rather not be counted, most mail programs can be set to stop loading remote images, which prevents the open being recorded.

The confirmation our support form sends you when you write in is our own, and carries nothing of the kind.

What we never do

We do not sell your data, run advertising on this website, or use anything we collect to target you with ads anywhere else. We keep no marketing list, and there is no advertising or tracking pixel anywhere on this site.

Email is a different matter, and we have said so above rather than leaving it in the small print: the emails Freemius send about a Pro purchase carry their own open and click tracking, and we have no way to remove it.

Why we are allowed to hold any of it

The law asks us to name the lawful basis for each thing, so here it is without the jargon.

Answering a support enquiry - because you asked us to, and because we have a legitimate interest in running a support desk that works.
Telling you when a plugin launches - your consent, given by asking for it, and withdrawn by replying and saying stop.
The record of refused spam - our legitimate interest in keeping the form usable, and in being able to find a genuine message it caught by mistake.
Analytics - your consent, given in the cookie banner and withdrawable at any time.
Your Pro licence details - performing the licence agreement you have with us and providing the support that comes with it.

Your rights

Under UK data protection law you can ask us what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Given how little we collect, that will usually mean finding and deleting an email thread - and we will do it promptly. If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office.