Privacy
Privacy
Short, because we keep very little.
When you walk around
While the town is open, your browser sends your position, facing, look and any phrase or emote about every two and a half seconds, with a random id made for that browser tab. We store a one-way fingerprint of that id, never your name or IP address, and delete each position row within about 90 minutes of its last update. Other visitors see your figure, never an id they could link to you.
Limits
To stop abuse we count requests per day, per browser tab (by the tab id's fingerprint) and per connection (by a salted one-way fingerprint of your IP address). The counts are deleted after three days.
Your daily time in town
Everyone gets 12 minutes in the town a day. To count them, the town page sets one cookie holding a random id with a signature (nothing else; it expires after two days). Each position update adds the time since your previous one to a daily total, kept under one-way fingerprints of that id, of your resident row if you are a resident (so the minutes are shared across your devices), and of your connection (the same salted fingerprint of your IP address the limits use). The totals hold no name or IP address and are deleted after three days.
Goals and shared goals
Today's goal progress (which goal steps you have done, with the time and place of your last step, so the next one can be checked) is stored against the same random cookie id (or resident row) as your daily time in town, and is deleted after three days. Residents with a Pass also keep a per-day goal history, like the Lantern Hunt's. Shared goals show other people only as figures, a ring and a count: no names and no chat. While you take part in a shared goal we also keep which browser tab joined (a one-way fingerprint, as for your position) and, for residents, the resident row, so the Pass history can count it; that row, and the shared round's note of who did what, are deleted within about 90 minutes. The river photo is made on your device and never sent to us.
Residents
A resident is a row holding a fingerprint of the resident code, your cottage and wardrobe choices, your best Lantern Hunt time per day, your goals finished and best River Round time per day, and your focus minutes per day. No email, name or payment details. Leaving town (on the Residency page) deletes it at once (if you pay for a Pass, cancel it first); residents not seen for 400 days without a running Pass are deleted automatically. Copies of the database kept in our site backups may still hold it until those backups are rotated out or deleted; we use them only to restore the site after a fault.
On your device
The Studio notepad, your sound and timer settings, your visitor look, a copy of today's goal board and a "Not now" to shared goals are kept in your browser's local storage and never sent to us. Cookies: one for security (CSRF), one for your daily time in town (a random id, kept two days) and, for residents, one holding the resident code.
Advertising
Since 17 October 2026 the public pages (home, Places, Pricing and About) show one banner ad from AdEngine (adengine.us), the small ad network run by WeldonPC, the company behind Weldon3D. For now the ads are for WeldonPC's own services. The town itself, the Residency page, Terms, this page and error pages never show one.
To show an ad, your browser loads a script from adengine.us, asks it for one banner, loads the banner image, and reports once that the page was viewed and once that the banner was shown. Like any website, adengine.us receives your IP address, your browser type and the address of this site (not of the page you are on) with those requests.
- No cookies, no profile. AdEngine sets no cookies, gives you no ID and does not track you from site to site.
- How your IP address is used. adengine.us looks up the approximate city for your IP address in a location database kept on its own server (nothing is sent to anyone else), so that ads meant for one area are shown only there. It also uses the address to count each ad view or click only once and to leave out robots and WeldonPC's own office traffic. The address is not stored with the counts; the temporary entries made from it expire within six hours and are cleared from the server within two days.
- What is kept. Daily totals only: page views for this site, and views and clicks for each ad. The adengine.us web server also keeps a standard access log (IP address, time, address requested, referring site, browser) for security; it is deleted on a rolling schedule.
- Clicking an ad passes through adengine.us, which counts the click, and then opens the advertiser's site, which has its own privacy policy.
- Nothing about you is sold or shared.
Nobody else
The site loads nothing from other companies: no analytics services, and no fonts or scripts from elsewhere. The one outside address the public pages load is adengine.us, WeldonPC's own ad network (see Advertising; it counts one page view per page as a daily total); the town itself loads nothing from it. Payments are not switched on yet.