Privacy · Sip n Strut

The tavern is small. It does not sell your drink preference to other houses, does not follow you down the road, and does not keep a file on you in the back. What it does keep, it keeps in your own pocket — and here is the list of it, in plain language so the crier can read it aloud at the door.

What we write down in your pocket

Two small notes, stored in your own browser's localStorage. These never leave your device unless you choose to submit a score.

autoq.sessionStats.v1 — the running tally for your AutoQ tab (hands played, best single hand, total score across all games in this browser). Wiped when you click “Flip the table” on the AutoQ page, clear your browser's site data, or open an incognito window.
autoq.playerName.v1 — the last name you entered when submitting a score, remembered so we can pre-fill it next time. Wiped the same way.

What we write down in the big ledger

When you finish an AutoQ game and click Submit on the name prompt, the following is sent to our own backend (AWS DynamoDB, in the US-East-1 region) and associated with the name you typed:

The name you entered (1–20 letters / digits / spaces)
Your final score
The longest word your game produced, if any
The timestamp of submission

If you click Skip instead, none of that is sent. An anonymous game-played counter increments either way — it holds no identifier of any kind, just a number that tells us how much AutoQ has been played in total.

One more note is written on a submission that goes through: a row keyed on your IP address, holding that address, the game, and an expiry five seconds out. It is what stops one address flooding the board. DynamoDB deletes it automatically when the expiry passes, and it is never joined to your score or to your account.

When you sign in

Signing in (via Google, for now) rigs a fixed identity for the Tavern's Ledger and lets your AutoQ tally follow you across devices. If you never sign in, this section doesn't apply to you.

At sign-in, Google shares these with us and nothing else:

A Google subject ID (a stable internal identifier; not your email and not usable elsewhere)
Your Google display name
Your Google account email address
The URL of your Google profile picture

We do not see your Google password, any other Google service data, your contacts, or anything outside these four fields.

While signed in we store, keyed on your Google subject ID:

A per-game tally for each game you play (hands played, best single-hand score, total score), plus the timestamp of its last update. Kept separately for AutoQ and Power Words.
Your character — the class you chose, an optional pseudonym, your gold, your inventory, any levels and faction standings you've picked up, and when the character was created and last changed.
Your franchisee application, if you submit one — every field on it: name, class and level, the alignment you pick on the grid, honorific, the felony question and its explanation, your chosen region, moniker, how you heard about it, and the four money answers (liquid worth, net worth, pocket money, and what you'll invest).
Any bets you place on an AutoQ game — one record each, holding the stake, how many bots you were playing, whether it has been settled and for what, and when it was placed.
Your Codex membership, if you have been granted one — your Google subject ID paired with the name you go by at the table, which is what decides which version of the Codex you are shown. That pairing is what the gate at codex.sipandstrut.com reads to let you through. It is the one item here kept outside your own records, in a shared membership list; see the deletion note below.

Your character, your bets and your franchisee application are in-character. The felony question and the money figures are part of a joke application to run a fictional tavern — we have no interest in your real criminal record or your real finances, and nothing on that form is checked against anything. But you type it and we store it, so it belongs on this list.

These live in the same DynamoDB table as the public leaderboard, under a USER# key prefix that isolates them from the game's public records — the Codex membership is the one exception, and sits in a shared list instead. Your session is held in a signed cookie that expires after 30 days or when you click Sign out. On the live site that cookie is scoped to sipandstrut.com and its subdomains rather than to a single hostname, which is what carries one sign-in from the tavern through to the Codex.

What we do not do

No third-party analytics. No Google Analytics, no Meta Pixel, no heatmaps.
No advertising cookies. No retargeting.
No tracking of which pages you visit beyond standard server access logs.
No selling, renting, or sharing any data we collect with third parties. The tavern keeps its own book.
No password of ours to forget — sign-in is Google's, and we never see or store a credential.

Who we talk to on your behalf

A few unavoidable outside houses make this tavern work. Each one sees only what it needs to do its job.

Vercel hosts the site. Standard server logs (request path, user agent, IP) are retained per Vercel's privacy policy. We do not operate Vercel Analytics.
Our own error logs go to the same place. When something fails server-side — a bet that will not settle, a deletion that does not finish — we write a short diagnostic line so it can be put right. That line can include your Google subject ID and the id of the record involved. It never includes your name, your email, or anything you typed into a form.
AWS stores the leaderboard (DynamoDB) and runs the score-submission and stats endpoints (Lambda + API Gateway). It also holds the Codex pages (S3), which our own server fetches for you once the gate has checked your membership — the storage itself never sees who you are. Same data as listed above and nothing more.
Our own strongbox holds a copy of that same ledger, taken once a day and kept on a private machine in the proprietor's house. That machine does serve a few other things to the open road, but this copy is never among them: the job only pulls from AWS, and nothing hands the copy back out. It is insurance against AWS losing the books, not a second set of books. We keep the last 30 daily copies, plus the first copy of each month for a year, and the oldest are destroyed as new ones arrive.
Merriam-Webster validates words you type during a hand. The validation call goes from our server (not your browser) so the dictionary never sees your identity — just the words to check.
Google Fonts serves the typefaces the AutoQ gameboard uses. Your browser fetches them from Google's CDN, which means Google sees the request (IP, user agent). This happens only on pages that load the game surface.
Google OAuth handles sign-in, if you choose to sign in. You're redirected to Google, consent to share the four fields listed above, and are sent back. We don't route any other traffic through Google on your behalf.

How to burn your entry

To clear the local notes: open the AutoQ page and click “Flip the table”, or clear this site's data in your browser settings (Application / Storage in dev tools works too).

To remove a leaderboard entry: send a note to sipnstrut@gmail.com with the name you used and the approximate date of the score. We will strike it from the record.

To delete your character yourself: go to your profile and use Delete my character at the bottom. That removes your character record and your franchisee application, and signs you out. It also removes every bet you have placed. It keeps your game stats, so your scores stay on the leaderboards, and it leaves your Codex membership alone — that is an access grant rather than part of your character, and the email below is the way to clear it. It cannot be undone.

To delete everything, stats included: email sipnstrut@gmail.com from the Google account you signed in with (or say which account) and we'll wipe all USER#<subject-ID> items — stats, bets and all — along with your Codex membership, which is kept outside that prefix and so is not covered by the phrase. The button is the quick path; the email is the complete one.

About the strongbox: either way of deleting clears the live ledger at once. The daily copies already taken are not rewritten, so your entry lingers in them until they age out — a month for the dailies, up to a year for the monthly ones. They are opened only to restore the ledger after a disaster, and if that ever happens, anyone who deleted after the copy was taken could reappear in it. We would say so on this page; tell us and we will burn the entry again.

To sign out or revoke the OAuth app: click your name in the header and choose Sign out to end the session on this device. To revoke Sip n Strut's access to your Google account entirely, visit myaccount.google.com/permissions and remove “Sip n Strut” from the list. (Revoking there doesn't delete any stats we've already stored — use the email path above for that.)

Changes

If we ever add analytics, accounts, or any form of tracking, this page will be updated and the date at the top will change. If the update is substantive (new categories of data, new recipients), that change will be called out in plain view.

Questions

Mail the tavern at sipnstrut@gmail.com.