Sharing and visibility
Who can open your Vantage Stats page, how to make it findable by name or take it back, and what a reader can and cannot learn from it.
On this page
Your Vantage Stats page is yours to show or not. This page is for the owner deciding who should see it: the two settings, what each one does to the address, how to take a link back, which parts you can keep to yourself, and what somebody looking at your page can never find out. It describes the mod and the page as of Vantage 2.0.1. The binding text is the privacy policy; this explains it from the buttons up.
Two settings
There are two, and the mod and the page call them by different names.
| Secret link | Findable | |
|---|---|---|
| On the page's settings | Link only | Public |
| In the protocol and the code | LINK_ONLY | PUBLIC |
| Default | Yes | No |
| Address | /s/ and a random key | /u/ and your name, and the /s/ link still works |
| Found by your name | No | Yes |
| Search engines | Told not to index it | May index it |
| Kept by a shared cache | Never | For up to a minute |
Every page starts as a secret link. Nothing about turning Vantage Stats on makes it findable; only you can, and only after this computer has signed in.
A secret link, to start with
A secret link is an address with a share key in it: 22 random characters of letters, digits, - and _, made from
random bytes on the server, so nobody can work it out from your name. Anyone you give it to can open the page.
Nobody else can find it.
The service treats a secret link as the only thing protecting your page, and acts like it:
- Search engines are told to stay away. Every
/s/page is sent withnoindex, nofollow, in its headers and in the page itself. - No shared cache keeps it. A
/s/page is sent asprivate, no-store, so no proxy or content network in between holds a copy. - The address does not leak through links. Every page is sent with
Referrer-Policy: no-referrer, and every link that leaves the site carriesrel="noopener noreferrer", so following a link from your page never tells the next site where you came from. - Guessing is limited. A lookup by share key that finds nothing counts against a budget for the address that asked, so trying keys one after another stops working quickly.
A reader who arrives through the link sees a Shared link chip in the header, whose tooltip says they are looking at the page through a private link and that it is not listed anywhere.
Findable by name
Findable adds a second address, /u/ followed by your Minecraft name, the way a profile site works. The same page
also answers to your uuid without its dashes. Your secret link keeps working beside it.
A findable page is an ordinary public page: search engines may index it, and a shared cache may keep a copy for up to a minute. That minute is the one number to remember about making a page findable, and both the mod and the page quote it beside the switch: Public copies may survive in caches for up to a minute.
Switching back to a secret link takes effect at once on the service. The only thing that can outlive it is one of those cached copies, for at most that minute.
Changing it
In the game, open the status screen with /vt stats. On its Overview tab, the Your page card has a Visible
to switch with two positions, Secret link and Findable. The status screen's header carries a chip with
the current setting.
The switch works only while this computer is signed in, because the change is made on the service, not on your computer. It moves when the service says so, and a toast confirms it: Anyone can find it by your name now, or Only people with the link can see it now.
On the page, as its owner, the Visibility panel of the settings shows the same choice as two cards, Link only and Public, each saying what it means. Changing it there takes effect at once, for every reader.
A new link
Making a new link is how you take the page back from somebody you shared it with. The old link stops working on the very next request, for everyone who has it. There is no grace period, and it cannot be brought back; anybody you still want to have the page needs the new one.
| Where | Press |
|---|---|
| The status screen, Your page card | New link |
| Your page, Visibility panel | Rotate the share link, then Rotate it now |
Deleting your stats also changes the link, and says so: Your page link changed; the old one stopped working.
What a reader sees
A reader sees your page as you left it, minus what you keep to yourself. You decide that in three places.
Categories you keep private
Every category has two switches: one to record it at all, one to hide it from readers. In the mod they are the Record and Hide columns on the status screen's Categories tab, and on the page they are the Off and Hidden buttons in the Categories panel.
| State | Recorded | Shown to readers |
|---|---|---|
| On | Yes | Yes |
| Hidden | Yes | No |
| Off | No | No, and what it recorded before is hidden too |
To a reader, off and hidden look the same: every part that belongs to the category reads The owner keeps this private, and nothing else. They see that something is private, never which, and never why.
Profiles you keep private
On the page, the Page panel lists your SkyBlock profiles with a Hide switch each. A hidden profile disappears from your page and from the switcher, and a link to it finds nothing. Its data is kept. The profile the page opens on cannot be hidden; choose another one to open on first.
How the page opens
The same panel sets how the page greets somebody arriving at it. None of it changes what is recorded.
| Setting | What a reader gets |
|---|---|
| Opens on the profile | The profile you choose, or by default the one you played most recently. |
| Opens on the half | Profile or Activity. Profile unless you change it. |
| Show when you played | On by default. Off, a reader sees the day of each session and timeline moment but no clock time, and the timeline has no day-by-day histogram. How long a session lasted, its runs, its drops and every counter are unchanged. |
| Show the profile switcher | On by default. Off, a reader sees only your default profile, with no way to open another. |
As the owner you always see everything, including what you hide; Your page explains how that works.
What a stranger can never tell
Link-only exists so that nobody can find out whether you use Vantage Stats at all. Every way of asking without the right link gets the same answer.
| Somebody asks for | They get |
|---|---|
/u/ and a name nobody has | Nothing here |
/u/ and your name, while your page is a secret link | Nothing here, exactly as above |
| A share key you have rotated away | Nothing here, exactly as above |
| A profile you have hidden | Nothing here, exactly as above |
The answer is the same page, word for word, so none of these can be told apart. The search box on the site's
start page never tries /u/ either: it looks players up in Hypixel's public data at /p/, which is the
profile viewer, not Vantage Stats.
A reader of a page you share also cannot learn anything about other players from it, because none of that was ever recorded: no party, lobby or co-op names, no auction sellers, no killers' names. The list is on What is recorded.
If your name changes
Your page belongs to your Minecraft account, not to the name. Mojang is the only authority on names, so the service learns a new one when your account is next proved, and the mod tells you in chat once it notices, with your new name where this example has Steve:
Mojang says this account is now called Steve. Your page moved; your data did not.
A findable page moves to the new name with you. Nobody who later takes your old name inherits your page: a name belongs to whoever most recently proved it to Mojang. Your secret link does not change when your name does.
Related
- Your page: what is on it, tab by tab.
- What is recorded: what each category holds.
- Vantage Stats: turning it on, signing out and deleting.
- Data and privacy: everything else the mod sends.