How this site uses cookies

A cookie is a small text file a site asks your browser to keep and send back on the next request. It is how a site recognises the same browser twice — remembers an answer, keeps a form honest, or counts a visit.

The law draws a line through them. A cookie the site cannot function without may be set without asking. Everything else — analytics included — needs your consent before it is set, and silence is not consent. The site follows that line exactly: its own two cookies are set as needed, Google's wait for a yes.

_xg_session is the standard Rails session cookie. It is signed and encrypted, it carries the token that proves a form was submitted from one of this site's pages and nothing else, and the browser discards it when you close it. On a site with no accounts there is no identity for it to hold.

consent appears when you answer the analytics question. It holds one word — granted or denied — for a year, so that you are not asked again on every page. It is the cookie that keeps the other cookies out.

If you allow analytics, the site loads Google Analytics 4, which sets _ga and one cookie beginning _ga_ followed by the property's identifier. Both hold a random number for up to two years so that two visits from the same browser can be told apart; neither holds your name, your email address or anything that names you.

They are set by Google, read by Google, and used for nothing but the counts the privacy page describes. Advertising features are off, so they are not used to follow you anywhere else. Say no and they are never set; say no after a yes and the site removes them.

A few screens remember how you left them in your browser's own storage, which is not a cookie and is never sent to the server: the schedule's competition filter stays until you clear your site data, and a club's squad table, the fantasy squad view and a form's last focused field last only as long as the tab is open.

None of it identifies you, none of it leaves your device, and every page renders correctly without it.

Cookie settings in the footer of every page reopens the question, and the button below does the same. A no removes Google's cookies and stops the analytics loading; a yes starts counting from the next page.

Your browser can also block or delete cookies for this site or for every site, through its own settings. Blocking the two necessary ones means the analytics question is asked on every page and forms may be refused; the rest of the site reads exactly the same.

If a cookie is added, removed or changes purpose, this page changes with it and the revision date at the bottom moves. There is no mailing list to notify, because there is no mailing list.