About Pickaside

How ranking works

Pick your favourite from each pair. Pickaside uses those choices to build your ranking without asking you to compare every possible pair. If you change your mind or something looks out of place, you can move it up or down at the end.

Comparing with friends

You can edit starter lists before ranking, including adding your own options. Changes apply to your copy; the public starter list stays the same. Sharing saves a copy of your list, nickname, and ranking on our server and gives you a short link. Unfamiliar options can be left out. In groups, we average each option’s normalized ranking score across people who ranked it; unranked options receive neither wins nor losses. Results show the number of people who ranked each option. Your friend sees your picks after finishing, but anyone with the link can access and forward the saved ranking. Don’t include private information.

Your privacy

You don’t need an account or email address. Pickaside has no advertising trackers. We count daily totals for votes created, invitations opened, ballots submitted, and invitations that lead to a new vote. These counters store no names, option text, IP addresses, or visitor identifiers. They are approximate activity counts, not a count of unique people. We use a temporary tab flag to tell whether someone has opened an invitation before creating a vote. The flag is not sent as an identifier. Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control disable optional activity counting in that browser. Your unfinished ranking, temporary list drafts, and the keys that let you update your vote or manage a group are saved in this browser.

New friend-comparison links load a saved ranking from our server and have no scheduled expiry. Older links still contain the list and ranking after the # in the address and continue to work. Group lists, nicknames, rankings, unranked options, and ruled-out options are stored on our server so we can combine everyone’s results. Anyone with a group link can see the nicknames and group result. Individual rankings are private unless the voter chooses to share theirs. Shared rankings show the nickname, ordered choices, and unranked options to anyone with the link. Voters can change that setting from the group page, including after voting closes. Ruled-out flags are never attached to names in the shared view, though people may infer preferences or constraints in a small group. Hiding a ranking cannot remove screenshots or copies someone already made.

Group links expire after 30 days. Expiry stops access but doesn’t delete the stored data. The organizer can delete the group and its votes using their private organizer link. Our hosting providers may process connection information, and the site loads fonts from Google Fonts.

Sharing lists

Use lists about interests and preferences. Do not share personal information or use rankings to harass people. To stop circulating an unwanted list, remove the link wherever you shared it. Individual challenge links cannot be centrally revoked. An organizer can delete a group to revoke its group link.

Advertising

There are no active ads or advertising cookies in this version. If ads are enabled later, they will be clearly labelled, away from voting controls, and after the main results. No pop-ups, forced ad views, or interrupted reveals. Privacy and consent settings will be updated before advertising is enabled.