Site Notice

Accounts (Picks)

Reading MissedTakes still needs no account and works exactly as described below. As of August 2026 you can optionally create a member account to record your own agree/disagree picks on claims. Accounts are governed by their own Privacy Policy and Terms of Service; the short version is: an email, an optional display name, and your picks — private by default, exportable and deletable by you, with a session cookie that exists only if you sign in.

The newsletter box

The footer has a box for leaving an email address to hear when a weekly newsletter starts. It is optional, it loads no third-party script — its spam protection is our own — and an address you leave is used for that and nothing else. The Privacy Policy says exactly what is kept and how to be removed.

Cookies

We ask once, and the answer defaults to no. Until you say otherwise this site loads no third-party scripts and sets nothing on your device; if you decline, the single cookie we keep is the record of that decision, so we do not ask again for a year.

If you say yes, we load Google Analytics through Google Tag Manager and Google sets its own cookies. You can change your mind at any time from Cookie Choices in the footer of every page. If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal we treat that as a no and do not offer the choice — the signal is the answer.

Our admin also carries a cookie, on our own browsers only, so that our own testing never reaches the analytics and is left out of the numbers.

How we count visits

If you allow analytics, Google Analytics counts your visit and we read the totals. If you do not, we do not count it at all — there is no second, quieter tally running behind the banner. For most of this site’s life there was one: a count kept on our own server that used no cookies and could not identify anybody. We retired it in August 2026 rather than run two systems, which means declining now costs us the measurement entirely. That is the trade, and it is the right way round.

We do separately log requests from robots — the search engine and AI crawlers that index this site — so we can see which of them visit and whether they respect the rules we publish. That is a record about software, not about readers.

Third-party content

No embedded fonts, no ad tags, no social widgets, and no advertising pixels — we run none and have no plans to, which is why the banner asks about one thing rather than several.

There are two third-party services. The first is Google Analytics, and only if you allow it. When you do, Google receives the addresses of the pages you open and a short list of things you do on them — which takes you read, when you check how a grade was calculated, when you follow a link out to a pundit’s original article. We never send what you type in the search box as data — search is not one of the things we report, and we do not keep a record of it ourselves. But the address of a results page includes what you searched, and once you have said yes, Google sees page addresses like any other.

The second is error monitoring, through Sentry. It records technical details when something breaks, and a small random sample of ordinary visits — about one in ten — so we can tell how slow the site is. That sample carries timings and page addresses, not identities, and it runs whether or not you allow analytics: it is how we keep the site working, not a measurement of you. Neither service follows your browsing across other sites.

Where our information comes from

MissedTakes summarizes predictions that pundits published publicly, and links back to the original every time. We do not republish articles or transcripts. Results data comes from public sports records.

Something wrong?

If we have misattributed a prediction or gotten one wrong, we want to fix it. Use the corrections form and we will correct the record — you get a reference code, and a reply if you leave an email address.