Privacy

Elided, a daily word puzzle, has no accounts and sets no cookies. The words you guess stay on your device, except a word the game refuses as not in its word list, which is sent so that the word list can be fixed. This page says what is kept there, what is counted, who counts it, and for how long.

What stays on your device

The game keeps these in your browser's own storage, under names beginning elide:, and puts nothing anywhere else:

• the record — every day you have finished, the stars each round earned, the words you guessed, how many submissions were refused, when each day was sealed, your best practice score, and a one-word label for how you first arrived here;
• while a daily puzzle is in progress, the play so far — the rounds finished, the words guessed and the tiles each one used, how many submissions were refused, and when you started — so a reload picks up where you left off, with a random label made up by the tab that dealt the puzzle, so that two tabs open on the same day share one attempt rather than playing two. The label is never sent anywhere. Once the day is finished the record above keeps its part of the play, and the rest, the label with it, is deleted;
• for anyone who played before the record changed shape, the older copy of it. This version of the site never writes to it and never deletes it. An older version still open in another tab may go on adding days to it, and this one reads those days back into your record;
• the practice puzzle held ready for the Practice button. This one is written when the page loads, before anything is played, so that pressing Practice costs no extra request — a visit that plays nothing still leaves it behind;
• the board shape, once you choose four rows of four;
• the theme, once you choose light or dark;
• whether the tutorial has been seen;
• whether the How to play sheet has been dismissed.

The words you guessed never leave your device, except the ones the game refused, described below. The counts listed below, and the one-word label, are read from that record and sent with each event. Clearing your browser's site data deletes all of it, and nothing here can restore it.

One more item can be kept, and not by the game. If you use the contact form, the check it runs against robots (Cloudflare's Turnstile, below) keeps one item, cf.turnstile.u, in its own storage for this site. It is a random-looking token this site cannot read, and clearing your browser's site data removes it too. Nothing else on the site loads it.

What is counted

Six things, and no word you played except those the game refused:

• a page viewed, and when it is left;
• a puzzle started, with how long the board was open before the first submission, and how much you have played in all: the number of plays, the number of days, and how long since your first;
• a round finished, with which round it was, its stars, how many submissions it took, the answer's length, the length of each guess and how many of its letters were inside the answer, how many submissions were refused and for which of the two reasons, the board shape you were using, how long the round took, how long before the first submission and between each one, whether the round was carried over a reload, and whether the tutorial handed it to you; and the words the round refused as not in its word list, at most twenty, which can only be spelled from the board's letters in their order, so each is almost always an attempt at a word, though one could happen to spell a name;
• a puzzle completed, with the stars, submissions, answer length and refusals of each of its three rounds and the totals of those, how many rounds you solved and how many on the first guess, how long it took, whether it was carried over a reload, the same three counts of how much you have played, and — for the daily only — whether you played yesterday, whether this is your first play today, this week or this month, your current run and your longest;
• the share button pressed, with the total stars and whether the text went to a share sheet or to the clipboard;
• an error the page itself hits, with what went wrong and where in the code, so it can be fixed.

Each of those arrives with the date on your clock, the puzzle's date and whether it is one from the archive, which mode it was — daily, practice or tutorial — and that one-word label, such as share or the name of a site that linked here.

One more thing is sent, and it is the part worth reading twice. PostHog records, with every event, the full address of the page you are on and the address you came from, query string included. A link from an advertisement or a social post often carries a click identifier in that query string, and the platform that issued it can match that identifier back to your account there. Nothing here uses it, asks for it or looks it up, but it is sent as it arrives and kept with the event. Beside it PostHog records your browser, your operating system, your device type and your screen size. None of that is a name, an account, or a word you played.

Who counts it

PostHog receives those events through this site's own address, which forwards your network address with them. It runs in a cookieless mode: it writes nothing to your device, and the identifier it uses to tell one day's visitors apart is a hash of that address together with your browser's user-agent string and this site's hostname, salted with a secret that is thrown away at the end of the day. It cannot be reversed, and it does not carry from one day to the next. PostHog keeps the events, and the words a round refused with them, for one year.

Cloudflare serves the site and, like any host, records each request: the address it came from, the page, the time. Its analytics count page views without cookies, and measure how quickly each page loads and responds to your first tap. How long Cloudflare keeps either is set by its own plan rather than by this site.

alldle.net, a directory that lists the game, serves the "Play on Alldle" badge at the foot of the page, so every page here asks alldle.net for that one image. The request tells alldle the address it came from, your browser, and that it came from elided.app, though not which page, and alldle sets no cookie with it. Your browser keeps the image for a day, so it asks again at most once a day. How long alldle keeps what it records is set by alldle rather than by this site.

Cloudflare Turnstile runs on the contact page only, and only once you start using the form: clicking, tapping or tabbing into any part of it is enough, before you type anything. It checks that a browser, not a script, is sending the message, and in doing so it sees your network address, your browser and the page it runs on, as described in Cloudflare's Turnstile Privacy Addendum. It sets no cookie. It never sees what you type.

The site's own database keeps a row for each of the four game events above — started, round finished, completed, shared — and none for page views or errors. Each of those rows carries the country the request came from and no address, and a finished round's row keeps the words it refused, so that the word list can be fixed. It also keeps a row for each message sent from the contact form, holding only when it was sent. Your address does reach the site's own code, which uses it to count requests a minute and to hand out practice puzzles fairly, and never writes it down. Those rows are kept indefinitely, as records of plays and of messages, never of people.

The contact form

A message sent from the contact page carries what you chose and typed (the topic, the day if you gave one, the message, and your email address if you gave one) and, added by the site, the time, the country the request came from, and your browser's user-agent string, which is what makes a report of something broken possible to reproduce. It is delivered as an ordinary email to contact@elided.app, so it is kept exactly as the Contact section below describes. An address you give is used to reply to you and for nothing else. The site's own database records only the time of each message, so that it can cap how many it sends. Your network address is used to count messages a minute and by Turnstile, and is never written down here.

Consent

Nothing here sets a cookie, and nothing asks for your name or an account; the one place that asks for an email address is the contact form, and there it is optional. Three things are written down plainly rather than left to be inferred. One thing is kept on your device for counting: the one-word arrival label, which lives in the record and is sent with each event. A word the game refuses as not in its word list is sent with the round that refused it. And the page address that goes with each event is the whole address, so a link that carried a click identifier sends that identifier too.

Nothing is sold, and nothing is joined to anything outside this page. Clearing your browser's site data removes everything the game has put on your device. If any of this changes, this page changes first.

Contact

Questions go to contact@elided.app. Mail to that address is kept in the site's own mailbox on Cloudflare and forwarded to the owner's personal Gmail account; replies leave from the same address and copy that account too, so a full record of both directions sits in an ordinary inbox. The mailbox is also reachable by the owner's AI coding assistant, which reads and drafts when asked; nothing runs a model over incoming mail on its own.