Privacy & takedown requests

This site is a read-only archive of malwareremoval.com, a volunteer malware-removal support forum. The forum itself is closed: no new posts, replies, or registrations are possible here.

No ads or advertising trackers

This archive runs no advertising or browser analytics scripts. We watch traffic through our hosting provider's server-side metrics. Local storage keeps your light/dark preference, not AI conversations. Reading archived pages does not set an Ask AI cookie or contact OpenAI. The optional Ask AI feature uses a secure first-party cookie, server-side history, and Cloudflare Turnstile for abuse prevention, as described below. These are not used for advertising or profiling.

AI-assisted answers (opt-in only)

Eligible malware and computer-support threads offer Ask AI. Nothing is sent to OpenAI or Cloudflare Turnstile just from reading a page. New answer requests, including shared cache hits, use Turnstile verification, which may show a challenge. When generating an answer, our server sends your question and selected already-redacted public posts to OpenAI. A follow-up may include your previous question and answer. Please don't include personal information: typed questions are not filtered like archived content.

After your first interaction, the secure first-party __Host-mwr-ai cookie holds a random identifier for up to 30 days. It is HttpOnly (not readable by page scripts) and SameSite=Strict. Server records use it to restore your saved answers and enforce one use of each answer option per topic. Anyone sharing that browser profile can restore those answers. Questions and answers are cached on the server for up to 355 days from generation. Reading an answer does not extend its lifetime. Model, prompt, or archive updates may invalidate cached answers sooner. Expired records are removed by the next daily cleanup. AI transcripts are no longer saved in localStorage; the legacy entry for a topic is removed when you visit it.

Daily allowances are 10 accepted requests per browser and 30 per network address, plus a site-wide limit of 100 paid generations, resetting at midnight UTC. Accepted requests count even if generation fails; restoring your own saved answers does not use another allowance or call OpenAI. Daily quota records use secret-keyed browser and network hashes that change each day, are retained for seven days, and do not store raw network addresses in the AI database. People sharing a network address share its allowance.

Service and feedback totals are retained for 90 days without questions, transcripts, topic addresses, or personal identifiers in those totals. Anonymous feedback receipts expire after 24 hours; duplicate-check and expired quota records are removed by daily cleanup. Hosting-provider logs are separate. OpenAI's data handling and retention depend on its service terms and the provider account settings, separately from our cache.

Read About Ask AI for its limitations and how answers use archived evidence. News, community, feedback, and general-discussion threads do not show the feature.

What was removed

Before this archive was built, every post and profile was processed to remove personal data that has no archival value: email addresses, IP addresses (both account-level and per-post), private messages, password data, moderation and ban logs, and session data. Signatures were removed. Where a post's own text contained an incidental personal detail (for example, a name typed into a signature or a stray email address pasted into a log), that specific detail was redacted from the post text itself.

What was kept

Display names, the text of public posts, and timestamps were kept. This is a targeted scrub of personal data, not a blanket takedown of the community's history — the goal is to preserve the troubleshooting knowledge this board built up over two decades while removing the personal data that shouldn't have stayed publicly attached to it.

A note on diagnostic scan logs

Many threads here include full scan logs from tools like HijackThis, DDS, or FRST, pasted in by members seeking help. These logs were preserved — they're often the most useful part of a thread — but were scanned and scrubbed of incidental identifying details (email addresses, IPs, and similar) found inside them, the same as any other post content.

Why this archive exists

Under data-protection law (including GDPR Article 17, the "right to erasure"), archiving in the public interest and for historical-record purposes is an explicit, recognized exception to erasure requests, where deleting the material would seriously undermine that purpose. That's the basis for this archive continuing to exist rather than being deleted outright. It isn't a basis for ignoring a genuine request from someone identifiable in the content below — see the request process.

Preserved third-party reference material

Alongside the forum itself, the old site hosted a small number of standalone tools and reference material built by community helpers, not posted as forum content. Where we judged this worth preserving for historical/research value, we did so as static, attributed content only — never as a live or interactive tool. See, for example, the HJTS reference data. The same request process below covers this material too.

Request removal or changes

If you posted here and want your name removed from a post, or the post itself taken down, email us directly: privacy@malwareremoval.com. We default to anonymizing your display name (replacing it with a generic placeholder) while keeping the post text intact, since most requests are about a name being publicly attached rather than the content itself — let us know if you specifically want the content removed as well.

The same address covers the preserved third-party material described above — if you created or hold rights to something preserved here and want it changed, credited differently, or taken down, use the same email. One address, one process, for every request about this archive.