What we keep, and how to take your boat down

• Your photo — prepared on your phone before it uploads: shrunk if it is a big one, with the camera metadata (including any location tag) stripped off on the way. It sits at a public link on this site, next to your Boat Score, so anyone can open it without signing in.
• The boat's details — year, make, model, engine, length, the condition you picked, and the boat's name.
• A display name for the bracket — whatever you type. No account, no password, no email address, and we never ask for a phone number.
• Where you keep the boat — the "Home marina or boat club" line, if you fill it in, in your own words and nothing more. It is optional, it sits under your boat's name on your card so the boats from your dock can find each other, and it is blank on every card whose owner left it alone.
• Where the entry came in from — a one-word tag like "facebook" if the link you clicked had one, and nothing at all if it didn't.

Votes are anonymous: one vote per visitor per matchup, kept as a scrambled number with no name on it. There is no analytics script, no ad tracker and no third-party anything on these pages.

There is no auto-delete. A rig stays up until you take it down or the site runs.

When you enter a rig you get a private removal link on the confirmation screen — it looks like /remove/…. Open it, and it tells you what will come off before you confirm anything. Press the button and that's it: no account, no waiting for somebody to agree, no email to write.

Keep the link, because it is the only key to that boat. We store a scrambled fingerprint of it, never the link itself, so nobody — not us, not a thief with the database — can hand it back to you or use it on your boat. It also works once: after your boat is down, the link has nothing left to do.

Entered from a different phone or browser? Your own score card also offers the take-down button, as long as that browser is the one you entered from.

Everything goes. The entry, the photo on our disk, and the votes cast in your matchups. The bracket closes back up around the boats that are left.

A finished week is a result, and a result cannot be quietly edited — the boaters who voted and the boats it beat would all be looking at a different history. So for a week that has closed we do this instead, and we say so before you confirm:

• Your photo is deleted from our server.
• Your display name, your boat's name, the home marina or boat club you typed, your engine description and your engine hours are blanked — the bracket shows "(removed)" where the boat used to be.
• The boat's year, make, model and Boat Score stay on that finished bracket, because those are what the week was decided on — they describe a kind of boat, not a person.
• If the boat is named in the week's written-down result — it won, or it was one of the boats the winner beat on the way — that record is frozen history and keeps the names it was recorded with. That one, honestly, we cannot undo.

We can't send it to you: we don't have it (only a fingerprint of it), and there is no email address on file to send anything to. What we can do is take the boat down by hand. Tell us which boat it is below, and a person picks the report up and does it. That is slower than the link, and it is a person's desk rather than a machine — but it works, and it is the same route whether the week is running or finished.

If you'd rather do it yourself and you still have the link: use the link. It is instant and it is the only thing we trust.

Your photo and your details sit on a public page. You can take them off yourself with the link you were given. A finished week keeps its result but loses your photo and your name. And if anything here looks wrong, the bracket and the rubric are all in the open — have a look.