Privacy & Terms

How this site was built

I built this site using AI tools for back-end development, theme code, and infrastructure. The About, Contact, and Support pages were drafted with AI assistance and edited and approved by me. I use AI tools for website copy in part because they help produce cleaner, more consistent language for machine translation, screen readers, and accessibility parsing: benefiting readers who rely on assistive technology or who read in a language other than English. As a one-person operation, I don't have the editors and copy reviewers that the outlets I write for do; AI tools help fill that gap for the site itself. All journalism I publish at external outlets is my own original reporting and writing and, if I ever publish here as an outlet, that expectation will be the same. AI tools were not used to write, draft, or edit any of it.

This site runs behind Cloudflare, which acts as a security proxy. Your experience — including page load times and some request handling — may be shaped by their infrastructure. Cloudflare has its own privacy policy.

I am not an engineer, and any errors or issues you encounter rest with me.

Design and accessibility

Body text is set in Source Serif 4. Headings and labels use Syne. Both are served via Google Fonts.

The site's color palette:

• #E8185C — primary accent (taffy)
• #F5A623 — secondary accent (butter)
• #29B5D8 — blue
• #7DC63F — lime
• #5C1228 — garnet
• #1D3A5C — marina (dark navy)
• #FDF5E4 — fondant (background)

If you have accessibility concerns — contrast, font size, screen reader compatibility, or anything else — please get in touch. I want this site to be readable by everyone.

What is collected and why

If you subscribe, your email address is stored by Ghost (the publishing platform this site runs on) and by SMTP2GO, which handles outbound email delivery. Your address is used only to notify you when new content publishes. It is not sold, shared, or used for advertising.

This site uses first-party, cookie-free analytics powered by Tinybird. No tracking pixels, no advertising cookies, no behavioral profiling. It tells me how many people visited a page, which pieces are being read, and roughly where traffic comes from. Because this site is self-hosted, that data stays on my own server infrastructure — it isn't sent to ad networks or data brokers. IP addresses are anonymized.

Tips and source confidentiality

Tips and messages go directly to me via email or Signal — no third-party form service stores them. Tips sent via Signal are end-to-end encrypted. I do not retain records of who contacted me unless I have explicit permission. Tips sent via email are stored in my personal inbox and are not shared. If you request confidentiality, I honor it. If a story ever requires on-record attribution, I will ask before proceeding.

Paid memberships

Payment is processed by Stripe. This site does not store payment information. Stripe's privacy policy governs how your payment data is handled.

There is no paywalled content. Membership is a contribution to independent journalism, not a purchase of access.

Terms of use

Content published on ForksandFigures.org is the original work of Cole Hanson unless otherwise noted. You're welcome to share, quote with attribution, and link freely. Reproducing full pieces without permission isn't cool — if you want to reprint something, ask.

Unless an article is hosted exclusively on this site, posts here link out to the original publication rather than rehosting the full piece. Those outlets depend on traffic to keep publishing, and I want to honor that. If a piece is taken down at its original publication, I may reserve the right to rehost it here with a link to the archived or dead page.

Contact

Questions, data removal requests, or anything else: get in touch or find me on Bluesky. Requests to be removed from the subscriber list are honored immediately.