Optional accounts

Playing Original puzzles does not require an account. If you deliberately register, the service processes your email address, password hash, optional username, and email-verification state. When you sign in, the service uses an essential HTTP-only session cookie for authentication.

The email delivery provider receives the address and verification message. Raw verification tokens are not stored in the database, and security-rate-limit records contain keyed digests rather than raw email or network identifiers. Community submissions, ratings, and account-linked puzzle attempts are not available in this release.

Account records currently persist until an authorized deletion is completed. Self-service deletion and password reset are not available yet; review the contact options before registering if you require either feature.

Feedback and bug information

The feedback and bug-information pages are guidance-only. They do not currently transmit or store submissions, and they are not connected to a monitored inbox.

Technical operation

Like other hosted websites, infrastructure used to deliver and protect the service may create necessary technical logs, such as request, error, security, and performance records. This page does not promise that such infrastructure records never exist.

Anonymous site measurement

Vercel Web Analytics counts page visits and a few Original-puzzle milestones: opening a puzzle, finishing it as solved or exhausted, and successfully using the share control. Vercel Speed Insights measures real-world loading and interaction performance. This configuration does not use analytics cookies or create persistent visitor profiles.

For each measurement data point, Vercel may process the page URL, referring origin, an IP-derived approximate location such as country, region, or city, and user-agent-derived browser, operating-system, and device-type information. Vercel also uses a request-derived visitor hash that rotates and is discarded after 24 hours. These provider-side fields are not available to the application's minimization callback.

This MVP does not currently offer an analytics opt-out control. Any analytics preference previously saved in this browser is not consulted by the active measurement integration.

Analytics event payloads do not include account identifiers, email addresses, puzzle words, answers, verification or invitation tokens, free text, or raw database identifiers. Authentication and private review routes are excluded. Query strings are removed before eligible events are sent, database-backed puzzle URLs are reported only as one aggregate route, and a site-wide no-referrer policy prevents page URLs from being attached as request-referrer data. Measurement also stays off when a referring site supplies more than its origin.