Privacy Promise, Terms Of Service, GDPR Compliance, Code Of Ethics, Legal Disclaimers

This page contains everything you need to know about our Privacy Promise, Terms of Service, GDPR compliance (the General Data Protection Regulations passed by the European Union Articles 13/14 of EU Regulation 2016/679), California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) as well as info about the way we run this site.

Why you can trust us

We adhere to the Blog With Integrity Code of Ethics and the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics. Our ratings and reviews are never influenced by advertising because our reviewers have no connection to ad sales. We disclose our material relationships, policies, and business practices. Readers will always know the difference between editorial and advertising. We do not do sponsored articles, paid articles, paid endorsements, paid links, paid social media posts, or accept junkets. There are never preconditions for coverage of a topic. We always present our honest opinions to the best of our ability. We own our words. Even if we occasionally have to eat them. No ketchup is allowed.

About this website

AmazingRibs.com is owned by Grilling.Guru, Inc., a Florida corporation, under the direction and sole ownership of Meathead, Barbecue Whisperer, Hedonism Evangelist, Culinary Mythbuster. If you need more info about us click here to contact us. We are not affiliated with Barbecue Guru or any other company. AmazingRibs.com is all about the science and art of barbecue, grilling, and outdoor cooking, with great barbecue recipes, tips on technique, science, myth-busting, and unbiased equipment reviews and ratings by experts. Learn how to set up your grills and smokers properly, the thermodynamics of what happens when the heat hits meat and vegetable, and unlearn the old husband’s tales. There are also buying guides to hundreds of grills, smokers, tools, accessories, and thermometers, as well as hundreds of excellent tested recipes including all the classics, and a vibrant membership community called The Pitmaster Club.

Copyright © by AmazingRibs.com

Unless otherwise noted, all text, recipes, photos, computer code, visitor comments, and posts to the Pitmaster Club, are owned by AmazingRibs.com and fully protected by US copyright law. This means that unless you have written permission to publish or distribute anything on this website you have committed a Federal crime. But we’re easy. We usually grant permission and don’t charge a fee. To get reprint rights, just click here and tell us what you want to use and what for. You do not need permission to link to this website. Note: Some photos of commercial products such as grills were provided by the manufacturers and are under their copyright.

Privacy promise

AmazingRibs.com promises to never sell or distribute any info about you individually without your express permission, and we promise not to, ahem, pepper you with email or make you eat spam. We take appropriate security measures to prevent unauthorized access, disclosure, modification, or unauthorized destruction of user data. GDPR requires that we be willing to delete any info we have about an EU resident if he or she requests it. We go a step further. We extend this right to anyone, EU resident or not.

in 2019 California passed a law requiring websites to disclose their privacy policies and to allow users to prevent the site from selling information about them called California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). You do not have to request that we not share info about you, that is our default policy. We have not ever and will not ever sell information about you. If you simply visit our site, we collect no info about you as an individual.

We use a number of reputable companies to help run this website. All are GDPR compliant and their businesses depend on their ability to adhere to the highest privacy and security standards. Some use cookies. Cookies are very small text files that are stored on your computer. They are not programs or capable of harm. You can disable any cookies on your computer in your browser settings, but this may stop a website from functioning properly. Personal data will be processed and stored for as long as required by the purpose for which they have been collected. Here is info about what we have about you and the services we use.

If you subscribe to our newsletter. We publish a free email newsletter named Smoke Signals with the help of a well-regarded email service provider that is GDPR compliant. If you subscribe to Smoke Signals, we have only your email address. You may cancel your subscription at any time by clicking the link at the bottom of every newsletter. The service we use stores your email address and they are not authorized to use it for any purpose. They are an industry leader and are widely respected for their integrity. If they cheated and spammed people they would be out of business in a hurry.

Website hosting. AmazingRibs.com lives on a computer at a reputable website hosting service that uses industry-standard security safeguards. The host is not authorized to use any information you provide under any circumstances.

AmazingRibs.com products. We offer some products for sale but warehousing, shipping, and the transaction are handled by a third party such as Amazon. If you purchase a product or service from them, they request information on their order form such as name, email, shipping address, credit card info, etc. They use this information for billing purposes and to fill your orders. If they have trouble processing an order, they will use this information to contact you. That’s all.

Surveys or Contests. From time to time we may offer contests or surveys. Participation is completely voluntary and you have a choice whether or not to disclose any information. Unless otherwise noted, this info is used strictly for the contest or survey. We may use a third-party service to conduct these surveys or contests and that company is prohibited from using personally identifiable information for any other purpose.

Comments posted to our pages. Before you can post a comment or question we require you to sign in because we want everyone hanging around the grill acting friendly. We use a popular comment service named that is also used by NPR, ABC, CNN, and TIME. If you prefer, you can log in with credentials from Facebook, Twitter, and Google. It is GDPR complaint. For it to work you must enable JavaScript and accept cookies. All comments become the property of AmazingRibs.com and we reserve the right to quote them, edit them, or delete them, and block people from making future comments for any reason at our sole discretion. This is something we rarely do, but we do not tolerate uncivil comments, nastiness, racism, porn, inappropriate language, never-ending arguments, or attacks on others.

Google Analytics. AmazingRibs.com has enabled Google Analytics to give us valuable information about our visitors as a group, not as individuals, so we can continue delivering pertinent information to you about grilling, smoking, and outdoor cooking. We understand that some visitors may not want to be part of these analytics so if you want to opt out, click this link, and download and install the add-on for your web browser. It will turn off Google Analytics for all websites, not just this one.

Social media connections. We may ask for some social media permissions allowing you to perform actions with your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, and other social media accounts, and to retrieve information from them. This allows you to connect with your account provided by those companies.

Links to other websites. AmazingRibs.com contains links to other websites. The links on the editorial portion of all these pages are selected by a human who has reviewed the site. Once you leave this site through a link to another site, we can not be responsible for the content of that site and you are subject to the privacy policy of that site. But you knew that, right?

Info collected about members of our Pitmaster Club

We have a subscription membership service called The Pitmaster Club built on a platform called vBulletin. Click here for more info about the Pitmaster Club and its benefits. All data requested by the Pitmaster Club is mandatory and failure to provide it may make it impossible for us to provide member services. If you belong to our Pitmaster Club we have your name, your address, your phone number, and your email address, as well as your Pitmaster Club user name. Our system stores your password, but no human can view it. We need your address in order to send your $10 temperature guide magnet via snail mail, we need your email in order to tell you when your membership is about to lapse and that your credit card or PayPal account will be charged. We also send you our email newsletter Hot From The Pit which you can cancel by clicking a link at the bottom of every email.

We offer free trial memberships in the Pitmaster Club. Joining is risk-free. At any time during the first 30 days, we will issue a prompt full refund. Not many companies offer a 30-day no-risk money back guarantee nowadays! For your convenience, when the year is up, you don’t have to do a thing to renew. Three weeks before your membership expires we’ll send you an email asking if you want to renew. If you do, don’t do a thing, you will be renewed automatically. The credit card processor will charge you. If you don’t wish to renew, just click a link in the email. But our money-back guarantee extends to renewals too: If you renew and change your mind within 30 days, we will refund your money promptly, no questions asked. We think this is a lot better than bombarding members with emails and snail mails begging them to renew.

Your payment is secure. We never see or store credit card info. The subscription page is a portal directly to Stripe, a large and respected credit card processor that is certified to PCI Service Provider Level 1, the most stringent level of certification available. It is also GeoTrust Secured. It is far more secure than handing your credit card to a stranger in a restaurant, gas station, or grocery store. And our privacy and security promise is as good as it gets. When we launched in 2014 we accepted payment via PayPal but we no longer use it for new subscribers. 

Advertising

Because we are adamant about the wall between editorial and advertising, neither I nor anyone on my team has anything to do with ads. This website is affiliated with a respected third party that sells advertising. We never know who is buying ads nor do we care. When we work on the site all ads are blocked on our computers (and they are blocked for Pitmaster Club members). AmazingRibs.com does not have a big corporate partner like Food Network or Bon Appetit so the site relies on advertising to pay the bills.  Most of our ads come from big agencies called ad networks. We don’t accept sponsored content or free trips or gifts. Very old-school journalism.

We don’t think kindly of malvertising, phishing ads, or crypto-miners, and we scream and stomp our feet whenever we see crappy ads or malvertising, but malvertising is everywhere, especially on Android mobile phones. As this article in the New York Times explains, malvertising pretending to be from Amazon is very common. It is not from our site. It is in your browser.

Advertisers sometimes place cookies in readers’ browsers. This is the case on practically every website and blog on the internet. These companies may use aggregated information about your visits to this and other sites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. Aggregated info means they count totals and summaries of visitors such as how many people visit the site and which countries or states they come from as totals, not as individuals. They do not collect your name, address, email address, or telephone number, etc. If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies, please see: http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp

Oh, and if you hate ads, please consider joining our Pitmaster Club. Among its many benefits, we remove all ads for members.

Other providers

We sometimes use other services and providers but we carefully vet their security systems first.

Fact checking

We employ expert editors who check all content before it is published for factuality and accuracy. All recipes are carefully tested.

Liability

We are serious about quality recipes and make every effort to be certain that they give excellent results on a variety of cookers. We actually test all recipes thoroughly. Not many websites can say that! Still, we cannot be responsible for recipes that don’t turn out the way you expected, and we cannot be held liable for costs or harm done by any cooking you do. In other words, you can’t sue us if you cut yourself, if you burn yourself, if the food doesn’t taste like you want it to taste, or if somebody gets sick. If you follow our instructions, none of these should happen. Likewise, we only recommend products we love, but we cannot be responsible for a manufacturer whose quality control is beyond us. In other words, if you buy a grill or something we recommend, chances are you will love it, but if the manufacturer built you a lemon, or changed the way it is made, we cannot be held responsible.

Disclaimers and limitations

The information on this website is for educational purposes only. All material within comes without warranties of any kind. We are human and capable of mistakes, so we make no guarantees of the accuracy, completeness, or safety of the information. Under no circumstances are we liable for any damages that result from the use of the site (so you can’t sue us if you burn your tongue on hot ribs, cut your finger, or get a tummy ache, OK?). You should follow USDA-recommended minimum cooking temperatures at all times. For more info, visit FoodSafety.gov. We cannot be responsible for errors or negligence on the part of third-party services. Please note that your information may be transferred if there is a sale, merger, transfer, exchange, or other disposition of AmazingRibs.com or Grilling.Guru, Inc. We reserve the right to modify this privacy statement at any time. If you have any questions or comments, click here to contact us.