What we keep, and what we don’t.

If you ask a question

We keep the question. It gets published on this site alongside its answer, on a permanent page, and it is meant to be found — that is the entire model. Write it as though it is going up in public, because it is.

Before it is even saved, code strips out email addresses and phone numbers. Whatever else you type about yourself is up to you: don’t put your name, your address or anything private in the box, because nobody is going to catch it for you.

We do not ask for your email and there is no field for one. There’s no newsletter, no account and nothing to sign up for. Your answer appears on the home page and in the archive; that is how you find it.

The one thing we store about you

To stop one person flooding the queue, we have to be able to tell submissions apart. So we take your IP address, mix it with today’s date, run it through a one-way hash and keep the first sixteen characters of the result. The IP address itself is never written down anywhere. The fingerprint is different tomorrow than it is today, it is not linked to a name, and it is used for counting and nothing else.

Same for the Plant Coroner: it stores the five answers you tapped and the plant’s name so the certificate can be re-drawn later, plus the same daily fingerprint. Certificates are unlisted — they are not indexed by search engines and not listed anywhere on the site — but anyone who has the link can open one, so treat it like a link you shared, not a secret.

No tracking. Genuinely none.

No cookies. No accounts. No analytics of any kind — no Google Analytics, no pixels, no session recording, no fingerprinting SDK. No advertising, no ad network, nothing sold or shared with anyone. The pages load no third-party scripts, fonts or images at all: everything you see comes from this site.

Two honest asterisks. The site is hosted on Cloudflare, and like any host they can see the traffic that reaches it — that is server logging, not us profiling you. And a few links go elsewhere: shop links, the tip jar, merch, the guide checkout. Follow one and you’re on someone else’s site under their rules. Some of those links may earn us a commission; that never changes what an answer recommends.

How long we keep it

Published questions and answers stay up indefinitely. An answer that is still there in three years is the point of the exercise — somebody with the same sad plant will find it.

Questions that were never published stay in the database too, including the ones the safety checks refused, so that what got rejected and why can be audited later. They are not public and are not shown anywhere.

Getting something taken down

Email hello@sadplantclub.com with the page link, or enough of the question that we can find it, and say what you want removed. We’ll take the page down, or delete the row entirely if you’d rather, and answer you to confirm. You do not have to explain yourself and there’s no form.

Same address for anything else — a wrong answer, a broken page, or a question about all of the above.

Who runs this

Sad Plant Club is one person’s side project. The answers are written by AI and checked by code before they post — the about page explains exactly how, including the parts that are not human. If any of that changes, this page changes with it.