Privacy Policy

Iron Realms records a great deal about how this website and this game are used, and sells none of it. This page says exactly what is stored, why, and how to get rid of it.

Effective 27 August 2026. If this changes materially, this date changes and a notice goes up in the game.

What changed on 24 August 2026. Until then this page said that no cookie was set, no identifier was stored and no IP address was recorded on this website, and that was true of the code that was running. It is no longer true of the code that is running. The site now sets a cookie, records the visit, and links it to your account where there is one — and the sentences that said otherwise were rewritten in the same change that made them false, here and on every other page of this site that repeated them.

What changed on 25 August 2026. This section used to say a consent banner for EU/UK visitors was planned and did not exist yet. It now exists — see what it does below.

What changed on 27 August 2026. This page said in three places that there was no third-party analytics anywhere in this project. That was true of this website and false of the game: the game client at /play had, all along, been loading Vercel Web Analytics and Vercel Speed Insights the moment it started. Both are now held behind the same consent switch as everything else here, and they are named and described under The two measurements that are not ours. The sentences that overclaimed were rewritten rather than quietly narrowed.

The short version

We store your email so you can sign in, a one-way hash of your password so we never hold the password itself, and your game progress so it follows you between devices. Your keep's position, power, name and house are visible to other players — that is the game. Nothing is sold, rented, or handed to advertisers.

We also run analytics on this website, and they are not the light kind. Every page load is recorded, the loads are tied together by a cookie so we can follow one reader across visits, and while you are signed in they are recorded against your account. That is described in full under What this website records about your visit. It is our own code writing to our own database, and there is no advertising SDK and no ad-network pixel anywhere in this project — but it is tracking, and this page is not going to call it anything else. Crash reports likewise go to our own server, not a third party. The game additionally reports two measurements to our host, Vercel; they are named and described under The two measurements that are not ours, and they are held behind the same consent switch as the rest.

What we store, and why

If you register an account

• Your email address. It identifies your account and is the only way to recover it. It is never shown to other players — the forum and chat use your display name.
• A scrypt hash of your password, plus a random salt. Not the password. We cannot read it, tell it to you, or recover it; we can only reset it.
• A session token. A random opaque string proving this device is signed in, kept in your browser's local storage and expiring after 30 days. It is not the analytics cookie described below and it is not sent to anyone else — but while it is present the two are joined up, and the pages you read on this website are recorded against your account rather than against an anonymous browser.
• Your display name, house and kingdom. Chosen by you, shown to other players.
• Your saved game. Buildings, troops, research, inventory and progress, so the same realm loads on your phone and your laptop.

Because it is a shared world

• Your keep. Its map position, power, level, garrison and stored resources are visible to other players in your kingdom. Rival lords can scout and attack it. That visibility is the game, not a leak.
• Battle records. Raids, marches, rallies and their outcomes, so both sides can read the same report.
• Messages you send. Kingdom chat, alliance chat and forum posts, kept so the conversation persists and so moderators can act on reports. Kingdom chat is also published on this website — see Where your messages go.

Automatically

• Crash reports. When the game throws an error it POSTs the error, a short trail of recent in-game actions, and the app version to our own server. No page contents, no keystrokes, no third party.
• Server logs. Our host (Vercel) records request metadata including IP addresses, as any web server does, for security and abuse prevention.
• Two measurements inside the game. Page views and load speed in the app at /play are reported to Vercel Web Analytics and Vercel Speed Insights — the only third-party measurement in the project, behind the same consent switch as everything else. See The two measurements that are not ours.
• Every page of this website you open. With a cookie, your IP address, your device, where you came from and, when you are signed in, your account. This is the largest single thing on this page and it has a section of its own: What this website records about your visit.

Where your messages go

Kingdom chat is public, and it is published outside the game. The kingdom channel is broadcast to every lord in your kingdom, and it is also shown on this website — at the Great Hall — where anyone can read it live without an account. Your display name is shown beside what you said; your email address never is.

That page is indexed by search engines. A line you type in kingdom chat may therefore appear in search results, and may be copied, quoted or cached by third parties — search engines, link previews, archives — that we neither control nor can compel to forget it. Treat kingdom chat the way you would treat a post on a public forum, because that is what it now is.

Direct messages and alliance chat are not published. They do not appear on that page, they are not in any public feed, and no unauthenticated request to our servers can read them. Only the shard-wide kingdom channel is made public.

Moderators remove chat lines that break the rules, and removal deletes the line outright — it disappears from the game and from the website together, within a minute or so of a shared cache expiring. What we cannot do is remove it from someone else's search index, archive or screenshot. That is the part that cannot be undone, and it is the reason this section exists.

Forum posts are public in the same way and always have been: readable without an account, and indexed.

Comments under a page of this website are public in exactly the same way. When you comment on a guide, a fan page or the FAQ, we store what you wrote, the display name on your account, your account id and the time — against that page, for as long as the comment is up. It is readable by anyone with the address, with no account needed to read it, and it is indexed like any other text on the page. The same warning as kingdom chat applies and for the same reason: we can take a comment down, and we cannot take it out of somebody else's search index or screenshot.

Reading a page does not comment on it and does not need an account. Nothing about a comment section is recorded until you write one and press the button.

What this website records about your visit

Every page on this site loads one small script of ours, which asks our own server for the site notice. That request now also records the visit, in detail. This section sets out what “in detail” means, because a policy that describes tracking in the abstract is not a policy anybody can check.

Why we do it. This site used to store a handful of daily totals and nothing else, which meant it could say how many times a page was opened and almost nothing else. It could not say whether the people reading the guides were the people who went on to build a keep, whether a reader who arrives from a search comes back, or which of two versions of a page actually did the work. Those are the questions the project has, they are questions about people rather than page loads, and answering them needs data about people. So that is what is now collected.

What is recorded, on every page load:

• A cookie. First-party, set by our own server, holding a random identifier and nothing else. It is what lets two page loads a week apart be recognised as the same browser. It lasts two years, and clearing your browser’s cookies clears it — after which you are recorded as a new browser rather than as nobody.
• Your IP address. Stored with the visit, and used to work out an approximate location — the country, region and city the address is registered to, which is frequently not the place you are sitting in.
• Your browser and your device. The User-Agent string as your browser sent it, kept whole, plus what we read out of it: browser and version, operating system, and whether the thing asking is a phone, a tablet, a desktop or a crawler.
• Your screen and your settings. Screen and window size, the language your browser asks for, and the time zone it reports.
• Where you came from. The referring address in full rather than a coarse bucket, and any campaign parameters on the link you followed (utm_source and the rest of that family).
• What you read, in order. Every page you open, with a timestamp, so a visit is a path through the site rather than a pile of unrelated loads.
• Who you are, when we know. If you are signed in to Iron Realms, the visit is recorded against your account.

The parts of that worth reading twice. The cookie outlives the sign-in, so visits you made before you had an account are joined to it once you have one: the site can tell that the lord who registered on a Tuesday had read four guides and two fan quizzes over the previous weekend, and it does. And these are visitors now, not views — a visitor count, a returning-reader figure and a session are all things this data can honestly produce, where the previous version of this system could produce none of them. That is the point of the change, and it is also the cost of it.

What it is used for. Understanding how the site and the game are found, read and played, and deciding what to build and write next. It is not used to target advertising, because there is no advertising here. It is not sold, rented or shared — see What we do not do.

How long it is kept. Individual visit records — the rows carrying the cookie, the IP address and the User-Agent — are kept for 400 days — about thirteen months — and then deleted. Totals derived from them, which carry no identifier, are kept indefinitely, because a chart of last year’s traffic is worth having and contains nothing about anybody.

None of what is described above goes to a third party. There is no Google Analytics, no Meta pixel, no tag manager and no advertising SDK on any page of this site; that collection is our own code writing to our own database on our own host. That limits who holds the data. It does not make the data smaller, and this page will not use it to imply otherwise. Two measurements inside the game do go somewhere else, and they are the next section.

What you can do about it. Clearing or blocking cookies for this site removes the identifier, and the site then treats you as a browser it has not seen before.

If our host's geo lookup places you in the EU or the UK, the first page you load asks before any of this starts: a banner offers Accept or Decline, and everything above — the visitor cookie, the event log, the beacon — stays off until you accept it. Only an actual click is remembered: Accept or Decline is stored in a separate small cookie (ir_consent, holding nothing but that one word and kept about six months) so you are not asked again on every visit. Closing the tab or otherwise leaving without clicking either button remembers nothing, and you are asked again next time — the same as a stale answer once the six months run out. There is still no button that stops a single request already in flight from being logged in a raw server log — see Server logs above, which belong to our host and are unaffected by this switch either way — but no visit is added to traffic_events, no cookie identifies you across pages, and no beacon is sent, until you say yes.

Changing your answer. Accepting is not a one-way door. The manage your analytics answer link on this page clears the stored cookie and reloads it, so the banner is due again on your very next page — the same one click either way. If your browser has JavaScript disabled, clearing this site's cookies by hand does the same thing.

Everywhere else, there is still no opt-out switch on the site: the cookie is set on the first page you load, exactly as described above. If you want your records removed, ask (see Your rights) and we will delete them by hand.

The two measurements that are not ours

The game itself — the app at /play, not the pages of this website — reports to two products run by Vercel, the company that hosts us:

• Vercel Web Analytics. Counts page views inside the game. It sets no cookie and stores nothing on your device; instead it works out whether two views came from the same person by taking a hash of things your browser sends anyway — your IP address, your User-Agent and similar — on Vercel's servers. That is not a cookie, and it is also not anonymous: a hash of your address and your browser is an identifier for you, computed by somebody other than us. Calling it “cookieless” and stopping there would be exactly the kind of half-sentence this page exists to avoid.
• Vercel Speed Insights. Reports how fast the game loaded and responded — the standard web performance measurements, with the screen or route they were measured on and coarse device information. It is about the software, not about you, but it travels on the same request and reaches the same third party.

Neither one is used for advertising, neither is sold, and neither is joined to your account by us. They exist to answer “is the game fast enough, and is anyone playing it”.

They obey the same switch as everything else on this page. If our host's geo lookup places you in the EU or the UK, they do not run until you have clicked Accept — and because that answer is stored on this domain, the click you made on this website is the one the game reads. Declining, or simply never answering, leaves both of them unloaded: the game never downloads their code at all. If the game cannot reach our server to ask, it treats that as a no.

This section is new, and it is a correction rather than a new practice. Vercel Web Analytics and Vercel Speed Insights ran unconditionally in the game from the day they were added, while this page said in three places that no third-party analytics existed anywhere in the project. The code was changed to match the promise, and the promise was rewritten to describe what is left.

What we do not do

We do not sell or rent your data. We do not share it with advertisers or data brokers. We do not embed advertising code anywhere, and the only third-party measurement in the project is the pair described under The two measurements that are not ours — nobody else receives any of this. We do not follow you onto other websites: the cookie is first-party, it is readable only on this domain, and there is no ad network here to join it to anything.

What we do do is above, and this section is not a hedge against it. We build a picture of what you read on this site across visits, and where you have an account, that picture has your name on it.

Playing without an account

You can play offline from the landing screen. Your realm is then stored only in your own browser and never reaches us — no email, no account, no server copy of the save. If you later register, that local progress is carried up to your new account. The exemption is the save file, not the visit: opening the page is recorded like any other page load, as described above.

Children

Iron Realms is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect data from them. If you believe a child has created an account, message lordking_uhtred on Discord and we will delete it. Some regions set that age higher — where local law requires a higher minimum, that minimum applies.

Your rights

Wherever you live, you can get a copy of your data, correct it, or have it erased. Under the GDPR (Europe/UK) and the CCPA (California) these are legal rights; we extend the same handling to everyone because maintaining two standards is how mistakes happen.

• See it. Sign in and request an export — the game returns everything tied to your account as a single JSON file, the recorded visits included: every column of every visit row, the IP address and the User-Agent among them, because they are yours. If you hold more visit records than one file sensibly carries, the file says so and gives you their number.
• Delete it. Deleting your account removes your login, your save, your keep, your battle records and your sessions, and unlinks every visit record from you, so no visit is held against your account any longer — the row itself then ages out on the 400-day retention above, carrying nobody's name. Messages you posted publicly are unlinked from you rather than removed, so conversations other players took part in stay readable — the same way a deleted forum account leaves the thread intact.
• Delete it without an account. If you have never registered, the visits recorded against your browser are still yours. Message us with the identifier — it is in the ir_vid cookie, which your browser will show you — and we will delete every row carrying it.
• Ask a human. Message lordking_uhtred on Discord and we will do it by hand.

How long we keep things

Account data lives until you delete the account. Session tokens expire after 30 days. Individual visit records are kept 400 days — about thirteen months — and then deleted; the identifier-free totals derived from them are kept indefinitely. Crash reports are kept while they are useful for fixing the bug and then discarded. Deleting your account takes effect immediately, not after a grace period.

Security

Passwords are hashed with scrypt and a per-account salt, so a stolen database does not yield passwords. Sign-in comparisons are constant-time, so an attacker cannot learn anything from how long a failure takes. Traffic is HTTPS end to end. Administrative endpoints are disabled unless an admin key is configured, and fail closed if it is not.

No system is perfect. If you find a vulnerability, please report it privately to lordking_uhtred on Discord before disclosing it publicly, and we will credit you.

Where your data is

The game runs on Vercel's infrastructure, with the database in the United States. If you play from outside the US, your data is processed there.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that matters, the effective date above changes and the game shows a notice. We will not quietly widen what we collect.

The change of 24 August 2026 is that promise being used rather than broken. What is collected widened a very long way; the date moved, this page was rewritten rather than patched, and the roughly sixty other pages on this site that repeated the old “no cookie, no tracking” line were rewritten in the same change, because a promise that only holds on the page nobody reads is not a promise.

Contact

Questions, requests, or corrections: Discord — lordking_uhtred.

This policy describes the system honestly and specifically, but it is not legal advice and its authors are not your lawyers.