Cookie policy
Two cookies, and neither of them appears unless you accept. This page names them and says exactly when they are written.
What AFK Journal stores, and when
Three things can end up in your browser because of this site. Two are cookies and only appear after you press Accept on the consent banner; the third is not a cookie at all, and is the record of the answer you gave.
| Name | Type | Written | What it is for | Lifetime |
|---|---|---|---|---|
_ga | First-party cookie, set by Google Analytics | Only after you accept | A random identifier that lets Google Analytics tell that two page views came from the same browser, so a returning reader is not counted as a new one. | 2 years (Google Analytics default) |
_ga_7C9S9F43Y9 | First-party cookie, set by Google Analytics | Only after you accept | The same job for this specific property — the suffix is this site's measurement id. It holds the session state Google Analytics needs to group page views into one visit. | 2 years (Google Analytics default) |
afk.consent | Local storage — not a cookie, never sent to any server | When you press Accept or Reject | Your answer, so you are not asked again on every page. It contains three fields: the answer, the date you gave it, and a version number. No identifier, nothing about you. | Until you clear the site's data |
That is the complete list. No third-party cookies, no advertising cookies, no session storage, no device fingerprinting and no tracking pixels. The site itself has nothing that would need storage: no accounts or logins, no saved preferences, no shopping basket, no advertising and no A/B testing.
Before you choose, and if you reject
Google Analytics loads on every page, but it loads under Google's Consent Mode with analytics storage denied. Denied means what it says: it sets no cookies, reads no cookies, and stores no identifier. What it does send is a cookieless ping so the page view can be counted — the page address, the referrer, a coarse device description and a timestamp, with nothing that persists between page loads and nothing that links two visits together.
Advertising storage, ad user data and ad personalisation are denied permanently, before and after any choice you make. There are no ads on this site.
Pressing Reject keeps that state and writes the record in the table above so you are not asked again. If you had accepted earlier, Reject also expires the_ga cookies immediately, so they are gone before you leave the page.
Changing your mind
Cookie settings in the footer of every page re-opens the banner, and so does this button: . Withdrawing consent takes exactly as many clicks as giving it.
Third parties
Google Analytics is the only third-party script on the site. What it collects, who processes it and on what legal basis is set out on the privacy page.
YouTube. Some posts embed a video. It does not load on its own: until you click play you are looking at a still image served from this site, and no request reaches YouTube. Clicking play loads the player from youtube-nocookie.com, Google's reduced-tracking embed domain. From that point the embed is Google's software running in your browser, and it may store data according to their terms rather than this page's. The choice is always yours, and it is always a deliberate click.
Sanity's image CDN. Images on the site are served from it. Serving an image means their servers see the request, but no cookie or storage is set by it.
Controlling this yourself
Nothing on this site depends on storage, so you can block cookies and site data for this domain entirely in your browser settings and every page — including search — works exactly as it does now. Blocking googletagmanager.com with any content blocker has the same effect, and so does Google's own Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on. Clearing the site's data also clears the afk.consent record, which means the banner will ask you again on your next visit.
Changes
If the site ever introduces anything else that sets storage, this page and the privacy page will be updated first, and the date above will change with them.
This page describes how the site works. It is a plain description, not legal advice.