what the hell is this place?
"Rhizzone.net, an online message board where shit-tier Maoist Third Worldists and other random nerds can meet and mingle"— Ross Wolfe, thecharnelhouse.org
"that left-in-form troll site, "rhizzone", which is filled with a whole host of unprincipled, pseudo-leftist, want-to-be academic (because none, it seems, have even reached graduate school) brocialists."— Joshua Moufawad-Paul, author, professor of philosophy (York University)
"To create R H I Z O N E review we checked Rhizzone.net reputation at lots of sites, including Siteadvisor and MyWOT. We found that Rhizzone content is not safe for kids and does not look fraudulent. We would describe it as legit."
"Rhizzone, a leftist forum and the ideological heir to Something Awful’s notorious political discussion boards"
"As I guessed, you are a clown."— Louis Proyect, The Unrepentant Marxist, to the rhizzone_txt twitter account
i would also collectively like to become a single clown with you, how can i participate?
go read this other page to find out how to do that.
actually instead can i just passively consume the rhizzone while i watch anime and have soylent piped into my face or something?
of course, twitter user! follow @rhizzone_txt (good post excerpts) and/or @therhizzone (new article notifications).
Security
tHE rHizzonE is hosted at bahnhof.se, a Swedish hosting company known for secure and private hosting (e.g.). Their policy (which you should read if you're interested) says they will not respond to any demands from authorities in other countries, and only respond to Swedish requests to the minimal extent they are required to by law - and will argue in court against requests where possible.
Our server is configured using good security practices, and does not store any data about site use, including visitor IP addresses, times of access, or anything beyond that which is required to pseudonymously identify users and their connections. Unencrypted connections to this site are not allowed (you should see a "Secure" notice in your browser at all times), and no one can see your passwords (which are stored encrypted).
There are some problems with the above, though, here and everywhere else on the internet. For one, e-mail is completely insecure; every internet service provider, malicious monitoring system, or whatever between the sender and receiver can read the text. We e-mail things (though maybe that will change someday.) Secondly, on the server, posts, private messages, your username and your e-mail address are stored in plaintext in the database and could be seen by a server administrator, or someone else were they to gain access, electronically or physically. Finally, any third party can see that your originating IP address is connected to this server and is sending and receiving data to it, though not the contents of the data (as far as we know). The encryption between you and this server is very strong*, though as The New York Times and others reported in 2016, the intelligence agencies of the US and UK have secretly broken many common encryption methods, and may also have broken this one.
The bottom line with security is that your best option is to act as though everything you do on the internet (including everything you do with a smartphone) is fully public, including accurate information about your real identity, location, and everything else. Your use of this site is at your own risk; it is almost certainly monitored in some way, automatically or manually.
* Google Chrome describes the site connection (at the time of this writing) as: "The connection to this site is encrypted and authenticated using TLS 1.2 (a strong protocol), ECDHE_RSA with P-256 (a strong key exchange), and AES_128_GCM (a strong cipher)." If you use Chrome, you should be able to see the current details yourself by right-clicking, selecting "Inspect", and navigating to the "Security" tab.
Privacy (Data Usage and Storage Details)
If you are a registered user of this website, we store your e-mail address and your chosen pseudonym (username). This is likely to be trivially linkable to you as a person, and as such this website is subject to the European General Data Protection Regulation if you are a citizen of the European Union. Since we have no way of knowing which users are EU citizens or not, the following applies to all registered users.
(We store no identifying information about unregistered users, i.e., website visitors.)
Volunteer administrator users on this website with access to the registration e-mail inbox (see the "Sign Up" page on the forum for what it is) will read e-mail from you and (if you're sane and everything) add your e-mail address to the database along with your chosen username when creating your account. Your e-mail address will be used to send you notifications of private messages from other users, to send you administrative notices about the server in case of a known security breach (this has never happened), or to verify your identity in case of a lost password; your posts, and a record of all your upvotes and downvotes ("reputation") are stored for public consumption in the forum; and your private messages are stored for both you and the recipient to read. You may access all data recorded about you through the website itself: your e-mail address is displayable and changeable on the "Basic Info" section of your forum profile, your posts are available via the search feature, reputation is viewable by clicking "reputation" on a forum post, and your private messages can be viewed at any time in your inbox. If for some reason you would like a structured, machine-readable export of all of your posts, private messages, and reputation votes in a single file, you can request that and we'll come up with something. This website does not collect any other personal data.
At your request, your account can be deactivated, which is very quick and easy for us to do, though it leaves weird holes in previous forum threads. Deactivation means that all posts you have written will be hidden, but any published articles written by you will continue to be available. A deactivated account still contains your personal data, and could be reactivated later. As a more drastic option, you may also instead request to have your data completely eradicated from the server, which will take longer and be a big pain in the ass, but we will do it. Unless deleted permanently, your data will be retained for public reference for as long as this site is active. If an archive is ever made of this site, the posts of deactivated accounts will not be retained in the archive, nor will deleted data. You probably already know this, but deactivation or deletion of your data on this website does not affect any copies of publicly-readable posts made by third parties, such as the Internet Archive, Google caches, the wide variety of other automated archiving bots, or private copies. Once it's out there, it's out there for good.