Privacy

This site adds no advertising trackers, third-party fonts or embedded social widgets. The published pages load no stylesheets or fonts from any external host, and the only script they load from elsewhere is the visitor-count script described below. Search runs in your browser against an index served from this site, so a query is not sent anywhere to be answered.

There are no accounts, no submission forms and no comment system. Neither the server nor the visitor-count script sets cookies, and the pages write nothing to your browser’s local storage, session storage or IndexedDB. Apart from that one script, species pages ship no executable JavaScript.

Visits are counted with Plausible, open-source analytics software that uses no cookies. It runs on a server operated by this site’s owner, at stats.priceguide.co.uk, and not by Plausible or any other company, so the counts are not shared with a third party.

Each page view sends that server the page address, the referring page and the width of your screen. The request also carries your IP address and your browser’s identification string, as every web request does. Neither is stored. They are combined with the site name and a random value that is replaced every 24 hours, and only the resulting one-way hash is kept. That lets a visitor be counted once within a day, but not recognised from one day to the next. The IP address is also used to look up a country, and the country is stored; the address is not.

The script also records clicks on links that leave this site and downloads of files, as the address of the link. It does not see what you type into search, which never leaves your browser. The stored counts are aggregate statistics: visitors, pages, referrers, countries, browsers and devices.

Nothing beyond the visitor counts above. The application that serves these pages writes no request log: it records only its own start-up messages. The reverse proxy in front of it is configured without access logging, so it keeps no per-request record either, and its own operational log holds proxy diagnostics rather than visitor activity.

That is a statement about this origin server, checked against its configuration rather than assumed. It is not a claim about the network between you and it.

These pages are delivered through Cloudflare, which terminates the TLS connection. Any content delivery network in that position necessarily processes requests, including the requesting IP address, and it does so under its own privacy terms rather than this site’s. Nothing on this page should be read as describing what Cloudflare retains, because that is not ours to state.

One effect of that arrangement is worth naming rather than leaving for a reader to discover in the response headers. Cloudflare adds Network Error Logging headers to responses from this site. They ask your browser to remember, for seven days, an instruction to report failed requests to an endpoint Cloudflare operates, with successful requests not sampled. Those reports go to Cloudflare and not to this site, and the pages themselves cannot switch the behaviour off.

This section will be updated if that arrangement changes. It is deliberately specific about who holds what, because a privacy page that says only "we respect your privacy" tells a reader nothing they can check.