Cookie Notice

The cookies we use

• Session / login cookie — a first-party, strictly-necessary cookie that keeps you logged in. It does not track you across other sites. Under EU/UK e-privacy rules a strictly-necessary cookie does not require consent.
• Linked-accounts cookie — if you sign in to more than one account, a first-party cookie remembers the linked sessions so you can switch between them without logging in again.
• Support-chat visitor cookie — set only if you open the support chat while logged out, so the conversation can continue across pages.
• Analytics visitor cookie (ispk_vid) — a first-party random identifier (it contains no personal details) that lets our own, self-hosted analytics count returning visitors and group page views into visits. It lasts up to 400 days, is set by our server, is readable only by this site, and is never shared with or read by any third party. If you sign in, we associate it with your account so we can understand how people find us and become contributors.
• Google Analytics cookies (_ga and a related per-property _ga_… cookie) — set by Google Analytics, which we use to understand how people find and move around this site. They hold a randomly generated identifier that lets Google recognise a returning browser, and they last up to two years. Unlike everything else on this page, these are third-party cookies: the data goes to Google, and may be processed outside your country. They are on by default and you can turn them off below.

Your analytics choice

Google Analytics is on by default. Turning it off stops all further collection immediately, deletes the cookies Google has set, and is remembered on this browser for 400 days. Our own first-party measurement (the ispk_vid cookie above) is unaffected — it is what we rely on to run the site, and it never leaves our servers.

What we don’t use

We use no advertising or cross-site trackers and no session-replay tools, and we have not enabled ads personalisation or sharing with Google’s advertising products. Apart from Google Analytics (above), our traffic measurement is first-party and self-hosted: the page path, the referring page’s address and any campaign tags on the link you followed, a coarse device, browser and operating-system class, a coarse country derived from your IP address at the moment of collection using an offline lookup (the IP itself is discarded, never stored), and anonymous interaction counters (for example, how many times “start recording” was clicked or a contact form was sent). When you follow one of our own short links (/l/…), our server counts the click before redirecting you — no extra cookie is involved. A short-lived per-tab flag in your browser’s sessionStorage (cleared when the tab closes) helps classify where a visit began. If a page malfunctions in your browser, we also record a technical error report (the error message and code location, the page it happened on, and the version of our software running) so we can find and fix the fault; these reports are deleted after 14 days. Raw page-view events are deleted after 12 months; aggregate daily totals are retained. We never sell or share this data.

If this changes

If we start using any advertising cookie, or add another third-party service beyond Google Analytics, we will update this notice and ask for consent where the law requires it.