Privacy

This site keeps its own statistics rather than using an advertising or tracking platform. They have one purpose: to show which pages help people and which need work, so the site can be improved.

Site statistics

Unless you turn them off, each page reports to our own server:

• the page you viewed, its title and the time;
• how long the page was on screen and in use, and how far down you scrolled;
• the site or search engine that sent you, as a site name only, and any campaign tags in the link;
• the type of device, browser and operating system, worked out from what your browser sends and then discarded;
• the width of the browser window, in broad bands;
• your browser's language setting, and its time zone, which gives a country without looking up an IP address;
• whether this browser has visited before, roughly how many times, and whether it has already been counted today;
• clicks on retailer links, the names of other sites you follow links to, and printing a page.

To do that, your browser stores a random visit key that expires after 30 minutes without activity, and a note of whether it has visited before and on which day it was last counted. Nothing lasts from one visit to the next that could identify you.

What is never recorded

IP addresses, precise location, form contents, anything you type, full browser strings and fingerprints are not stored. Nothing is used for advertising, and nothing is shared with or sold to anyone.

How long it is kept

Each visit is kept as its own record only until its day is over. The day is then added into totals, such as views per page and visits per country, and the individual records are deleted. The totals contain no visit key and nothing about any one person.

Your choice

UK law allows a site to store information in your browser without asking first when it is used only for statistics about how the site is used, to improve it, as long as you are told and can object. We rely on that, and on our legitimate interest in improving the site. You can turn statistics off at any time with the cookie settings link at the foot of every page. That stops the reports straight away and removes what was stored in your browser.

Searches

What you ask the stain finder is recorded as a combination, for example coffee on cotton, so we know which pages to research next. It is not connected to you.

Statcounter

If you choose Also allow Statcounter in cookie settings, this site also loads Statcounter, a third party visitor counting service. It records visits, pages and referring sites under its own privacy policy, and it sets its own cookies. It is not loaded at all unless you have allowed it.

Counting page loads

Whether or not statistics are on, our own server counts how many times each page was loaded on each day. The whole record is a page address, a date and a number.

That count contains no identifier, no cookie, no IP address, no browser string and no referrer, so there is no way to work back from it to a person or to link two page loads together. It is what tells us which guides are worth expanding and which are not being found.

We do look at the browser identification string while the page is being built, to leave search engine crawlers out of the count, and it is never stored.