About & privacy

Trusspole

Trusspole is a moss pole for climbing plants that you print yourself: poles twisting round each other, held by crossing struts, on a ring with a bayonet, so that one moss pole locks onto the one below and they stack as high as the plant grows. A watering pipe can run up inside it, and thin walls can close its sides. This site lets you set it up and download it for printing.

Presented to you by the Clankers, because we can't touch grass. Trusspole is made with a lot of help from AI coding assistants, the Clankers: they wrote much of the design and of this site, and its author grows the plants.

The models are written in OpenSCAD. Your browser renders them itself, with OpenSCAD compiled to WebAssembly: your settings and the files you download are made on your computer, not on the server. Licences and source code lists the software the site sends you and runs.

Contact

Privacy

No account, no tracking, no analytics service, no advertising. Everything the page loads comes from this site; your browser asks no one else. The site doesn't keep anything about you, and doesn't need to: it has no database. The one exception is a record you agree to, to help find bugs, below.

Unless you agree to help find bugs. The page asks once, in the lower right corner. If you agree, your browser gets a visitor ID in a cookie, mosspole_visitor, kept a day, shown with a name made from it in that corner, where you can delete it again. While it is there, everything your browser sends is recorded with it: every request with its headers, every connection, every setting you change and every render, the page's errors, with all your browser tells about the computer. Your IP address is not recorded, neither from the connection nor from the headers that pass it on. The record is kept 30 days, and you can read your own from the corner. Without the cookie, nothing of this is recorded, and the site works just the same.

In your browser

One cookie, _mosspole_key. It holds only a token that protects the page's form, and goes when you close the browser.
LiveView, the library that keeps the page connected to the server, notes how often a page failed to reconnect (local storage, set back to zero once it connects) and the position in the browser's history (session storage, until the tab closes).
Your settings are in the page's address, so a link brings them back.
The last 12 models your browser rendered, at most 150 MB of them, with what OpenSCAD said about them, in its cache (Cache Storage, and which ones in local storage), so that going back to settings shows the model at once. They never leave your browser; clearing the site's data deletes them.

On the server

Its log notes the time, the page (without your settings) and the answer of each request: no IP address, no cookie. It is kept until the site is next updated.
Counts for the site's monitoring: how many models were rendered and downloaded, by model and file format, and how many pages are open; and how long renders took, by model, number of poles and struts, browser and its main version (such as Firefox 132) and operating system (such as Windows), to find what makes renders slow. Your browser reports each render once, under a random ID the server makes for that render alone, not tied to you or your browser. No addresses, no other settings; kept 90 days.
A record of each render, kept 90 days, to find out what makes renders slow on which computer: a random ID made for that render alone, how long it took, whether it worked, the model and all its settings, your browser with its full version (such as Chrome 131.0.6778.85) and your operating system with its version where your browser gives it (such as Android 14). No address, no cookie.
With these records, what your browser tells about your computer: the number of processor threads, and where your browser says, memory (rounded, at most 8 GB), the processor's kind (such as x86 or ARM), the system's exact version, the device's model, the kind of connection (such as 4G) and its speed; the graphics card's name as the browser gives it; and, with the first render, how long OpenSCAD took to download and to start, whether it came from your browser's cache, and the time of a short speed test of your processor.
When a render fails in your browser, OpenSCAD's worker crashes, or a render never finishes (say the tab crashed): what went wrong, OpenSCAD's last lines and error, which build of OpenSCAD ran, the model's settings, your browser and system and their versions, and what your browser tells about your computer, as above. They are listed on the benchmark page and kept until the problem is understood. No address, no cookie.
If you run the benchmark: its times, for each build of OpenSCAD and model, with your browser and system and their versions and what your browser tells about your computer, as above. They are shown on the benchmark page to everyone and kept until they are no longer needed to compare versions of the site. No address, no cookie.
How often the preview card, the picture a chat app shows for a link to this site, was fetched, and from how many different internet addresses, is counted without keeping the addresses: only as keyed hashes in a sketch that can't list them, started again every Monday with a new key.
To keep made-up reports out of those counts and records, the server limits how many one address may send. It keeps the address for that only in memory, as a keyed hash it can't turn back, for at most an hour.
The server in front of the site keeps no log of its visits. Requests from networks on Spamhaus' DROP list, which are known to belong to criminals, and requests for paths only attacks ask for, such as /.env or .php files, go to a trap that records them in full, IP address included: 90 days, and 30 days for those paths. An ordinary visit never reaches it.

Where it runs

Not on a cloud service: on a physical server its author owns, together with his other projects.