What a visitor leaves behind

A portal is public, and the people who use it are strangers. This page says what LastHelp keeps about them, so that you can tell them. You run the instance, so you are the one who answers for it — this is what the software does, not legal advice.

What is stored

What	Where	For how long
What the reporter wrote: title, description, the answers to the form	The database	Until your team deletes it. Once approved it is public.
The reporter’s email — only if you configured a mail relay	The database	Until the report closes, and the reporter has been told so. Then it is erased.
A hash of the secret link the reporter keeps	The database	As long as the report exists. It is a hash, so a copy of the database cannot be used to reply as the reporter.
A vote	The database, against a random identity, never an address	As long as the report exists.
A picture the reporter attached	The database, drawn again from its pixels, so the place and the camera a photo carries are not kept	Seen only by your team and the reporter until approved. Erased thirty days after the report closes, or at once if it is rejected, marked as spam or deleted.
The picture of a team member, if they chose one	The database	While the account exists. It is shown beside their replies on public pages, so a visitor sees it. Somebody who has chosen none, and everybody who is not on the team, is shown a default figure instead.

Without a mail relay (LASTHELP_SMTP_HOST) the “tell me when this changes” option is not even offered, so no email address is stored at all.

Following a board with Atom stores nothing about the reader.

What is not stored

• The visitor’s address. It is never written to the database. The rate limits that slow a flood keep it in memory, grouped by network block (/24 for IPv4, /64 for IPv6), and it is gone when the server restarts. LastHelp writes no access log of its own.
• No account, no name, no profile, no analytics, no third party of any kind.

Cookies

Cookie	Who gets it	What it is for	Lasts
lasthelp_csrf	Every visitor	Refuses a form submitted from another site	The browser session
lasthelp_voter	Whoever votes	A random, signed identity, so one browser counts once	One year
lasthelp_session	Your team, after signing in	Keeps them signed in	Thirty days since last seen

All three are needed for something the visitor asked for or for security, and none carries personal data. In general that kind of cookie does not need a consent banner; confirm it for your own country.

What is yours to check

The proxy in front of LastHelp logs more than LastHelp does. nginx, Caddy, Traefik and tunnels often write the visitor’s address, the path and the time to an access log, and keep it as long as they are configured to. That log is yours, not LastHelp’s. Look at how long it lives, and turn it off or shorten it if you do not use it.

If your proxy does log, or you run a mail relay, say so to your visitors in one sentence on your own page. For example: “Reports are public once approved, with their pictures, which are erased thirty days after the report closes. If you leave an email it is used only to tell you when the report closes, and erased then. Our server may record your address for a few days for security.”