The short version
There's nothing to sign up for, no advertising, and no third-party trackers. Nothing about you is sold. Ordinarily what you type is seen only by the players in your room and the services that host the game; the operator sees content that's reported or caught by the safety filter, as described below. Almost everything you do here lives in the server's short-term memory and is cleared soon after your room closes.
On your device
Your browser stores your nickname, tile colour, a few settings (volume, keeping the screen awake, the page-count switch below), and a random player ID that lets the server recognise "same browser as before". We never ask for your name or email to play. Clearing this site's data in your browser removes all of it.
In the room
Other players in your room see your nickname, your colour, and whatever you type: chat, clues, guesses. That's the game. Rooms marked public are listed in the lobby for anyone to join. Rounds and chat live in memory only and are cleared within a minute of the room emptying, with two exceptions: anything that was reported, and the nameless game statistics described below.
What we keep
A few things are stored on the server, each for a job and most with an expiry:
- Reports. A report holds the reason, the room's name and code, the nicknames and player IDs of the reporter and the reported player, a scrambled IP address, and a snapshot of the room's recent activity (up to the last 15 minutes of chat, clues, guesses, and names), including anything the reporter singled out. The snapshot keeps player IDs only for those two; everyone else's lines stay in it as context, under their nicknames. Reports are deleted after 30 days; a dismissed report's snapshot is deleted after a day. If a report involves serious harm, above all to a child, we may share the minimum needed with Australian authorities and regulators, or with specialist child-safety or counter-terrorism organisations here or overseas, such as NCMEC in the United States or Tech Against Terrorism in the United Kingdom.
- Bans. A ban stores a player ID, a scrambled IP address, or both, along with the reason, for as long as the ban is in force. Once it expires or is lifted, the record is kept another 90 days, then deleted.
- Contact messages. Messages sent through the contact form are kept for up to 90 days, along with your email address if you chose to leave one. If you email us instead, your message works like any other email: it arrives in an ordinary Gmail inbox, so Google carries and stores it, and it stays there until we delete it.
- Filter records. When the filter blocks or edits a line, we keep the text it acted on for 30 days after we last saw it, with no record of who typed it, to check the filter's aim. Contact details are the exception: when the filter blocks something like an email address or phone number, we keep a count of what kind of thing it was, never the text itself.
- Error reports. If the game breaks in your browser, the page sends us a short automatic report so we can find and fix the bug: the error message, a technical trace of where in the code it happened, the kind of page you were on (the pattern, like "a room page", never which room), the version of the game you were running, and a rough browser description like "Chrome 126 Android". No names, player IDs, or rooms are attached. Because an error message can occasionally catch a fragment of what was being typed when things broke, these reports are treated as content: they're deleted 90 days after the error last happened.
- Game statistics. To learn which words are hard, we keep a record of each Cluesy round: when it was played, the mystery word, the clues the table saw, how the round ended, how long the guess took, and how many players were at the table, but never who was playing. No names, player IDs, or rooms are attached to these records. Round records are deleted after 90 days; what remains is per-word tallies, and a clue only enters those once it has been given in at least three different rounds, so a one-off word someone typed doesn't linger.
"Scrambled" means we don't store the address in readable form: what's kept is a keyed one-way code, used to recognise the same address if it appears again. "Deleted" means removed from the live system; encrypted backups exist for disaster recovery and age out within about another two weeks.
Age
Wordasaurus is for players 13 and up. Whatever your age, the game never asks who you are: no real names, no sign-up. Pick a nickname that isn't your real name, and don't share personal details in chat.
Hosting and analytics
The game is run from Australia on servers in the United States. Your IP address is used in memory to manage connections and rate limits; the page counter below uses it only in the moment, to work out the rough place a visit came from. It isn't written to visitor logs, and it reaches storage only as the scrambled records listed above.
We also count page views, with a counter that runs on our own servers. It records which pages get visited, along with the rough place they're visited from (country and region), the browser and system you use, screen size, and the site that linked you here (including any campaign tags in the link). It never records which room you were in. Counts are kept for 180 days, no cookies are set, and if your browser asks not to be tracked, you're not counted at all. You can also switch it off just for this browser (switching it back on may need a page reload):
Requests and complaints
You can ask what we hold that relates to you, ask for it to be deleted, or tell us if you think we've handled something badly: send us a message from the link below. We keep so little that we may need details, like the room, nicknames, and rough timing, to find anything at all. Records still needed to handle a report, enforce a ban, keep players safe, or meet a legal duty stay for as long as that takes.
Changes
If how any of this works changes, this page changes with it.
Questions or worries? . It goes straight to the operator. If the form doesn't work for you, because a ban blocks it or the game is down, email wordasaurusgame@gmail.com instead.