Cookies, and the one value we store

When you answer the banner at the bottom of the screen, your answer is written to the browser's local storage on your own device as one short value. The next time you arrive, the site reads that value, sees that you have already answered, and leaves you alone. It holds nothing else and identifies nobody.

It never leaves your device. It is not sent to us, it is not sent to anybody else, and we have no way of reading it or of knowing how many people have answered which way.

No analytics of any kind, which means we genuinely do not know how many people read these pages or which guide is the popular one. No advertising network, no retargeting pixel, no social media buttons that phone home, no comment system hosted elsewhere, no chat widget, no font or script loaded from somebody else's server.

That costs us something. We write in the dark, and we find out what is useful only when somebody phones and tells us. We think it is a fair trade for a site where nothing follows you afterwards.

Loading a page means your browser asks our host for files, and the host records that request in an ordinary server log the way every web server has always done. Those logs rotate and overwrite themselves as part of running the machine. We do not open them, build reports from them or connect them to anything you have sent us.

If you submit the form, the submission reaches us as a notification. That is a message, not a cookie, and the privacy page explains how long we keep it.

Clearing site data for this address in your browser settings removes the stored value, and the banner will ask again on your next visit. Private or incognito browsing means it is discarded when you close the window, so the banner will appear every time, which is the system working as intended rather than a fault.

Declining it changes nothing about the site. Every page, every guide and the form all work exactly the same, because the value controls the banner and nothing else.

Because asking is the right habit even when the answer is trivial, and because a reader cannot tell from the outside whether a site is storing one harmless thing or thirty useful ones. The banner is our way of saying there is one, here it is, and here is the page that describes it.

We considered dropping the banner and simply storing nothing. The trouble is that then the site has no way to remember you declined, and a cheerful note about privacy that reappears on every single visit is its own small annoyance.

Tell us and we will fix the page. The site is small enough that one of the two of us can check what it actually stores in a few minutes, and if we have described it wrongly the description is what is wrong. The phone number and the form are on the contact page.

Should we ever add anything that stores more, this page gets rewritten before the change goes live rather than afterwards. We have no plans to add anything.