Privacy

Games generate and run in your browser. Your guesses, streaks, and stats are stored in your browser’s localStorage and are never transmitted. This site shows no ads, sets no cookies, and runs no third-party analytics.

The site does count how it is used, so we can see which games are worth improving. Each page view (view), each round of a game that ends (result), and each link followed to another site (out) is sent as a small count to this site’s own address. A count carries the page’s path, the referring site’s name and your country, and no cookie, no ID, no IP address and no guess, word or score, and it is not linked to any other count. One click turns it off. The full list of what a count holds is below.

What is counted

Every page loads one small script of this site’s own, /count.js. It sends short counts to this site’s own address, /_c, and to nowhere else. There is no third-party analytics, tag manager, pixel or advertising script. Your browser enforces that part: the Content-Security-Policy served with every page allows connections to this origin alone, so a request to any outside origin is blocked.

A count is sent when a page is viewed, when a round of a game ends, and when you follow a link to another site or an email link. One count holds these fields and nothing else:

• Site. This site’s name, wordgamelibrary.com, so its counts can be told apart from other sites’ counts.
• Copy. Whether the count came from wordgamelibrary.com itself or from a preview copy of the site made while it is being changed.
• Kind of count. A page view, a game result, or a link followed to another site.
• Page. The address of the page, without anything after a question mark or a # sign, such as /word-guess/. A challenge link keeps its puzzle after the # sign, and that part is never in a count.
• Start of a visit. For a page view, whether you arrived from another site or from nowhere (a typed address or a bookmark), rather than from a page on this site, a reload or the back button.
• Kind of referring site. For the first page of a visit only, which kind of site sent you: one name from a short fixed list of search engines, AI assistants and social sites, or direct, or other.
• Referring site. For the first page of a visit only, the name of the site that sent you, such as duckduckgo.com. Never the address of the page you came from, and never what you searched for.
• How the page was opened. For a page view, whether the browser followed a link, reloaded the page or used the back or forward button.
• Result or link. For a game result, one word, once per round that ends: solve when you win the round, or finish when it ends any other way (out of guesses or misses, skipped, out of time, or ended by you). Which game it was shows only through the page address. The word is all that is sent; your guesses, the answer, the words you found and your score are not. A Daily round you already finished, shown again when you come back, is not counted again. For a link, the name of the site it leads to, or mailto for an email link.
• Format. The version number of this list of fields.
• Country. The two-letter code of the country the request came from, such as US, as the company that hosts this site already works it out to deliver the page, or XX when it cannot tell. Never a region, city, postal code or position.
• Time. When the count was received, added by the service that stores it.

A count holds no cookie or other identifier, no IP address, no network name, nothing finer than the country, no browser or device details, no screen size, no guess, answer, word or score, no streak or stat, no text you type, and no full referring address. Nothing in one count ties it to another count or to you, so the counts add up to totals per page and per day and cannot be joined into a history of one person’s visits.

Where counts are kept. Counts are written to Cloudflare Workers Analytics Engine, a storage service of the company that hosts this site, which keeps each count for three months. Daily totals may be kept longer. Counts are read only as totals.

Turning it off. One click turns counting off in this browser, and a second click turns it back on:

The switch writes one entry, count-off, holding 1, to this browser’s local storage for this site. While it is there, /count.js sends nothing at all, on any page; the second click deletes it. Clearing this site’s data in your browser deletes it too, and turns counting back on. If your browser sends Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track, the script sends nothing at all without any click. Blocking /count.js with a content blocker does the same, and with JavaScript off nothing is counted. Every game on the site works the same way without it.

Automated visitors. A count from software that names itself a bot or crawler is dropped, and so is a count from the hosting network our own test browsers run on: the code that receives a count compares the request’s network number with that one network and stores neither. Other automated visits can still be counted, so the totals are approximate.

Hosting and server logs

The site is served by Cloudflare Pages. Like any web host, Cloudflare processes standard technical data (IP address, browser self-description, requested address) to deliver pages, including the counts above, and to protect against abuse, subject to Cloudflare’s privacy policy. Those server logs are outside our control. The code that receives a count reads the browser’s self-description only to drop bots, and stores neither it nor the IP address.