Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

GuideVault is a game-guide site run by one person. This policy describes what the site actually stores, who else sees it, and how long it is kept. It is written from the code, not from a template: if you find something here that the site does not do, that is a bug and we want to hear about it.

2. If you only read the guides

Reading GuideVault needs no account and sets no tracking cookies. Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and Disqus were all removed in September 2026 and no third-party analytics replaced them. We do count visits, but we do it on our own server and without putting anything on your device — see Counting visits below.

• A session cookie, and only once something needs one. It is HttpOnly, SameSite=Lax, sent only over HTTPS, and it lasts seven days from your last visit, so you stay signed in; logging out deletes it. It is strictly necessary and carries no identifier of you.
• Your browser's local storage, which never leaves your device and which we cannot read from the server. It holds your theme, your spoiler setting, and — if you are not signed in — the guide progress you tick off.
• Server logs kept by our hosting provider, in the ordinary way, including your IP address.
• Counting visits. We count how many times each page is read, which site you arrived from (only the domain — never the full address, so a search you typed into Google never reaches us), your browser language, whether you are on a phone or a computer, and which country you are reading from. All of it is stored as daily totals: a number per day, not a record per person. Nothing is written to your device and your IP address is never stored.
  
  The country is worked out on our own server. We keep a public table of address ranges — "these addresses belong to Spain" — and look yours up in it; your address is used for that lookup and then discarded, and what we store is a daily count per country and nothing else. We deliberately do not use a geolocation service, because that would mean sending your address to another company on every page you open. The country is as precise as the ranges are: a mobile connection or a VPN can place you in the wrong one, and we make no attempt to correct that.
  
  Those ranges come from the free IP to Country Lite database by DB-IP, used under CC BY 4.0.
  
  To avoid counting the same reader ten times in one day we need to recognise, for that day only, that two page loads came from the same browser. We do it by hashing your IP address and browser name together with a random secret that changes every night and is then destroyed. The result is 16 bytes that can only be compared against others from the same day; it cannot be turned back into your address, and once the nightly secret is gone it cannot be recreated even by us. After two days those values are deleted and all that remains is the count.
  
  The number is deliberately rough. Two people on the same home connection count as one; the same person on a phone and a laptop counts as two. We do not attempt to tell them apart, because doing so would mean building the profile this whole approach exists to avoid.
• Searches that found nothing. When the site search returns no results and you give up, we record the words you searched for and the page language — so we know which guide is missing. We count how many times each term was searched; we do not record who searched it, when, from what address, or in what order. Two people searching the same thing are indistinguishable from one person searching it twice, and that is deliberate: it answers "what should we write next" without building a picture of you. Searches that do find something are not recorded at all, and neither are terms that look like an email address, a link or a long number.
• Shared cards and finished guides. Two more daily totals per guide. One goes up when the progress card of a profile that isn't private is shown — usually because someone pasted the link and Discord or Reddit fetched the preview, though the owner's own previews count too; a private profile's card is never counted, not even when its owner looks at it. The other goes up when your browser celebrates finishing a guide (100 %): it sends the guide's name and nothing else, without cookies, once per browser — it reuses the note the site already keeps so it does not show you the same celebration twice, and stores nothing new on your device. What we keep is a number per day, guide and event: no account, no address, no page, no time of day.
• Arrivals from our emails. Links to a guide in the emails we send carry a short label saying which of our emails they came from (such as ?src=mensual). When you open a guide from one, your browser adds one to a weekly total for that email, without cookies, and then removes the label from the address bar so it is not shared or counted twice. What we keep is one number per week and email — not which guide you opened, nor on which day: no account, no address, no guide, no day or time.
• Clicks to Patreon. When you click a link to our Patreon page, your browser adds one to a weekly total for the part of the site the link was on (the plans page, the support box at the foot of a page, and so on), without cookies. What we keep is one number per week and place: no account, no address, no page, no day or time. What you do on Patreon is between you and Patreon; we only learn your tier if you connect your account.

3. If you create an account

Then we store, in our own database:

• Your username and a hash of your password. We never store the password itself and cannot recover it.
• Your email address. It is required when you sign up with a username and password, because it is how you get back in if you forget your password (with Google, it is the address Google confirms). We send a link to confirm it is yours and store the date and IP address of that confirmation; until it is confirmed, only the welcome email, the confirmation link (one more if you asked for one of the emails below before we started checking) and password resets go to it. We use it for that, plus two emails that exist only if you turn them on yourself in your profile and can turn off there: a monthly summary of your own progress (any account), and a weekly digest of news about the games you track (supporters). Both also list the guides you track that we updated in that period. Both need a confirmed address. Nothing else. Changing the address asks for your password first, and the new one has to be confirmed again. Confirmation records for an address you no longer use are deleted once their link has expired.
• New-guide emails, only if you tick the box. The sign-up form and your profile have a separate, unticked box to be emailed when a new guide opens, at most once a week. It is the same list described under “Guide announcements” below, and it starts only once your address is confirmed.
• Your progress — what you have ticked off in each guide, your save slots and any custom tasks you add.
• Anything you publish: community routes and their steps, saved routes, and reports you send about content or about someone else's route.
• A profile visibility setting, which you control, and which decides whether anyone else can see your progress.
• Community totals. Once a day we count, for each guide, how many players have ticked off each item (for example “6% of players have this”) and how far along players are, so a guide can show how rare an item is and where you stand. Every account with a confirmed email, at least a week old and with at least 5 items ticked in that guide counts, including private profiles, but only as part of the total: no name, account or individual list is ever shown or published. A guide with fewer than 20 such players shows nothing, so the figures are always shared among many players. Staff accounts and accounts pending deletion are left out.
• Progress cards: if you generate one, the rendered image is stored on our server so it can be shared.
• The days you use the site. While you are signed in, we note the date of each day you use GuideVault — once per day, with no time, page, guide or IP address. We use it for one thing: counting how many new accounts come back a week and a month after signing up, so we can tell whether what we change brings people back. Each date is deleted after 100 days; before that, all we keep is a weekly total (how many accounts were created that week and how many came back), with no account attached. For a week with fewer than 5 new accounts, that total says only how many were created, never how many came back, so it cannot describe one person. The dates are also deleted with your account. If you read without an account, nothing like this is recorded.

Password reset links are stored only as a hash and expire after one hour.

4. If you sign in with Google

We store the stable account identifier Google gives us and the email address on that Google account. We never receive your Google password. Signing in this way means Google knows you visited us, under their own privacy policy.

5. If you link Patreon

Linking is optional and only affects which supporter tier the site gives you. We store your Patreon account identifier, and we log the pledge events Patreon sends us — which includes the email address on your Patreon account and the event as Patreon sent it. That log exists so a payment that does not match any account can be sorted out by hand.

When your account is deleted, those log entries are stripped of the email, the raw event and the link to you; only the anonymous shape of the event survives for accounting.

6. Other people's services

Loading a page here also contacts:

• Google Fonts, which receives your IP address in order to serve the typefaces.
• Google reCAPTCHA, but only on the contact form, to tell people from bots.

Both are Google services and are governed by Google's privacy policy. Links out to game sites, stores or wikis are theirs, not ours, and we do not control what they collect.

7. The contact form

What you write is emailed to us and not stored in any database. We keep the email as long as we need it to answer you.

Guide announcements: If you tick the box on the sign-up form, we store your email address, which guide you asked about, and the date and IP address of that consent, kept as a record of when you agreed. We then send one email with a link to confirm the address is yours; until you confirm, we send nothing else, and confirming stores its date and IP address for the same reason. We use it for one thing only: telling you when a guide opens — at most one email a week if you asked about any new guide. We never sell or share it. Every message carries an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing marks the record as withdrawn rather than deleting it, so the record of your consent and its withdrawal survives. Ask us and we will delete it outright.

8. Crash and security reports

Your browser may send us a report when a script on the page is blocked by our security policy. Those reports describe the page and the blocked resource, not you, and the log is capped and then stops writing.

9. How long we keep things

• Your account: until you delete it. You can ask from your account settings; we then wait 30 days — during which you can cancel and get everything back — and after that it is deleted permanently, along with your progress, your progress cards, and your guide-announcement sign-ups. One thing outlives it on purpose: if an administrator acted on your account, the record that an action happened stays, with your ID removed. Deleting that too would erase the trace of your own deletion, which is the case the record exists for.
• Password reset links: one hour.
• Our own admin actions: when a site administrator changes or deletes an account, we record which administrator did it, what they did and when, and keep that for 24 months. We do this so that a change to your account is never anonymous, including a deletion. The record stores account IDs and the names of the fields that changed; it does not copy your email address or your password.
• Visit counts: the daily totals for 400 days, so we can compare a month against the same month last year. The day-long value used to avoid double-counting a reader is deleted after two days, together with the nightly secret it was made with — that deletion is what makes the totals anonymous, and it runs on a schedule rather than on request.
• Searches that found nothing: 12 months from the last time anyone searched that term. A word nobody has looked for in a year no longer tells us which guide to write, so we stop keeping it.
• Shared cards and finished guides: the daily totals are kept without a deadline. They hold a date, a guide and a number, and nothing that could lead back to anyone, so there is nothing personal to delete. The same goes for arrivals from our emails.
• The days you use the site (accounts): 100 days, and straight away when your account is deleted. The weekly totals made from them hold no account and are kept without a deadline.
• Guide announcements: as described above — unsubscribing keeps the record of your consent and its withdrawal, and asking us deletes it outright.

10. Your rights

You can ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. You can delete your account yourself from your account settings, and download a copy of your data as a JSON file with “Download your data” in the account menu. For a correction, email us and we will do it by hand.

You can withdraw consent for guide announcements at any time from the link in every message.

11. Contact

Questions about this policy, or about anything above: contact@guidevault.online.