Privacy
This page describes what Fictopedia does today, not what it might do one day, and not what a longer document would let us imply. If something here stops being true, the page changes with it.
Last updated: 14 August 2026
What Fictopedia is
Fictopedia is an encyclopedia of things that don’t exist. People write articles about invented worlds and collect them into universes. Reading a public universe needs no account at all; you can arrive from a search engine, read, follow links, and leave without ever telling us who you are.
Writing needs an account. Universes are public by default: anything you create here can be read by anyone on the internet, and its articles can appear on the homepage, in search results here, and through Random Article. Public universes are also openly editable: any signed-in person can add or improve articles in one, including yours.
Members can make a universe they own private. A private universe is taken out of search, the homepage, Random Article, and the sitemap, and only the account that owns it and the people that account has added can read it or write in it. Turning a universe public again never needs a membership. Everywhere else on this page, what is said about writing being public describes a universe that is public, which every universe is unless its owner has chosen otherwise.
Your account
Signing up asks for three things: a display name, an email address, and a password. Accounts are handled by the third-party authentication and database service Fictopedia runs on. Your email address lives in that service’s authentication records; your display name is copied into a profile row attached to your user id.
Your display name is public. It is shown to everyone, signed in or not, on articles you write by hand, in the line described under “What you write” below. That is the only place it appears, and it is the only part of your account anybody else can see: your email address is never shown to another person or published anywhere on the site. You can change it whenever you like, from your account page, and the new name replaces the old one everywhere it is shown.
No two accounts can hold the same display name. Names are compared ignoring capitals and spacing, so a name that differs from an existing one only in how it is capitalised or spaced counts as the same name and cannot be taken. A short list of names that would read as coming from Fictopedia itself, rather than from a person, is kept aside and cannot be taken by any account either. If the one you want is unavailable for any of those reasons, the form says so and asks for another.
They are used to sign you in, to send you the confirmation and account emails that signing in requires, and to attribute the work you create to you. There is no newsletter, no marketing email, and no sale or sharing of your address with anyone. Fictopedia’s own code never stores your password. It is passed straight to that authentication service and handled there.
The sign-up and log-in forms may show a short automated check that you are a person rather than a script. When it is switched on, that check is run by a third-party anti-abuse service and Fictopedia receives nothing from it except a one-time token, which is passed to the authentication service to be verified and then discarded. It is not used to identify you, is not stored, and is not connected to anything you write here.
Children. Fictopedia is not directed to children under 13, and you have to be 13 or older to have an account, as the Terms say. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. We do not ask anyone for a date of birth, because collecting one would mean holding more personal information about everybody, not less. If we learn that an account belongs to a child under 13, we remove it.
What you write
Universes and articles are stored in Fictopedia’s database with your account id recorded as their owner, author, and last editor. Everything in a public universe is readable by anyone, signed in or not. Writing is wider than it used to be: any signed-in person can create and edit articles in any public universe, so an article you started may be extended or rewritten by someone else. What stays yours is the universe itself: only the account that created a universe can change its name and description or whether it is private, and only that account (or an editor it has added) can delete an article. Every one of those rules is enforced by the database itself on every query, not by the pages that display it.
Every change to an article’s title, summary, or body is kept as a complete snapshot in an immutable revision history, written by the database rather than by the application, and recorded against the account that made it. Revisions can be read by anyone who can read the article, and they cannot be edited or deleted through the app, so an edit is a permanent part of that article’s public record. The history pages show what changed and when; they do not display who made a change. Deleting an article deletes its revisions with it.
Each article page also carries one short line of provenance, and it is the one place on Fictopedia where an account is named to other people. An article somebody wrote by hand names the account that started it, by that account’s display name. An article that was drafted with AI names nobody, ever: the account that asked for a draft did not write it, so it is not credited as the author. Everyone sees the same line, signed in or not.
The rest of that line is a count. When accounts other than the one that started an article have revised it, the line says how many of them there are and links to the revision history so anyone can check the number. Those contributors are never named, and the history pages still do not display who made a change. No account id and no email address appears anywhere on either. If the account that started an article no longer exists, or has never set a display name, the line says how the article was made and names nobody.
Unless you have made a universe private, please treat everything you write here as public writing that other people may build on. Fictional worlds are still written by real people, and this is not the place for anything you would not want read, or edited.
Automated screening
Text you write by hand is checked by an automated screening service before it is published. This applies to articles you create, edit, or restore from an earlier version, to the names and descriptions you give universes, and to your display name, both when you sign up and every time you change it. The text is sent to that service for that one purpose, and for nothing else: it is not used to build a profile of you, it is not kept by Fictopedia, and it is not attached to your account anywhere in the request.
There are two possible outcomes. Almost everything is simply published. A very small amount of content is declined, in which case nothing is saved and you see a short message saying so. In between, a contribution may be held for review, which does not delay or change anything you see: the article is published normally and a note is added to a private queue so a person can read it.
That note records the article and a short list of category names only, such as “violence”. It never stores a score, a rating, an excerpt of what you wrote, or anything about who wrote it. Readers are never shown that a review note exists, and nothing about your article changes because of one.
A display name can be held for review too. If yours is, it is published and shown normally, exactly as an article would be, and a note is added to the same private queue so a person can read it. A note about a name records the account and a short list of category names, and never the name itself: whoever reviews it looks at the name your account has at that moment. A universe name or description is still the exception, and can only be published or declined, with nothing in between. A declined name is not saved and you are asked for a different one.
If a person decides a display name cannot stay, they can replace it with a plain placeholder such as “Member” followed by a few random characters. Nothing else about the account changes: it keeps its articles, its universes, and everything else, and it can choose a new name straight away from its account page. The replaced name is not kept anywhere.
Fictopedia is a site about invented worlds, and the checks are tuned for that: fiction contains conflict, cruelty, and death, and writing about those things well is not a reason to refuse anyone. If the screening service cannot be reached, contributions are published as normal rather than blocked. Text that Fictopedia’s AI writes for you is not screened here; it is produced under the AI provider’s own safety systems.
Reporting an article
Every article page carries a small “Report this article” control for signed-in readers. Reporting requires an account, and there is a limit on how many reports one account can send in a day.
A report stores four things: which article it is about, the account id of the person who sent it, which of four fixed reasons they chose, and an optional note of up to 500 characters if they wrote one. It stores no IP address, no browser or device information, and no copy of the article.
Reports are readable only by site administration. The person who sent one cannot read it back, and the author of the reported article is never told who reported it or that a report exists.
Moderation
Fictopedia has a small number of administrator accounts. They can read the report and review queues described above, remove an article, replace a display name that has been flagged for review, and suspend an account so it can no longer sign in. Those powers are used as described in the Terms.
Administrator access is not something anybody can grant themselves or request through the site: it is set directly in the database by whoever operates Fictopedia. Removing an article also removes its revision history, and that cannot be undone from within the site. Suspending an account does not delete or hide what that account already wrote. Replacing a display name changes only that name, and an account can only be reached that way if its name is already in the review queue described above.
Analytics
Fictopedia measures how the product is used with a third-party product analytics service, and does it on the narrowest setting the tool has. There is no autocapture: nothing is recorded merely because you clicked or scrolled. Instead the code sends a small, fixed list of named events: an account was created, a universe was created, an article was created, edited, or viewed, a link inside an article was followed.
- No session replay. Your screen, typing, and mouse are never recorded. Session recording is turned off in code.
- No automatic pageview, pageleave, or performance capture. Only the explicit events listed above are sent.
- No IP or location enrichment. Every event, from both the browser and the server, is stamped so that the analytics service does not attach your IP address, city, region, postal code, or coordinates. This is enforced in Fictopedia’s own code, not only by a setting in that service’s dashboard.
- No prose, ever. Events carry stable identifiers (a universe id, an article id, your account id once you are signed in) and fixed categorical values such as whether a universe is public or private, or whether an article was written by hand or by AI. Article titles, summaries, bodies, AI instructions, universe names, display names, and email addresses are blocked from analytics by a guard that inspects every payload before it is sent.
- Searches are not measured at all. What you type into the search box is never sent anywhere except the query that answers it. There is no search event.
- Anonymous readers are not profiled. The analytics service is configured to build a person profile only after an account signs in, and only ever from the account’s id, never from an email address or a name. Signing out resets that identity in your browser.
Analytics is optional infrastructure: when that service is not configured for an installation of Fictopedia, nothing is sent at all and the site works exactly the same.
AI article generation
Signed-in creators can ask Fictopedia to draft an article. When you do, your instruction is sent to our third-party AI model provider, together with a strictly bounded slice of context from the universe you are writing in (its name and description, and short excerpts from a limited number of its existing articles), so the draft fits the world you have already built. That is what the model needs to write the article, and it is sent for no other purpose. Generation happens only when you ask for it.
The draft comes back and is saved as an ordinary article in that universe, public and openly editable like everything else there unless the universe is private. Alongside it, Fictopedia keeps an accounting record of the request so it can enforce fair usage limits. That record holds operational metadata only: which account and universe asked, what kind of generation it was, whether it succeeded, how long it took, how many tokens it used, the provider and model identifiers, and (if it failed) one of a fixed set of short failure codes. Your instruction, the assembled prompt, the universe context, the generated text, and any raw provider error are deliberately absent from it; the database has no column for them.
AI illustrations
Members can ask Fictopedia to draw one illustration for an article. When somebody does, the article’s title, its summary, an excerpt of its text, and the name and description of the universe it belongs to are sent to a third-party image-generation service, which is what that service needs in order to draw something that fits the world. It is sent for that one purpose and no other. Nothing is sent unless a member asks for a picture, and readers never trigger this by reading.
The picture that comes back is stored and served publicly. It is kept in a public file store, it appears on the article page for anyone who can read that article, and it can be fetched by anybody with the link, including people who are not signed in and search engines. Looking at illustrations is free for everyone; only making them needs a membership. There is no private or members-only version of a generated image, and making a universe private does not make its pictures private: a private universe keeps its articles out of the site, but the image file itself stays reachable by anyone who has its address. Please treat any illustration you make as public.
Alongside each picture, Fictopedia records the facts it needs to show it and to enforce fair usage limits: which article it belongs to, where the file is, its size and dimensions, which account asked for it, and identifiers for the service and settings that produced it. The separate accounting record for the request holds operational metadata only, in the same shape as the one for written articles. Neither record holds the text that was sent, the instructions built from it, or any raw error from the service; the database has no column for them.
An article keeps one current illustration. Deleting an article deletes its image records too, so the picture stops appearing anywhere on the site. The file itself is not erased from the file store by that deletion, so anyone who already had the direct link could still fetch it; there is no routine that sweeps those files up yet, and this page will say so when there is.
Cookies and local storage
Fictopedia sets authentication cookies, and nothing else. They hold your authentication session so you stay signed in between pages, and they are refreshed as you browse. Reading public articles without an account sets no Fictopedia cookie at all.
When analytics is enabled, the analytics service’s browser SDK also keeps an identifier for your browser in a cookie and in local storage, so repeat events from the same browser can be counted as one visitor. It is not used for advertising and is not shared with advertisers.
There are no advertising cookies, no ad-network cookies, and no third-party tracking pixels on this site.
Advertising
Article pages carry a single clearly-labelled banner. Today it promotes Fictopedia’s own paid membership and links to the membership page. The content is served by this site, it is static, and it neither loads a third-party script nor observes anything about you. Clicking it is an ordinary internal link: no click is measured, recorded, or reported to anybody. No ad network is integrated, no advertising profile is built, and nothing about your reading is sold or shared for advertising.
Members do not see it. The decision is made on the server from your signed-in account, so a member’s page arrives with no banner in it at all rather than with one that is hidden.
If that ever changes, this page will be updated before the change ships, not after.
Changes and contact
Fictopedia is early, and it is still being built. This policy will be updated as the product evolves, and the date at the top of the page tells you when it last changed.
If you have a question about privacy on Fictopedia, email support@fictopedia.com.