How inputresponse works

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Nine questions at nine. Three lives. Everyone in your city, at the same moment.

Why this exists

A city used to have things everybody did at the same time: a paper, a broadcast, a match on a Saturday. Most of that has gone, and what replaced it is a feed that is never the same for two people and never finishes.

This is one thing a whole city does at once. The same nine questions at nine o'clock, for everybody in the same place, and then it is over for the night. No feed, no endless scroll, and nothing in your copy that is different from your neighbour's.

It is free, and it stays free. There is no entry fee, there never will be, and there is nothing to buy that would help you win.

The round

At nine o'clock local time the questions begin, whether you are ready or not. There are nine, one after another, ten seconds each. Three lives. A wrong answer costs one, and so does a question you never answer. At zero you are out for the night — but only for that night. You can try again the next day, and you start it with all three lives.

Three kinds of question, then the bonus question

The first three are reachable. Two options, nothing specialist, so nobody is knocked out early feeling stupid.

The middle three are graded. "In what year did this happen?" — and you are scored on how close you got. Get inside the tolerance and you keep your life. This is where the near miss lives.

The last three are the decider. One right answer each, and a source shown for every one of them.

Then the tenth: the bonus question. Survive the nine and you are asked one thing about your own city that nobody from anywhere else can answer. Get it right and you take the city standing. It never costs a life, so it can never be the thing that puts you out — it only decides who wins.

The bonus question

The bonus question is the tenth, and it is what decides who takes a city standing. It is about your own city, and it is the kind of thing you know because you live there rather than because you looked it up. Anyone, anywhere, can survive the nine — none of the nine depend on where you are.

So nothing checks which city you are playing for, and nothing needs to. Claiming a city you do not know is not cheating your way onto a board, it is handing the title to whoever does know it. Picking your own city is not a rule you are obeying. It is your advantage.

You can play the nine from anywhere, in any of the 34,000 cities the game knows, and every city plays at nine o'clock its own time. Name one when you want a board to stand on, and that is all declaring it takes.

What we know about you

Very little, on purpose. No account, no email, no password. You get a random id in a cookie so the game can remember your lives between questions. No location permission is requested, no coordinate is ever stored, and no IP address is kept — not even to rate limit you, which is done on a value that is hashed and thrown away with the process.

If you pick a city we keep the city, because that is the board you play for. Nothing else about where you are.

You can delete your whole record in one tap, and it is gone: your nights, your finishes, your closest-ever.

Scripts and bots

A script could answer every question correctly and take a city title that a person earned. So the game is built against it: the server owns the clock, an answer cannot be sent before its question opens, a question is never sent with its answer attached, identical answers are refused, and the number of requests one address can make is capped. None of that is hidden from you.

What actually costs a script is the clock. A question is not sent until its own ten seconds begin, and the answer has to arrive inside them — early is refused, late is refused, and a second attempt is refused. So any lookup has to happen inside the same ten seconds a person gets. The clock is the defence here, and it is the only one worth claiming.

The bonus question is not that defence, and it is not offered as one. A script knows which city it declared, so it can read about that city as easily as anything else. What the bonus question does is make a city board mean a place rather than a scoreboard: you have to know the city you claimed, or you hand the title to somebody who does.

The reminder

A round that starts at nine whether you are ready or not only becomes a habit if something tells you it is nine. So you can ask the browser for one notification a night, and nothing else ever.

There is no email address, no account and no phone number behind it. The notification is a browser subscription, and the message carries no personal data at all — the push itself is empty, and the wording is put together on your own device.

Turning reminders off deletes the subscription we hold. There is nothing else to stop, and no list to be quietly kept on.

Stopping

Stopping takes one tap and it happens immediately. There is no re-engagement, no reminder, no win-back email, and no "are you sure?" maze. Most apps lie about this. This one does not.

Stop playing and nothing follows you: no reminder, no email, no nudge back. And nothing is deleted for going quiet either — your record is there when you come back, for as long as you want it, and deleting it is one tap whenever you decide.

Money

inputresponse is free to play and there is no entry fee, ever. That is deliberate: charging at the door changes what a game is, and it would stop this one being something anyone can simply walk into.

It is meant to be paid for by a local sponsor and by advertising on the results screen, never in the middle of a round. Neither is running yet — there is no sponsor and no advertising on this site today, and this page will say so until there is. If you run a business in a city that plays, a night is available: sponsor@inputresponse.com.

Where the questions come from

Public statistics, public datasets, and questions submitted by players. Every answer shows the authority it came from. If a question is ever disputed, it is withdrawn rather than argued about.

Credits

The catalogue of cities is derived from the GeoNames cities15000 dataset, used under a Creative Commons Attribution licence. We use it to turn a typed city name into a real place with a real nine o'clock, and nothing else.

Back to the game

What inputresponse records

One identifier, the record of the nights you played, and a declared city if you play for one. No account, no email, no password. Nothing reads your device to work out where you are — and the only thing on the record about place is what you typed into it.

Last updated 14 September 2026. This page describes what the site actually does, written to match the code rather than to sound reassuring.

Every cookie, and everything else stored

Four things, in total. If a fifth ever appears it will be listed here before it is used.

The two Google cookies are set by Google, not by this site, and are governed by Google's own privacy policy. They last up to two years unless you clear them. Withdrawing the permission is the Cookie settings control in the footer: moving the switch there ends it at once, and clearing cookies in your browser removes them entirely.

There is nothing else. No advertising cookie, no tracking pixel, no social widget, no other third-party script of any kind — with one exception, and it is not one this site adds or can remove from here: Cloudflare, which serves these pages, injects a small script into every one of them that hides the two email addresses on this site from address harvesters. Its only job is to decode an address when a reader clicks one, and it stores nothing. If advertising is ever added it will be a fifth entry in this list, and it will need its own permission — analytics consent will not be stretched to cover it, and nothing advertising-related will run on the strength of the choice you have already made.

The one cookie this site needs

When you first open inputresponse the server puts a random identifier in a cookie called standing_pid. It is signed and HTTP-only, which means the page's own scripts cannot read it and nobody can invent one. It is the only way the game can remember anything, because there is no account to log into.

Held against that identifier: a declared city if you play for one, a display name if you chose one, how many nights you have played, your best finish, the closest you have ever come, and a record of each answer you gave — so the near-miss card can be worked out from real events rather than a counter that might be wrong.

It exists for no other purpose. It is not sold, not shared, not matched against anything else, and not used to advertise to you. It expires after about thirteen months of not being used, and Delete my record in the game's footer removes everything at once, including the identifier.

What is never recorded

Nothing is read from your device. No location permission is ever requested, no coordinate is ever stored, and the nearest cities you are shown are worked out from the city you typed, not from where you are. Nothing is kept about your connection. No IP address is written to the record. Rate limiting uses a value that is hashed in memory and thrown away when the process restarts, so even the flood protection keeps nothing. Nothing finer than what you typed. A declared city if you play for one — that is the whole of it. None of it was read from a device, and none of it is used to work out where you are.

No email, no password, no phone number, no real name. The only name stored is one you type yourself, and it is optional. There is no mailing list to be on and no re-engagement message of any kind.

Analytics, and your choice

Counting visits is optional here, and the choice is genuinely yours. Google Analytics is not loaded at all until you allow it: no request is made to Google, no cookie is set, and nothing is counted. If you decline, that is remembered and you are not asked again — the banner does not return on the next page or the next visit.

If you allow it, Google Analytics records the pages visited, roughly where the visit came from, the kind of device used, which controls are pressed and how far down a page is read, against an identifier Google sets. It never receives what anyone types — not an answer, not a city, not a name, and no form field is read. It is used to see which parts of the game people reach and which they abandon. You can change your mind at any time with Cookie settings in the footer, and the change takes effect immediately.

Google's handling of that data is governed by Google's own privacy policy. If you want to be left out of Google's measurement across every site, not just this one, install the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on.

Advertising, when it runs

inputresponse is free to play, with no entry fee and no prize that costs money, and it is paid for by a sponsor and by advertising on the results screen — never in the middle of a round. Advertising is not running at the moment. This section describes what will apply when it does, and it will be true on the day it does.

When advertising runs it will be served by Google. Google and its partners may set cookies or read device identifiers to decide which ad to show, and may show ads based on your interests. You can turn personalised advertising off at Google Ads Settings, and you can see and control what other companies do at aboutads.info and youronlinechoices.com. Advertising cookies are set by Google, not by this site, and they will be subject to the same permission rule as analytics: nothing advertising-related runs before you allow it.

Under California law — the California Consumer Privacy Act, as amended — a person has the right to know what is collected, to have it deleted, and to say no to the selling or sharing of personal information. This site does not sell anything about you to anyone. Where personalised advertising begins, that counts as "sharing" under the Act, and the Cookie settings control in the footer is how you refuse it.

Your rights, and how to use them

If you are in the European Union, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Brazil, Quebec or California, you have rights over what is held about you: to be told what it is, to have it corrected, to have it erased, to object to it being used, and to receive a copy. A complaint can be made to your national data protection authority or, in Canada, to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner.

Here is the useful part: erasure and objection are already one tap, without asking anyone. Delete my record in the game's footer erases everything held against your identifier, permanently and immediately. Turning reminders off, on the front page, stops all notifications and reminders. Cookie settings withdraws permission to be counted. These are not requests that get processed later; they happen when you press them.

Children

This site is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly hold anything about them. There is no account, no email address and no way to contact a child through it. If a record was made by a child, deleting it takes one tap and removes it entirely.

Who is responsible, and changes to this page

inputresponse is run by one person, George Fielder, who decides what happens to the data described here and who is the controller for the purpose of the European rules. There is no company behind it, no staff, and no analytics or marketing agency with access to anything.

Who is in charge of your information

Person in charge of the protection of personal information: George Fielder. He decides why any of it is held and what happens to it, and he is the person to write to about anything on this page — to see what is held, to correct it, to withdraw a permission, or to complain. Contact: privacy@inputresponse.com.

This paragraph is here because Quebec law requires an address, not because the answer is different anywhere else: there is one person running this, so the person who answers is the same one either way.

One thing leaves the country, and only if you allow it. Nothing is transferred anywhere unless you accept analytics — the choice is real and declining means no request at all. If you do accept, the pages you visit are measured by Google, whose servers may be in the United States, and that is a transfer of information outside Quebec and outside Canada. The assessment that rule asks for was made on that basis, and the answer was to keep the transfer optional rather than to make it a condition of playing.

If this page changes, the date at the top changes with it, and the change is written plainly rather than tucked into the wording. Anything that would widen what is collected will be announced on the game page before it takes effect.