Vote

How the pair is chosen

A round of five pairs a day, by your own calendar rather than ours. Each pair comes from the pairings compared least, and it is one you have not answered yet, so coverage spreads evenly instead of piling onto whoever is in front of everybody this week. No scale to calibrate and no mark out of ten: a lone number has nothing to anchor it, and a second character does.

Once your browser has answered every pairing there is, one you have answered before comes round again. You can pick afresh, and the new answer takes the place of the old one.

What comes back

The split for that pair as it stood when you voted, and whether you sided with the majority or against it. Once a pairing has ten votes the page says which; before that it says it is too early to tell, because your own vote would have decided it. At the end of the round you are told how many of the five went with the crowd, and how many days running you have played. Not a position and not a place in a table: the standings appear only when there are enough votes behind them to mean something. Come back later the same day and the page shows the finished round, and tells you the next one opens tomorrow. The arithmetic, the scheduled recomputes and the parts of it that cannot yet be trusted are in how the World Class 100 works.

What a vote stores

A winner, a loser and a timestamp. That is the whole row, and no account exists and no address is kept, hashed or otherwise.

Your browser keeps one thing of its own: a single entry naming the pairings you have answered and which of the two you picked, plus today’s date, today’s round (each pair, your pick and the split you were shown for it) and the run of days you have played. It never leaves the browser. The page is handed several pairings at a time and picks one you have not answered yet, so we are never told which ones those are and could not tell you if you asked. No cookie either, and that distinction is real rather than a dodge: a cookie rides along with every request to the server, this rides along with nothing.

It is there for three reasons. It holds a browser to one round a day and counts the run of days. Coming back to the page gives you your own answers instead of a blank slate. And you are not shown the same two faces while pairings you have never seen are waiting.

The daily round and the run live in that entry and nowhere else, which makes it a courtesy rather than a lock. Clear your site data, or open the page in another browser, and there is another vote waiting; we know, and we accept it rather than overlook it. Clearing the data also takes your answers with it, with nothing lost that we could put back, because we never had it. What the privacy policy promises holds on our side: a vote reaches us as a winner, a loser and a time, and nothing in it says who sent it, so we cannot tell your sixth vote of the day from somebody else’s first. The defence is the batch recompute rather than a fingerprint.

Who you are choosing between

Everyone in Profiles was written by us and every face was generated. No character depicts, is modelled on or is named after a real person, and nobody here is offered or available for anything. That is the appeal of the format rather than the small print underneath it: a list of who wins, with nobody on the receiving end of losing.