Methodology
How we measure which slots are Popular.
The recommended-games widget at the bottom of every slot page can carry a small Popular chip on cards above a threshold of real reader engagement. Here is what that means, what we measure to decide it, and how to opt out. This page is a public contract.
What we measure
When you press Play on a slot demo on this site, a timer in your browser starts counting active engagement. Active means three things at once: the tab is in the foreground, the demo player is in your viewport, and you have either focused the player or recently moved your cursor over it. When any of those goes away, the timer pauses. When the tab closes or goes into the background, the accumulated time gets sent to our servers as a single anonymous number.
We aggregate those numbers per slot over a rolling 7-day window with an exponential decay function — minutes accrued today count twice as much as minutes accrued a week ago. The result is a per-slot popularity figure that favours recent activity over historical hits.
What we don't measure
- No cookies. No localStorage tracking identifiers. No fingerprinting.
- No IP address retention. Your IP is used only for rate-limiting and is dropped immediately after.
- No cross-tab or cross-visit identification. If you open the same slot in two tabs, that counts as two separate sessions.
- No personalised recommendations. Every reader sees the same recommended-games widget on a given page.
- No reader accounts. We don't know who you are and we don't try.
- No in-iframe gameplay capture. The demo player runs on a different site (SlotsLaunch) and we have no way of seeing what you do inside it — spins, bets, wins, all invisible to us.
- No marketing analytics, funnels, cohorts, or attribution.
The threshold
A slot earns the Popular chip when, in the last 7 days, it has accumulated at least 5 qualifying engagement sessions AND at least 20 page impressions. Both numbers must be hit. A session is any single tab where you pressed Play on the demo and accrued at least 30 seconds of active engagement before closing the tab.
To prevent the chip from flickering at the threshold edge, we use hysteresis: once a slot gains the chip, it keeps it until sessions drop to 3 OR impressions drop to 10. So a slot in the middle of the threshold band keeps its chip across builds rather than oscillating in and out.
Engagement minutes are capped server-side at 30 minutes per single session. That cap exists so a single browser tab left open overnight can't dominate the signal. Decay half-life is 7 days — minutes accrued more than a week ago count for half what today's minutes count.
How to opt out
Three opt-outs, in order of strength:
- The button below writes a single key to your browser's localStorage telling our engagement timer to never fire. The setting persists on this browser until you clear site data.
- Global Privacy Control (Sec-GPC) set in your browser causes our server to drop the beacon without recording anything.
- Do Not Track (DNT) set in your browser causes the timer to never start in the first place.
Why we do this
The recommended-games widget at the bottom of every slot page used to rank slots by same-provider + same-mechanic heuristics — the same logic every operator-funded affiliate site uses. We wanted a signal we own. Engagement minutes are objective counter-signal to our editorial verdicts. If we say Skip and readers spend eight minutes anyway, that is information worth seeing.
The chip is binary — Popular or not — by design. No numbers, no leaderboard, no ranked counts. The chip is one bit of trust signal, not a metric to chase.