How inputresponse works
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 use a postal code we keep three characters of it, so the game knows which board you are on. If you pick a city we keep the city. 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 it off, or opting out, deletes the subscription we hold. There is nothing else to stop, and no list to be quietly kept on.
Stopping
Opting out stops everything immediately and permanently. 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 paid for by a local sponsor and by advertising on the results screen, never in the middle of a round.
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
Postal regions are derived from the GeoNames postal code dataset, used under a Creative Commons Attribution licence. We use it to turn a postal code into a city name, and nothing else.