# Why does this forum store IP addresses indefinitely? **URL:** https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/why-does-this-forum-store-ip-addresses-indefinitely/29828 **Category:** Meta **Tags:** discourse **Created:** 2025-08-07T01:15:19Z **Posts:** 18 ## Post 1 by @anon94117004 — 2025-08-07T01:15:19Z If you use the request data thingy, you’ll get a dump with months or even years of past IP addresses. This is in opposition of the privacy policy, emphasis mine: > We generally store the above information for just a _few weeks_. --- ## Post 2 by @anonymous386 — 2025-08-07T06:07:40Z Thank you for bringing this up. This seems very invasive to our privacy if it is true. I wonder if anyone on the [@team](/groups/team) can elaborate? --- ## Post 4 by @anon43787453 — 2025-08-08T10:38:23Z I wish it would be: “only days that country laws requires”. --- ## Post 5 by @anon39279085 — 2025-08-08T11:32:01Z cat girl/boy calling out a serious flaw on a forum like privacy guides? crazy --- ## Post 6 by @anon39279085 — 2025-08-08T11:33:00Z in all seriousness @jonah, admin of the server, please elaborate on this or maybe update the policy. --- ## Post 7 by @anon94117004 — 2025-08-08T15:20:18Z > [@linussoytips](#): > > You people are a No need to be rude! This is most likely a mistake. I bet they handle the logs fine, but Discourse is probably maintaining its own records in its database and was overlooked. I’m sure they’ll fix it. edit: I also wouldn’t be surprised if most other Discourse forums do this, so maybe check your exports on other sites and report to them if they do? --- ## Post 8 by @jonah — 2025-08-08T15:49:30Z Good question! This data is used by Discourse (the software, not the company of course) to protect your account by detecting suspicious logins and to generate reports of suspicious logins for admins to view. How this data is stored and for how long is detailed in our current [privacy policy](https://www.privacyguides.org/en/privacy/). Your IP address is stored as account data: ![2025-08-08 at 10.30.53](https://forum-uploads.privacyguidesusercontent.com/original/2X/f/fd577daf1e62321370ab574e92daeed8bd13380b.png) If you follow [the link in this table](https://www.privacyguides.org/en/privacy/#privacy-guides-collects-account-data) for more information, account data is stored per this statement: > Privacy Guides stores this account data as long as your account remains open. --- ## Post 9 by @anon94117004 — 2025-08-08T15:51:43Z > [@jonah](#): > > per this statement That is quite ambigious. > [@jonah](#): > > protect your account by detecting suspicious logins and to generate reports of suspicious logins for admins to view. That doesn’t justify keeping IP addresses older than a year at all. Can you please trim it down to at least six months maybe? Also does this mean basically every Discourse forum is doing this indefinite logging? Why has PG never made a PSA about that? --- ## Post 10 by @anonymous378 — 2025-08-08T15:57:57Z > [@anon94117004](#): > > That is quite ambigious. > [@anon94117004](#): > > Also does this mean basically every Discourse forum is doing this indefinite logging? I am bit confused here. > [@jonah](#): > > Privacy Guides stores this account data as long as your account remains open. “as long as your account remains open” does not seem either ambiguous or indefinite. --- ## Post 11 by @anon94117004 — 2025-08-08T16:00:33Z > [@anonymous378](#): > > “as long as your account remains open” does not seem either ambiguous or indefinite. it should explicitely state that every IP address ever used to signin is stored. Obviously posts would stay forever, it doesn’t make that clear that IP addresses are too. Just because it says “Email Address, IP Address”, most people wouldn’t assume that they’re all stored for the same lengths of time. edit: My biggest concern is that Discourse is a very heavy and complex web app. It is inevitable that someone finds a security issue and uses it to dump the database of many instances. Years of IP addresses should be considered toxic waste and handled correctly. eg. here is one: [Potential Backup file leaked via Nginx · Advisory · discourse/discourse · GitHub](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/security/advisories/GHSA-567m-82f6-56rv) --- ## Post 12 by @jonah — 2025-08-08T16:25:52Z > [@anon94117004](#): > > most people wouldn’t assume that they’re all stored for the same lengths of time. You should assume everything listed in that table is stored for the amount of time stated in the privacy policy, which is why it is written :slight_smile: All this being said, while it is documented and does serve a legitimate purpose, I do think _on our end_ we will be fine with cleaning up most of this data, so I can make a change here… This _is_ default Discourse behavior, and other forums may have more complex needs than our own when it comes to spam prevention, so yes I would assume that other forums keep this data and will not be willing to[[1]](#footnote-105091-1) clean it up for active users like we are now doing. * * * 1. or able to, if they’re one of the forums using Discourse’s cloud hosting service, but those forums probably didn’t care about your privacy anyways. [↩︎](#footnote-ref-105091-1) --- ## Post 13 by @anon94117004 — 2025-08-08T16:27:53Z > [@jonah](#): > > You should **assume** everything listed in that table is stored for the amount of time stated in the privacy policy It is hard for my smol autistic cat brain to understand these things when they aren’t spelled out. I hope it can be clarified for those who are in the same boat. --- ## Post 14 by @rmd — 2025-08-08T17:03:24Z I don’t understand: 1. Why it is acceptable to store IP addresses for a privacy forum? (to track where I live or lived) 2. How does IP address help in any way for anything good rather than to track? One can change IP address anytime, so why do you need to know the past? 3. Why software you are using have no options for administrators to opt out or limit the time of storage? --- ## Post 15 by @jonah — 2025-08-08T17:05:59Z > [@rmd](#): > > Why it is acceptable to store IP addresses for a privacy forum? The security threats on the internet do not change based on the type of content you serve: > [@jonah](#): > > This data is used by Discourse (the software, not the company of course) to protect your account by detecting suspicious logins and to generate reports of suspicious logins for admins to view. * * * > [@rmd](#): > > Why software you are using have no options for administrators to opt out or limit the time of storage? It does: > [@jonah](#): > > I do think _on our end_ we will be fine with cleaning up most of this data, so I can make a change here… --- ## Post 16 by @jonah — 2025-08-08T17:20:26Z > [@jonah](#): > > so I can make a change here… I should additionally note that this change has already been made, which you should see reflected in your account data archives. --- ## Post 17 by @jonah — 2025-08-10T16:35:56Z > > > Fixes: https://meta.discourse.org/t/clean-up-user-auth-token-logs/326397?u=jonah…aragon1 > > Currently (since 2021 when this logging was [made unconditional](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/8fb823c30f7fd3086f4370c2dc6e4e3737ae6acf)) all user IP addresses and user agent strings for all forum users are continuously logged and never cleared. Keeping unnecessary PII is a massive liability for us, so I hope this can be merged ASAP. > > I observe (in my user archive download) this indefinite logging does not happen on Meta, presumably because you have _verbose_ logging enabled, but it does happen on virtually all Discourse-hosted and self-hosted sites, which indicates to me this is unintended behavior. I should not have to enable verbose logging to _decrease_ the amount of logging here, but that is what I had to do as a temporary solution. > > This change will keep the logs for a few months by default. I can find no reason the logs should be kept longer, _especially_ as they only seem to be used for a feature (suspicious login reporting) which currently only applies to staff accounts and not regular users. > > cc: @OsamaSayegh --- ## Post 18 by @anon94117004 — 2025-08-16T15:39:31Z Cool, seems an improvement/fix was merged for the next release of Discourse! Look at us, making progress :grinning_cat: