OpenKingdoms

What this site counts

OpenKingdoms counts visits to this site so the person who runs it can see how many people come by, how many of them play, and which parts of the game get used. This page lists everything that is counted and everything that is not.

What is counted

• A visit to each page of the site, and whether it was the first page of a browser tab.
• How far a visit got. The game files were chosen, the main menu came up, a battle started. Also which of the skirmish, campaign and multiplayer screens it opened.
• Each battle's kind (campaign, skirmish, multiplayer, a replay or a loaded game) and its map, or its campaign and mission. For a multiplayer battle, whether you hosted, joined, dropped in, rejoined or watched, and how many people played. For a loaded game, where it was loaded from.
• The number of computer players and how hard they were, whether the Remastered Battlefield option was on, the side you played, how long the battle lasted and how it ended.
• The mod set, by its name when the site's mod registry lists it. Any other mod set counts only as one of your own, since you may have named it yourself.
• Error messages from the page or the game, cut to their first line, with web addresses, email addresses and the name on a home folder taken out.
• Your browser family, your system family, whether it is a phone or a tablet, a rough screen size, and which of the game server's regions your browser reached.
• Whether this browser has been counted before.

How a visitor is counted once a day

Your browser makes up a random number each day and keeps it in its own storage for this site, with the date it was made. The number says nothing about you, and the next day your browser makes a new one. The game server mixes it with a key that changes every day and keeps the mixed form only to count each visitor once that day. The list goes at midnight UTC. If the server restarts during the day it keeps that list on disk while it is down and deletes it as it starts again. After the day is over all that is left are the day's totals, such as 40 visitors and 12 skirmishes on one map.

What is never collected

No cookies are set and no IP address is stored. To stop one machine from flooding the counts, the game server holds a scrambled form of the address in memory for at most a minute, and then it is gone. No player names, chat, saved games or game files are collected. Nothing is sold or shared, and no other company tracks anyone on these pages. The desktop builds of the game send nothing at all.

The pages are hosted on GitHub Pages and the game server runs on fly.io. Like any web host they see your IP address when your browser connects, under their own privacy policies. The pages also load their two typefaces from Google Fonts.

What the Asset Atlas keeps

The Asset Atlas reads your game files in your browser and sends nothing about them anywhere. To open quickly next time it keeps a few things in this browser’s own storage for the site: a list of what your archives hold, with names, paths and sizes, small pictures of the assets you have looked at, the notes, ratings and tags you write, and the folder you picked, so it can ask to open it again. It also keeps a copy of each Stars of Darien model it fetched. Those models come from GitHub, which sees your IP address when your browser asks for one, as any web host does. The atlas menu has a button that clears all of this but your notes, and clearing the site’s data in your browser removes everything.

Your notes leave this browser only when you export them yourself. The file holds names, paths and your words, never a picture.

The multiplayer leaderboard is a separate thing. It lists finished multiplayer games with the names the players typed into the game, and all of it is on that page for anyone to see.

Turning it off

If your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, nothing is counted and nothing is sent. You can also turn the counting off for this browser below. The choice is kept in this browser until you clear its data for this site.

Questions

Ask on the project's GitHub issues. The code that does all of this is public there too.